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Originally Posted by Slava
Financial Services, Medicine, the list goes on. You know what's just as short sighted? The belief that we can just take less money from oil and gas and everything else is totally unaffected and just keeps rolling on. There seems to be this idea that the move from oil to whatever the next technology (or form of energy) is will be seamless and easy. Maybe its not. Maybe the reality is that we are so reliant on oil that there isn't really anything to bridge the gap for decades.
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That may be true, but it's scary. There are places in this world that used to do very well from coal and steel. And they're awful now.
That's why using the royalties from oil and gas for day-to-day financing of government services today is so foolish. It allows Albertans to have extraordinarily low taxes and buy nice cars and go on trips to Hawaii. But it does nothing to prepare us for the time when taps run dry. Twenty years from now I don't want my kids to drive on broken down roads, have crappy hospitals, and send their kids to crumbling schools because Alberta is a depressed backwater.
The money generated from oil and gas revenues should go to providing public infrastructure and services 20-40 years from now, not subsidizing consumption in one of the most high-spending jurisdictions in the world. That was the whole idea when Lougheed came up with the Heritage fund. And we've pissed it all away so every middle-class home can have a new SUV in the garage and eat out at Earl's twice a month.