Alberta Politics Thread v2

[Manhattanboy]

Originally Posted by troutman

No sales tax, no inheritance tax, low property transfer tax, etc.

We have been under-taxed for far too long - that is why we have a revenue/service/deficit problem.

Agree - problem is how do you introduce a sales tax now without getting hammered at the polls?

Alberta would be much better off with a PST and the flat 10% provincial income tax that we had before.

[longsuffering]

Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14

I'm not quite sure why I'm replying as your mind is already made based on Facebook posts dating back over a decade ago.

Surely you know the basis of our system is having MLAs which stick to the party's plan. 1 individual in this election is not going to be able to destroy science and convince people that climate change is fake. Yes you wont agree with all of his views and actions, but what do you dislike more;

Your interpretation of his views from 11 years ago, or another 4 years of NDP fiscally fist f****** our economy?

I'll take the derpy fiscal conservative of a decade ago 10 times out of 10.

It's thinking like yours that has people supporting pedophiles and other creeps as long as they're running for the "home team".

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Manhattanboy

Agree - problem is how do you introduce a sales tax now without getting hammered at the polls?

Alberta would be much better off with a PST and the flat 10% provincial income tax that we had before.

Pull a Notley and introduce it after you've been elected.

[longsuffering]

Originally Posted by stampsx2

Albertans already pay more taxes than the rest of the country. It’s why our province loses $10 billion every year to other provinces in transfer payments.

You want us to pay even more taxes?

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

So with your incredibly high understanding can you please link something that shows the average Albertan pays more in taxes than someone in say, Quebec or Ontario?

How are you doing with finding that link stampsx2?

I'll wait for you to move the goalposts to "prove" you're right.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Dion

Pull a Notley and introduce it after you've been elected.

I think they call that pulling a Ford nowadays

But I guess Notley can have the jurisdiction on doing it with taxes

[Dion]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

I think they call that pulling a Ford nowadays

But I guess Notley can have the jurisdiction on doing it with taxes

Excellent point

[PaperBagger'14]

Originally Posted by longsuffering

It's thinking like yours that has people supporting pedophiles and other creeps as long as they're running for the "home team".

Slightly apples to oranges here, I dont consider a climate change denier a monster. Pedophiles sure are though. I also believe any provincial party that had a pedophile in it would be removing them from their position immediately.

[Manhattanboy]

Originally Posted by Dion

Pull a Notley and introduce it after you've been elected.

See also Horgan - BC speculation tax.

[PepsiFree]

I think people ought to consider their vote more carefully than they do. Wanting a party to win, that’s great and all, but the clear choice in my eyes is to vote for the best candidate in your riding. Bad apples, idiots, creeps, whatever. Those are not people you should be voting for regardless of their party. Democracy is a responsibility, and one people should take more seriously than sending blind votes to whomever is wearing their team colours.

It’s the only way to ensure you’re actually represented the way you want to be, and it’s also the best way to form good parties. Of course, it’s a fantasy, I don’t think a lot of voters look beyond the party or the leader, but it’d make a hell of a lot of sense.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Manhattanboy

See also Horgan - BC speculation tax.

this just isn't true.

[PaperBagger'14]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I think people ought to consider their vote more carefully than they do. Wanting a party to win, that’s great and all, but the clear choice in my eyes is to vote for the best candidate in your riding. Bad apples, idiots, creeps, whatever. Those are not people you should be voting for regardless of their party. Democracy is a responsibility, and one people should take more seriously than sending blind votes to whomever is wearing their team colours.

It’s the only way to ensure you’re actually represented the way you want to be, and it’s also the best way to form good parties. Of course, it’s a fantasy, I don’t think a lot of voters look beyond the party or the leader, but it’d make a hell of a lot of sense.

