Quote:
Originally Posted by Yoho
Not printing money? Who knew.
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I agree that the printing of the money through COVID struck me as excessive but, a few points;
1. The Conservatives were 100% behind it and borderline pushing for more in various circumstances... maybe in just different ways slightly. This implies that across the political spectrum that we should care about (the broad centre), it was a political decision / issue that Canadians were pretty much largely united on.
2. If the Government did not print massive amounts of money to support small businesses, the effect of so many companies / individuals and people across the country with literally no money due to Government imposed restrictions would have been absolutely disastrous. What would the effect have been without printing any money? Far worse for sure, as homelessness, drug abuse, poverty, crime, etc. would have all sky rocketed. I am assuming you agree with this point and so really this becomes a debate as to the extent of the money printing.
3. Clearly, not only evidenced by the study but just generally speaking unless you have been under a rock for 1.5 years, global impacts are all impacting inflation. Canada is intimately connected to markets for every product on earth and there was literally no getting around this so the point of the study to argue that global factors played the lion's share of role in inflation is fair and valid.
4. Justin Trudeau is an idiot and there is so much to criticize him for. He is a pandering ghost of a man whose almost entire tenure as leader has been to worry first about how something looks or may be viewed and then somewhere down the list care about whether or not such action will work or is even a good idea. Because there are so many valid and good criticisms of this moron, inflation is the wrong one to pick up on because looking back, they actually didn't do too bad a job on managing some pieces of the economy during Covid and secondly I am HIGHLY suspect the Conservatives if push came to shove would have done anything different anyway, and that's a good thing too.
5. I do think the Canadian government needs to get super aggressive on all mechanisms it can control to tame inflation and you're right, that means really shore up spending and stop printing money now that we are theoretically through the tough part of Covid. I do not think Trudeau knows how to do anything but spend money because he likes to feel liked and spending money on people is easy and gets them to like you even if it's not the best political or long-term decision for Canada.