Alberta Politics & Government Thread 3.0

[Flames0910]

Originally Posted by timun

For the record the NDP lowered the small business income tax rate to the current 2%.

Get out of here with your facts! Orange bad, blue good!

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by aaronck

Careful, reminding people of what they have said in the past can now be considered slander, you'll have approximately 30 days to recant your statement or provide a T4 and your grade 7 transcript to compare income and education!

They can come at me with everything they’ve got

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Are people really falling a half-hearted attempt to shift the discussion to new police hirings? I mean whether or not you think that's a good idea barely matters, it's not worth talking about in light of the other crap that's happened in the past few days.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

I mean you have to work with the data that's available. Vagrancy and the like has gone up sure, but the things that matter most like Violent Crime can only be quantified with published police-reported numbers.

Legislating based off perception is bad governance.

I get it and don't disagree, but we do have up-to-date stats to work with... at least, using Calgary's own historical crime numbers as a comparison -- CPS doesn't give us the Alberta / Canada averages as a yardstick, unfortunately. (Link)

I also understand that it isn't nearly as easily consumed in the format it's given to us -- the Federal report you linked is nice and easy to find all the information you want without hopping between umpteen bloody PDFs -- but it's just too many years out of date to really be compelling.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

I dunno about that. Increased presence and enforcement probably doesn't hurt at all and does reduce crime.

It's one part of the equation, but I don't know what a cop is supposed to do with all the drugged out weirdos who are causing the problems. They can intervene in specific instances and stuff, but it does nothing to solve the overall problem or do anything whatsoever to make it go away.

Plus, I can't help but think it'll just lead to more of us regular people getting speeding tickets and pulled over because our registration is three days expired. Like, why wouldn't they? If I were a cop I'd rather deal with a guy like me versus the methed out ####wits who are making everybody uncomfortable everywhere - busting me you're still doing your job, I'll pay the ticket and you don't have to worry about me having some big freak out on the side of the road. A methed-out freakazoid? He might stab you, spit on you or otherwise just make your day gross and miserable. And if you do arrest him for something, then what happens? He goes to jail for a day or two, can't pay his fines and won't clean up and he's back causing trouble before the end of the weekend.

I'd respect Smith more if she actually did something novel on this, which is to house these people somewhere and get them clean and help them become productive. If they aren't able to do that, then let's put them in a warehouse with all the fentanyl they want and they can just have at 'er. But, get them off the ####ing streets and away from the rest of us. With them off the streets, we don't need an extra 100 dudes with guns and authority over the rest of us wandering around for more than the six months to a year it'd take to clean up the streets.

What we need are safe-injection sites. Not the kind where the junkies have a safe space, though. A space that makes the rest of us safe, which is the #### away from the functioning members of society.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by timun

For the record the NDP lowered the small business income tax rate to the current 2%.

source? In 2015 they raised it by 2%, but maybe I'm missing something?

[Torture]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1643314315532066816
Lol, of course they didn't.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Sliver

It's one part of the equation, but I don't know what a cop is supposed to do with all the drugged out weirdos who are causing the problems. They can intervene in specific instances and stuff, but it does nothing to solve the overall problem or do anything whatsoever to make it go away.

Plus, I can't help but think it'll just lead to more of us regular people getting speeding tickets and pulled over because our registration is three days expired. Like, why wouldn't they? If I were a cop I'd rather deal with a guy like me versus the methed out ####wits who are making everybody uncomfortable everywhere - busting me you're still doing your job, I'll pay the ticket and you don't have to worry about me having some big freak out on the side of the road. A methed-out freakazoid? He might stab you, spit on you or otherwise just make your day gross and miserable. And if you do arrest him for something, then what happens? He goes to jail for a day or two, can't pay his fines and won't clean up and he's back causing trouble before the end of the weekend.

I'd respect Smith more if she actually did something novel on this, which is to house these people somewhere and get them clean and help them become productive. If they aren't able to do that, then let's put them in a warehouse with all the fentanyl they want and they can just have at 'er. But, get them off the ####ing streets and away from the rest of us. With them off the streets, we don't need an extra 100 dudes with guns and authority over the rest of us wandering around for more than the six months to a year it'd take to clean up the streets.

What we need are safe-injection sites. Not the kind where the junkies have a safe space, though. A space that makes the rest of us safe, which is the #### away from the functioning members of society.

