Quote:
Originally Posted by PeteMoss
Canada's GDP growth has been positive since before 2012 until this year.
Shockingly since the Cons have now stopped running deficits they are declaring the recession over.
You can have it one of two ways:
1) The recession ended in 2012 and they've been running deficits since 2012 because they bungled spending.
2) Canada is back to struggling economically so the government should be spending money.
They are picking and choosing data points to make themselves look better (which they should be doing), but if you look at the actual data it doesn't look good for them.
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For point #1, their deficits were smaller and smaller every single year with the growing economy. This showed that they had confidence in the economy after the 2008 recession and pulled back on the stimulus slowly (whether the timing was good policy or just to sync with the election cycle is another question). This is better than just completely going from 20 billion in stimulus to zero in one year. Shocks are extremely hard to handle.
Personally, I don't believe deficits are a binary thing (eg. $1 in deficit is the same as $1,000,000,000). The fact that there was a positive trend does show that there was some thought to their budgeting, and also to the effectiveness of their policies.