[Mean Mr. Mustard]

Originally Posted by Azure

How the hell you see a museum as being equal to a hospital God only knows. So can you please just stop with the ridiculous notion that we all want to cut infrastructure spending completely? We all understand its the only straw you've got left to hold when it comes to the rather ######ed idea that running a balanced $39 BILLION dollar budget in 2012 somehow equals cutting infrastructure spending to absofrickinlutely zero.

But when your way of saving money is spending more money in the future it seems like it really is a poor way of actually saving money, particularly in the case of the museum - which I believe is essential for a government to fund due to it's cultural and heritage value. So on top of spending more money later, the Federal Government of Canada has also pledged nearly 100 million dollars towards the building, something that could not be relied upon in two years time or whenever you would like it built.

So your options it seems to me are to put up 100 million dollars now towards a new museum or to wait for another 2 + years at which point it will possibly cost over twice as much when you factor in unknown funding from the federal government and increases in costs. Unless the alternative is for the government of Alberta to not fund a new museum...

We all know the delaying critical spending can harm us in the long-term, but that is exactly what WILL happen when ANY government refuses to make sure they run a balanced budget as much as possible, and make damn sure they don't reach the point where they need to cut critical spending because they can't borrow money anymore because the deficit has gotten completely out of hand.

But cutting critical spending to an unreasonable degree is what has Alberta in a continual game of catchup having to spend more money over the long run.

Alberta is $800 million over budget. It is entirely possible to cut it from the budget. It is also possible to sit down and figure out how to start SAVING the money from natural resource royalties, instead of spending it year after year, ESPECIALLY when there is no more recession. If it means more taxes, so be it. But don't spend what you shouldn't, even as much as the ridiculous left-wing ideology somehow tells you that saving money for a year like 2008 when everything comes crashing down is somehow a bad idea.

You save money in the future by effectively spending money in the current time. I don't consider myself someone who is left wing or right wing, I look to the government as an organization that should look at maintaining itself from an economic standpoint over the course of a long term, a couple years in the red and going into a deficit are not the worst things that can happen to this province, I know it is hard to believe but it is true, the worst thing that could happen would be for a return to the early 90's Klein style cutbacks resulting in poor social services and a population which costs the government more in the long run.