Quote:
Originally Posted by Makarov
Incidentally, according to the Ontario budget link I provided earlier, I see debt financing as 8.4% of Ontario's expenses. Subtracting that, I get a total of $115.8 billion dollars in spending, divided by 13.5 million residents, for $8,578 per capita spending.
Alberta spent $10,816 per capita, or 21% more. According to Statistics Canada, Alberta's average weekly wage was 17.9% higher than Ontario's in March of 2012 ( link).
Presuming that wages are 50% of the cost of delivering public services in Alberta, we would expect Alberta to spend about $9,350 per capita. Obviously, that is still significantly less than the $10,816 that Alberta did spend (or at least budget). If Alberta were able to reduce its spending to that $9,350 number, it would save roughly $5.5 billion (so pretty close to your number).
According to the Government of Alberta, it relied on resource revenue of $11.2 billion and had a deficit of about $900 million (although the angry people at CTF argued that the real deficit was $6 billion). In my view, that means that Alberta needs to somehow close a gap of at least $12 billion if it wants to not be reliant on resource revenue. Saving $5.5 billion by reducing spending to something comparable to Ontario only gets us halfway there. |
I am glad that we agree on the numbers. They will always be a bit different depending on what point in time and such but tend to agree for the most part.
Assuming the cuts are made to bring us in line with Canadian averages there is definitely room for a discussion as to how much money Alberta should put away. In the above scenario though we are saving $6 billion in a bad year, more in better years and less in other years. I think it would be hard for any politician to sell the province on a tax increase to help increase the savings rate, but I would definitely listen to them if they had a solid plan to both save/spend the money and to prevent it from being used as a piggy bank for election promises.