Quote:
Originally Posted by DJones
Your list added up about 2.5 billion. The majority of which was the keystone gamble and 5 years ago. In retrospect sure, didn't work out but you just gotta do it. Like ####, we just spent 40 billion on a pipeline. If a billion gives a chance at a pipeline you gotta take it. If an Albertan government didn't take that bet I'd be mad. We'll probably spend a billion on the next BC pipeline just on permitting. If that only costs them a billion that would be a miracle, If they can get a route and permit and sell it to someone for a 5 billion loss I'd consider that a win. Hell, Notley gambled a billion on excess rail capacity that didn't end up being required. Similar idea, wasn't a great idea but I can't fault her for it, at the time I probably would have been tempted to do the same. I looked at it as a hedge.
The corporate tax cut is just blatantly untrue. ~90% of any corporate tax cut gets refunded to the province within 3-5 years. That's just how corporate taxes work.
I do not like any party, I find it mystifying why anyone would attach themselves to a team of these #######s haha. Yes, the Tylenol was stupid, no argument here, the private blood clinics was botched, sadly our governments are terrible at tendering bids. The renewable pause, terrible, any government that denies private investment in a useful industry is clearly in the wrong.
But like you realize the NDP spent $400 giving people power bars that shut off people TVs for them. I used mine for two days before I said #### that, took 10 seconds for my tv to turn on. That they didn't understand how our power contracts works and got sued for 2 billion when they broke said contracts in the coal shut down.
None of those things ultimately mattered. One bad natural disaster can wipe out all of those things. Thats why they have contingencies. Something is going to go wrong this year that costs 2-3 billion to Alberta. No idea what it'll be but its going to happen.
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Without the tax cuts my list added up to $3B, with the tax cuts it added up to $13B. the List was far from exhaustive, I really tried to focus on areas where other government likely would have done better, who didn't start with the base assumption that governing is easy and doesn't require detail orientated planning before announcing policy that experts had already warned would be ineffective.
You can go find the Keystone thread here, from day one their were plenty of people who had a massive degree of certainty that it was sunk money from day one, and nothing was done to protect the province from that.
The other thing about this list is +/-$3B of those costs are annually recurring and growing mainly the tax cuts.
By what measure did Alberta recoup the corporate tax cuts? I don't think there is a lot for evidence that we would have lost business without the tax cut, it would be an especially rich for the separatist right to argue we should be worried about the risk of scaring off business. The other side of the argument is that there will be jobs growth which is also hard to buy into when Alberta employment metrics have general lagged behind the rest of the country in the years since the tax cuts. Seemingly it was a straight across wealth transfer towards those with productive investments in the province, now it seems the only idea they have for recouping that wealth transfer is the raise property taxes on everyone else.
I think the reason you get strong retorts to all of your posts here, is because if you aren't completely beholden to one side of the political spectrum than you are extremely poorly calibrated, you are talking about a piece of a program that cost $136M and achieved it's stated goal (I really don't bemoan you disputing the value of that goal, I have criticized it myself), while I am talking about a problem over 100x larger with little basically no positive outcomes, and I would argue spending that was largely DOA in terms of hoping for positive outcomes.
I don't know if you are a right wing hack, or if you just can't calibrate problems within two orders of magnitude, but the ANDP, Prentice, Redford, Trudeau, Harper.... are basically beyond reproach in comparison to the fiscal management of the UCP, and really should not be brought up as points of comparison, directly address the UPCs problems and stop comparing them to their betters.