You're totally right that it should be that way, and I wish it was. When the party controls its MLA's it's the party we are voting for. With that being said, if the UCP put up a pedophile/murderer/rapist in my constituency, I would not cast a ballot as no other party represents me and I wont support what I consider to be a bad person. Climate change deniers might be daft but not necessarily bad people.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I think people ought to consider their vote more carefully than they do. Wanting a party to win, that’s great and all, but the clear choice in my eyes is to vote for the best candidate in your riding. Bad apples, idiots, creeps, whatever. Those are not people you should be voting for regardless of their party. Democracy is a responsibility, and one people should take more seriously than sending blind votes to whomever is wearing their team colours.

It’s the only way to ensure you’re actually represented the way you want to be, and it’s also the best way to form good parties. Of course, it’s a fantasy, I don’t think a lot of voters look beyond the party or the leader, but it’d make a hell of a lot of sense.

The reality is that every single party has some of these people. If a party was made up solely of this type of people then you have a point but that's simply not the case as all the parties are mostly comprised of good people. I agree about not voting strictly on party as I'm probably one of the few people here that actually voted for nearly every party once including the Liberals.

[Dion]

Had a visit with Thomas Schneider this past weekend. He's running for the UCP nomination in the Livingstone-Macleod riding. I liked what he had to say and we had some good discussions on issues facing Albertans.

https://www.highriveronline.com/loca...owded-ucp-race

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/thomas-schneider-6883724a

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14

You're totally right that it should be that way, and I wish it was. When the party controls its MLA's it's the party we are voting for. With that being said, if the UCP put up a pedophile/murderer/rapist in my constituency, I would not cast a ballot as no other party represents me and I wont support what I consider to be a bad person. Climate change deniers might be daft but not necessarily bad people.

IF the UCP put up a pedophile/murderer/rapist, I believe any decent human being would believe it to be their duty to vote for whatever likelyhood best guaranteed that pedophile/murderer/rapist did not attain power.

[PaperBagger'14]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

IF the UCP put up a pedophile/murderer/rapist, I believe any decent human being would believe it to be their duty to vote for whatever likelyhood best guaranteed that pedophile/murderer/rapist did not attain power.

Kind of a moot point as that would highly unlikely happen here, but no I wont be participating in a spite vote and show support for someone who doesn't represent me compared to someone who is vastly different from me.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame

Erick Estrada - "You are free to vote as you please."

Just as long as you vote on things that are most important to you particularly, right?

Let me be clear what's important to me is one thing and that's the welfare of my fellow Albertans. The Alberta or Canadian economy does not effect my employment in the least. My job is recession proof and if anything the ever increasing stringent world emissions is a boon to my career. My wife is a teacher with 10+ years experience so she's in the clear for the rest of her career. My wife and I are set and Alberta could be in ruins and I would be in a personal good spot. That said I have neighbors and friends that have seen tough times recently and I also have the futures of my two boys to worry about. I want what's best for this province as I'm a proud Albertan. Hell with my climate change views. Hell with my religious views. Hell with my social justice views. I want the best for my neighbors and fellow Albertans that post in CP. I want Alberta to prosper again. Do I see a party that's going to deliver that? No. But I don't believe we can go another four years of having a party in power that is not investment friendly. I fully realize that the NDP is not solely to blame for our current situation but the timing of an NDP government in Alberta couldn't have been worse. Sure Notley has changed some of her stances (when she realized just how Alberta's bread is buttered) and become respectable in my eyes how she's handled some things but just having an NDP government in power is bad for business in the eyes of foreign investors. We just can't go another four years like this and I do mean "we" because the last four years haven't been bad for me at all.

[dino7c]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I think people ought to consider their vote more carefully than they do. Wanting a party to win, that’s great and all, but the clear choice in my eyes is to vote for the best candidate in your riding. Bad apples, idiots, creeps, whatever. Those are not people you should be voting for regardless of their party. Democracy is a responsibility, and one people should take more seriously than sending blind votes to whomever is wearing their team colours.

