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Originally Posted by #-3
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.
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Then expand your list. I didn't disagree with most of them being poor choices. They are just immaterial. Like ####, if you have to talk about Tylenol for five years at some point let it go.
People had been saying Keystone was dead for a decade but governments and private interests kept dumping money into them. If Trump would have won it would likely have proceeded. It was the presidential permit that revived and killed it.
If corporate taxes are 50%, your dividends are tax free. If Corporate taxes are 0%, your dividends are taxed at 50%. If corporate taxes are 25%, your dividends get taxed at 25%. Obviously a lot more math involved but that's how corporate taxes work. It's not a real tax, its a tax deferral. I think corporate taxes should be 0%. More revenue would end up going to the government. It would just be sporadic. That's why government hate it, if a big windfall comes in for your opponent but not you, the public will destroy you. Terrible for budgeting even if the net value of taxes goes up significantly.
I have been pushing for a PST, more property taxes, more crown corporations and more provincial spending in pretty much all of my posts. But sure, must be a right wing hack because I said #### Trudeau. Yes, I voted for Smith for the strict purpose of fighting the feds and frankly the complete dismantling of Trudeau policies is a bigger win than I could have hoped for. Smith can go #### off. Now we need someone that can align the top 4 provinces to start clawing back federal spending and taxes.