Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I'm not even sure it's idealism. We are facing massive, apparently intractable public finance deficits in an era of stagnating economies and relentless demographic atrophy. The math is terrifying. So people ignore the math, either because they're innumerate (which covers most voters) or because they'd simply prefer not to think about how this stuff will look more than about five years out.
Our public finances are basically a mini-van careening down a rutted mountain road at night with no headlights, while the passengers and driver argue over which radio station to listen to.
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The biggest red light for me isn't the actual budget itself, even though a deficit in the $10 billion range for a province to me is pretty unacceptable.
The biggest red light is that the Alberta Government itself is running a deficit on its operations budget, and that's a serious serious bleed.
Right now the tax revenue is shrinking because less people are working, that's not even an argument anymore. You can't keep hammering the remaining tax base with more and more taxes because at some point, the taxes become regressive, and it also impacts economic confidence.
If the government is going to spend into a deficit in bad economic times, that's acceptable as long as you don't blow your brains out, and its effective spending.
But running a debt just to turn the lights on in the morning is a fundamental failure point and has to be addressed.
I disagree with any concept of a sales tax being introduced, that's been done with the Carbon Tax which is a consumer tax and is going to general revenue, its also a tax across all income brackets that's going to impact people without a lot of disposable income in the first place.
At this point, there has to be some sanity introduced in terms of government spending and inefficiencies, when things were good, you could afford to be ineffective, when you have a ton of money rolling in, you can get away with pissing it away.
But now we're in the situation where the money isn't coming in, and might not be coming in for a while and the margin for error and stupid spending and ineffective services with a high price tag are concepts that will kill this province.