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Originally Posted by Flash Walken
Well, in my opinion it is. The majority of the budget savings were coming from a roughly 10% cut to spending. The prentice budget forecast raising roughly 2.5 billion from new taxation, in the same frame as saying the province was looking at a 7 billion dollar hole just based on the price of oil at the time.
In my opinion, that's eating around the edges. The political miscalculation wasn't only on not raising corporate taxes, it was that income tax raises on high income earners weren't enough, and were labeled as 'temporary'. Again, that isn't addressing the fundamental structural problem of tax revenue in the province.
And that's just it in my mind. It wasn't addressing the fundamental lack of revenue, it was proposing significant program cuts that for many albertans was the second time in a generation they've had to live through that. The revenue problem is 30 years old. Cuts were not going to address that and I think implicitly the voter base understood that, and further, didn't trust a PC government who had dug the hole in the first place to dig them out.
It is truly stunning when the CCPA and the Fraser Institute can agree on economics, but both agreed the province needed to look immediately at weening resource revenue off entirely. A return to the Lougheed 30% days, at least. They had wildly different proposals on how to do that, but everyone and their mother could see the status quo wasn't working.
I can give Prentice definite credit for listening somewhat to economists who warned about the impact massive cuts would have on the economy, but his budget still fell very short of addressing the foundational aspects of the budget shortfall.
His budget over promised and under delivered when he said it would be radical. You don't get yourself out of a 7-10 billion dollar hole by raising cigarette and alcohol taxes, or taxing fuel that most of the province uses to operate the economy. To me, that's eating around the edges.
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Well if it makes you feel any better Alberta is not even close to being the lowest income-taxed jurisdiction anymore. So mission accomplished NDP.
As a portion of GDP, resources is becoming lower and lower. It's almost like people know that O&G is volatile. It takes time though. You don't build new industries overnight. Most of BC's GDP is now "real estate transactions" (and their main exports are still coal, LNG, wood and minerals), so let's see how "sustainable" that is.
And man, people will never understand how corporate income tax works. Changing it doesn't do what people think it does.