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Originally Posted by GP_Matt
That is exactly it, Revenue has and continues to grow faster than is prudent. The amount of money that we pull from revenue in Alberta is staggering and should be more than enough to augment taxes to maintain adequate government services and put money into a trust fund.
Tinordi, you seem to be arguing that we should save the resource revenue and run the government solely off of the tax base. This may well be a great plan but the fact is that none of the parties are proposing it. The Liberals want to increase taxes to balance the budget and provide additional services, the PC's want to maintain taxes and spending for now and the WRA wants to maintain taxes and slow the growth in spending putting money away for the future.
None of those ideas involve saving all of the resource revenues in fact the Wildrose is the only party who proposes saving some of it.
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Wow, talk about selective. The Liberals have been arguing to save some of this money for years, and during the 2008 election were the one party doing so.
As for the comment about revenues continuing to grow, its just a bad way to look at things. Does this mean that there is effectively no possible ceiling? Just because spending has gone up over the past decade doesn't mean it will continue to rise exponentially. It might make a political position look better to extrapolate the data that way, but its not really valid.
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Originally Posted by MarchHare
Non-renewable resource revenue accounted for nearly 28% of the province's income last year. If you can figure out a way to reduce government spending by over 1/4 while still providing a decent level of service to the population, I'd love to hear your ideas.
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This is the main point. Its easy to say "just stop spending", but its not sensible in the least. I think that this is exactly why the Wildrose hasn't laid out the full platform with costs yet; its either an unknown to them as well or a huge reduction in services.