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What does the budget propose to do about this? As mentioned, it proposes to spend a great deal: adjusted for inflation and population growth, likely the largest two-year increase in spending, outside of recession, since 1972-1973. There were larger increases in the early 1980s, and 2009-10 alone beat every record. But those were recession years. By contrast, the current plunge into deficit is almost wholly discretionary.

Compare the spending track laid out in the 2015 budget, just a year ago. For 2015-16, it projected program spending of $263.2 billion. The current figure: $270.9 billion, an increase of nearly $8 billion. Indeed, it’s $3.5 billion more than the finance minister said it would be just a month ago.

But that’s just the warm-up act. For 2016-17, last year’s budget projected spending of $274.3 billion. The current estimate: $291.4 billion — an increase of $17 billion. For 2017-18, projected spending has gone from the $282.7 billion projected last year to $304.6 billion today. All told, that’s nearly $40 billion in new spending over two years.

How much of that is to be invested in infrastructure, the Liberals’ promised elixir for sluggish productivity? Accepting the Liberals’ own expansive definition of “infrastructure,” i.e. virtually everything, it adds up to barely a quarter of that sum: $4 billion this year, $7.3 billion the next. And how much will that add to growth? Again, accepting the budget’s own figures as gospel: two-tenths of one per cent of GDP the first year, four-tenths the second. Where the economy might have grown, in nominal terms, by 4.7 per cent and 4.3 per cent, it will instead grow by 4.9 and 4.7 per cent. Happy days are here again.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/na...173/story.html