Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I disagree. The desire by most Albertans to have some of the lowest taxes in the civilized world while expecting public services that are second-to-none is a huge political problem. The last politicians to point out the incomparability of those two desires was vilified for it. Basically, Alberta has an extraordinarily entitled population.
It's not as though we're trying to do something unique here. There are places in the world that don't have oil, don't have royalties of any kind, and still manage to provide a decent standard of living and high quality public services to citizens.
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Granted, but the problem being in Alberta that we pay the most for our services and rank low in terms of deliverables. We have some of the worst wait times in the province in health care for example. I think we rank middle of the pack in terms of educational returns. Yet we pay the most for it.
For successive governments and yes the cons were bad for it, the solution has been to throw money at it, specifically in terms of wages and benefit.
That system is not working.
And right now with the economy the way it is, we can't afford to keep pissing money against the wall.
We can't afford to keep paying orders of magnitude more then other provinces, we certainly can't afford the public sector benefits and pensions, the deficit is clearly showing that. We are never going to get back to the salad days of $100 or probably even $80.00 per barrel again, so this government has to adjust to the new reality.
They need to look at both the costs and efficiency deficits of the business of government, and we're going to have to either get cheaper or smaller.
The difficult thing is the reality that this NDP government should be taking a hard line in all of the 100+ collective bargaining agreements that are under negotiation this year, its no longer a matter of saying a wage freeze is sufficient. Its not with a deficit that is not only growing. But the governments day to day operations are operating at a loss.
And you can't keep thinking that raising taxes is the answer, taxes as a whole are regressive.