It's not that I disagree, because I don't, but that's a long-term solution. Like you could build that place (preferably in Lake Bonavista), today and I'm not sure that it solves anything right away.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Slava

It's not that I disagree, because I don't, but that's a long-term solution. Like you could build that place (preferably in Lake Bonavista), today and I'm not sure that it solves anything right away.

Are you thinking the bottom of the lake? kidding

I hear you, but 100 cops to arrest these guys to put them in jail for a night or two doesn't do anything, either. So if we have the cops, that's step one, but I don't get what step two is since we have nothing in place to incarcerate these people until they're clean and contributive. Feels like we're going to pay 100 guys $100k/year to shuffle the problem two days down the road in perpetuity. I just don't get what we'll achieve since after the cops arrest the people the people are just back out there doing their thing again days (or hours) later.

[btimbit]

Originally Posted by Slava

It's not that I disagree, because I don't, but that's a long-term solution. Like you could build that place (preferably in Lake Bonavista), today and I'm not sure that it solves anything right away.

You're not wrong either but even short term, throwing manpower at it doesn't help when that manpower is still powerless to do anything effective

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Slava

source? In 2015 they raised it by 2%, but maybe I'm missing something?

You're talking about different things.

The Corporate Tax rate was increased to 12% from 10%, but the Small Business Tax was cut to 2% from the previous 3%.

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by Slava

source? In 2015 they raised it by 2%, but maybe I'm missing something?

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/da...rates-aoda.pdf

[Torture]

I for one, am glad Smith has tied herself to thoughtful folks like Pawloski.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1643316224015880192

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

So basically from that meme I gather that Trump is the bad guy from RRR, we're going to need NTR Jr. to get to New York immediately.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

So basically from that meme I gather that Trump is the bad guy from RRR, we're going to need NTR Jr. to get to New York immediately.

I thought he was supposed to be Simba

[Muta]

For all Edmonton gets trashed on this board, they are doing something right in this sense - they're building supportive housing buildings across the city through the Rapid House Initiative, which is getting homeless people off the streets and into a transitional home they can call their own - complete with support services and security. This type of responsibility and ownership is a proven first step in giving people control and autonomy back over their own lives. By the end of 2024, they'll have had eight of these facilities built across the city for approximately $100M (which may sound like a lot, but actually isn't for this many facilities of this type in 2023).

[Roughneck]

Originally Posted by Slava

source? In 2015 they raised it by 2%, but maybe I'm missing something?

That Alberta has a corporate tax rate (which the NDP did raise by 2% to 12%) and a small business corporate tax rate (which the NDP lowered from 3% to 2%)

[Sliver]

Man if they think Trump is so rad, do they look at the rest of us like we're gods or something? I'm a bald 46-year-old schlep and I look 10x cooler than Trump.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Sliver

Are you thinking the bottom of the lake? kidding

I hear you, but 100 cops to arrest these guys to put them in jail for a night or two doesn't do anything, either. So if we have the cops, that's step one, but I don't get what step two is since we have nothing in place to incarcerate these people until they're clean and contributive. Feels like we're going to pay 100 guys $100k/year to shuffle the problem two days down the road in perpetuity. I just don't get what we'll achieve since after the cops arrest the people the people are just back out there doing their thing again days (or hours) later.

You present a good idea, the problem is that most people will say it’s great and then not want to pay for it and not want it near them. So, they get to claim they want something done about it, but just nothing that actually impacts them in any way whatsoever, even if that impact is overall lower than the impact of doing literally nothing.

It’s the way.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

You present a good idea, the problem is that most people will say it’s great and then not want to pay for it and not want it near them. So, they get to claim they want something done about it, but just nothing that actually impacts them in any way whatsoever, even if that impact is overall lower than the impact of doing literally nothing.

It’s the way.

Well, I'm as NIMBY as it gets, but as for paying for it? No problem whatsoever. High earners need to be taxed way more. It's crazy. I grew up with a single mom and we were so poor it was ridiculous. Now I'm on the other side of the coin and it's even more ridiculous. They should be taxing the #### out of me.

It's embarrassing and greedy how much some people can make while others are scraping by and we have literal zombies bumbling around our falling-apart city and having our cool bridges smashed up all the time. There are people with money out there that they did not earn because nobody's labour is so valuable they should have orders of magnitude more than others. No one deserves to be filthy rich (I'm absolutely not saying I fall into that category, but I'm enough on the spectrum that I should be taxed more). If you're making over, like, $2 million a year or something, it should be taxed at 99%. So people can still be stupidly rich, but let's cut it out with the glittering wealth until basic problems are sorted out.