Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
You have a few options
1) add staff
2) cut service
3) Find efficiency by eliminating non essential activities.
What I expect to happen is the portion of GDP spent on public services to rise and taxation to reflect that increased level of service.
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The problem is we can’t seem to acknowledge the increasing demands we’re placing on public services. It’s getting ever costlier to deliver health care to an aging population. The massive expansion of post-secondary education has not yielded economies of scale. The cost of skilled labour has increased, but the nature of most public-sector work means that labour isn’t more productive (better trained nurses and teachers can’t support more patients and students). Building standards and the cost of construction labour and materials have gone way up (it costs far more in inflation-adjusted dollars to build a public school today than it did in the 60s).
This reality is unwelcome. So instead of recognizing increased demands and costs, we frame the gap between what we expect and what we get as cuts to funding. I suppose that’s a more attractive outlook because it means we just have to restore previous levels of funding and the ship will right itself. But previous levels of funding won’t cut it. To meet our expectations, we need to substantially increase the resources we devote to public health care, education, policing, etc, and that means higher taxes across the board.
That’s a hard sell when our leaders can’t even openly express the problem. The dependency ratio is the single most important factor in the economics of public policy. Can’t talk about it. Because seniors
lose their #### if anyone points out the twin empirical truths that A) statistically, most retired Canadians are net costs to the public balance sheet, and B) few paid sufficient taxes in their working years to make up this shortfall. And on the public service side, teachers, nurses, police, etc
lose their #### if you explain that they’re paid considerably more in inflation-adjusted dollars than their counterparts 40 years ago. And the anti-tax crowd
loses their #### if you point out that Canadians are undertaxed relative to our expectations of public services, and this shortfall cannot be wholly made up by cutting administrative waste.
Any politician presenting the real problem will infuriate about two-thirds of Canadians. Hardly a smart move for someone trying to win elections.