It’s the only way to ensure you’re actually represented the way you want to be, and it’s also the best way to form good parties. Of course, it’s a fantasy, I don’t think a lot of voters look beyond the party or the leader, but it’d make a hell of a lot of sense.

tell that to the people who voted for Deborah Drever

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

Well, in my opinion it is. The majority of the budget savings were coming from a roughly 10% cut to spending. The prentice budget forecast raising roughly 2.5 billion from new taxation, in the same frame as saying the province was looking at a 7 billion dollar hole just based on the price of oil at the time.

In my opinion, that's eating around the edges. The political miscalculation wasn't only on not raising corporate taxes, it was that income tax raises on high income earners weren't enough, and were labeled as 'temporary'. Again, that isn't addressing the fundamental structural problem of tax revenue in the province.



And that's just it in my mind. It wasn't addressing the fundamental lack of revenue, it was proposing significant program cuts that for many albertans was the second time in a generation they've had to live through that. The revenue problem is 30 years old. Cuts were not going to address that and I think implicitly the voter base understood that, and further, didn't trust a PC government who had dug the hole in the first place to dig them out.



It is truly stunning when the CCPA and the Fraser Institute can agree on economics, but both agreed the province needed to look immediately at weening resource revenue off entirely. A return to the Lougheed 30% days, at least. They had wildly different proposals on how to do that, but everyone and their mother could see the status quo wasn't working.



I can give Prentice definite credit for listening somewhat to economists who warned about the impact massive cuts would have on the economy, but his budget still fell very short of addressing the foundational aspects of the budget shortfall.

His budget over promised and under delivered when he said it would be radical. You don't get yourself out of a 7-10 billion dollar hole by raising cigarette and alcohol taxes, or taxing fuel that most of the province uses to operate the economy. To me, that's eating around the edges.

Well if it makes you feel any better Alberta is not even close to being the lowest income-taxed jurisdiction anymore. So mission accomplished NDP.

As a portion of GDP, resources is becoming lower and lower. It's almost like people know that O&G is volatile. It takes time though. You don't build new industries overnight. Most of BC's GDP is now "real estate transactions" (and their main exports are still coal, LNG, wood and minerals), so let's see how "sustainable" that is.

And man, people will never understand how corporate income tax works. Changing it doesn't do what people think it does.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Shazam

Well if it makes you feel any better Alberta is not even close to being the lowest income-taxed jurisdiction anymore. So mission accomplished NDP.

As a portion of GDP, resources is becoming lower and lower. It's almost like people know that O&G is volatile. It takes time though. You don't build new industries overnight. Most of BC's GDP is now "real estate transactions" (and their main exports are still coal, LNG, wood and minerals), so let's see how "sustainable" that is.

And man, people will never understand how corporate income tax works. Changing it doesn't do what people think it does.

nah, actually resource revenue is a greater proportion of alberta government revenue now that it was in the 90s. That's the economic legacy of the PC governments of the last 30 years. It's becoming lower and lower now out of bare necessity, but it's not a strategy, it's a reaction to market forces any serious economist saw coming.

I also understand the corporate taxes argument. I can get behind arguments that favour exceptionally lower corporate tax rates. The problem is, the 'fiscally conservative' governments weren't making tax policy based on mainstream economics, they've been making it on ideology. I simply can't support that kind of willful blindness in the face of being wrong.

And BC's housing bubble is a HUGE problem. It shouldn't make Albertans feel any better to point to a neighbouring province also looking at revenue shortfall deficits as a reason it's OK Alberta's 'fiscally conservative' governments paved the way. If anything, it should help them question even further just how 'fiscally conservative' modern conservative movements actually are.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14

Kind of a moot point as that would highly unlikely happen here, but no I wont be participating in a spite vote and show support for someone who doesn't represent me compared to someone who is vastly different from me.

It's not a moot point, it's a point you raised about how you're so dyed in the wool partisan you wouldn't vote for another political party even if it meant keeping a ####ing pedophile rapist murder from representing you and your riding.

This kind of outrageous partisanship is toxic to the core.