[Senator Clay Davis]

With such wasteful economic policies as this, it's not particularly surprising why they can't balance a budget. Buy those votes baby!

On the second full day of a campaign already deemed endless, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared in Toronto Tuesday to promise help for those who economists say mostly don’t need it.

In the heart of Toronto’s overheated housing market, where the average detached home now sells for more than $1 million, Harper vowed to make life better not for those struggling to enter the market, but for those who already own their own homes.

Speaking at a warehouse in North York — in Finance Minister Joe Oliver’s Eglinton-Lawrence riding — Harper promised to introduce a new, permanent home renovation tax credit if re-elected in October. The plan would be phased in, depending on economic conditions, during the 2016-17 fiscal year. It would cost the government approximately $1.5 billion annually

Economists were quick to trash the idea online. Laval University’s Stephen Gordon called it “yet another God damn boutique tax credit” on Twitter. He added that home renovations “are not a public good. There’s no market failure to fix here.”

Mike Moffatt, an economist and assistant professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business, wrote that if he had $1.5 billion to spend on a tax measure, he’d “eliminate a whole truckload of tariffs and have money left over.”

In an interview, Moffatt, who is not part of the Liberal campaign but has provided economic advice to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, said the earlier home renovation tax credit made some sense. It was a temporary measure designed to stimulate a lagging economy at a time when the construction sector needed a boost.

The plan Harper proposed Tuesday, on the other hand, would be permanent, phased in only if the economy was strong, and aimed at residential real estate, “the one sector of the economy that’s going gang busters,” Moffatt said.

“It seems really strange,” he added. “Normally if this was a form of stimulus, you would wait until the economy was weak and you would target sectors of the economy that are not doing all that well.”

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/ca...e-is-reelected