Politic-O-Pinion

Why Higher Taxes Are Better Than Spending Cuts

The budget is due to be released next week when Parliament opens its new session and Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty has promised that the government will use spending cuts rather than increased taxes to balance the budget.

And this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I’ll tell you why:

The Canada Revenue Agency doesn’t need to hire any new personnel when taxes are increased.  5% GST or 7% makes no difference to the administrative costs of the CRA.  Personal and corporate income tax rate fluctuations?  No problem, it’s just a matter of punching a different number on the calculator.

But:

When the government “cuts spending” that means that programs the government runs, offers and services it provides are reduced, eliminated or scaled back.  Money is spent by the government (also known as OUR TAX DOLLARS) to prioritize potential programs, services and spending for cutting.  It spends money our tax dollars to wind down those programs and services – and in the process people lose their jobs (and get paid severance, EI, etc – by way of OUR TAX DOLLARS).

Also, when government revenues recover and the government wants to increase spending on these programs and services it costs money our tax dollars to decide what programs, services and spending priorities should be tackled in what order.  And then it costs money our tax dollars to ramp up the new and improved programs and services. Not to mention hiring the new people who will be doing the job that others were already trained to do (with our tax dollars, times two).

All signs point to the current economic situation as a temporary one.  That we’re “on a path to recovery“.  The government’s own advertisements make that assertion.  Why, then, would they want to throw away excess millions of dollars paying consultants and administration in the process of ramping down these programs only to, presumably, restore the funding and ramp them back up?  A temporary increase in taxes to mitigate the deficit makes far more sense in the forward-thinking, long-term view.

Of course it doesn’t sell well if you’re a Conservative.

Then again the common-sense things rarely do.

Please, Mr. Flaherty, don’t throw away millions of our taxpayer dollars to government consultants just so that you can provide fewer services for the same amount of taxes.

Posted in Federal | No Comments »

Mr. Harper: Puck Off!

Stephen Harper gave an interview with Sports Illustrated and claimed that he would rather play in the NHL than be the Prime Minister.

Well, uh…  BYE!!

No, seriously.  Just go.

Now, that’s not the exact quote, so in the spirit of fairness let’s have the direct quote.  He was asked whether he’d rather be Prime Minister or play for the NHL.

“It’s probably terrible to say, but any Canadian boy, if he could play in the NHL, would play in the NHL.”

Still, that says to me quite clearly that he’d rather not be the Prime Minister.

And I concur.  I’ll even buy season tickets for whatever team he ends up on.

Posted in In The News | No Comments »

Facebook Comment for Jack Layton

Now, let’s be clear, I’m a huge pinko bleeding-heart socialist nut liberal Liberal.  That said, even I have to say can’t we just let one go from time to time?

I also whole heartedly believe that allowing the every day oafs who roam the Internet like zombies trying to eat our brains to comment on news articles and postings on the Internet is a very, very bad idea.  I started blogging 14 years ago when you actually had to know something in order to have an opinion in the Internet.

Ah, the good old days.

That, however, is not the point of this diatribe.

On Jack Layton’s Facebook page he posted the text of the short announcement he made this afternoon announcing his cancer.  As of this writing there have been some 140-odd replies to the English version of the announcement.  Among them one that stands out:

Really?  That’s what pops to the top of your head when you read about this man having cancer?

The reaction is to the language used in the announcement “This year, more than 25,000 Canadian men will be diagnosed with treatable prostate cancer and I have recently learned that I’m one of them.”

What sort of language were you looking for?  “prostate-laden Canadians?“  The use of “and [...] I am one of them” should absolve him from having to explain that transsexual women also have prostates – given that he’s not a transsexual woman.  He also didn’t mention that many other mammals have prostates – why not stand up for the chimp who needs a prostatectomy?

Seriously, let one go.

Posted in In The News, Pure Opinion | No Comments »

Prorogue Purloins Peoples’ Precious Pennies!

As we all know the Parliament of Canada has been prorogued until after the Olympic games next month.  What is worth noting is that the members of parliament and the senate will still be being paid; as will their staffs.  Also, their spending allowances are not dependent on the numbers of days they work each year, so they still get that money, too.

According to numbers available online – and I’m no math genius, either, and I tend to round down in order to not get accused of exaggerating these things – parliament costs the taxpayer approximately 502,680,000$ in direct costs (this number is the dollars spent for the people – not the buildings).

The Senate costs about 85,500,000$ and the House costs about 417,180,000$.  These numbers, as mentioned before, are rounded down where calculations had to be made.

The prorogation of parliament extended the holiday for parliament by 22 days (there’s a “natural” holiday in February for Family Day).  Given an average work year – according to my calculations – of about 175 days that means that one day of work for parliament costs taxpayers 2.87 million dollars (for parliamentary salaries, costs, etc) that totals out to 63.1 million dollars for this prorogue.

According to an article at Canada Free Press the Parliament of Canada sat for 133 days in 2009.  That is considerably less than the 175 I have estimated for a reasonable (ha!) work year for parliament, which would necessarily drive the average cost per day up.  This year we’re starting parliament more than 35 days later than last year – we’ll be lucky to get 100 days out of them.

100 days of GOVERNMENT for 500 million dollars…  cheap at twice the price, right?

** Scott Ross wrote another article on this last week which I didn’t find until after I had made my own calculations.  His article includes the indirect costs of having to reintroduce bills, it shows its work and is probably better sourced.  Although he comes up with a higher cost than I do, it’s not by much (2 million dollars difference in direct costs).

Posted in Federal | No Comments »

Wait. What? California Schools Ban… THE DICTIONARY.

This comes straight out of the WTF files for me.  I mean, if it were Texas it would still be bizarre but at least they’ve got their heads far enough up their asses – socially – to have this kinda-sorta make sense.

But California?  Really?

Perhaps Massachusetts electing a Republican senator really was some sort of a Sign that up is now down and California is now a social-conservative haven.  Was there an earthquake the slipped San Andreas into the bible belt?

So the meat of the ban is that the dictionary (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary), surprise surprise, defines “oral sex”.  And it uses such graphic language as “oral stimulation of the genitals” – truly contentious.  It should also be noted that the parent who launched the complaint that lead to the ban was volunteering in her son’s classroom when she came upon the definition; there’s just something icky to me about reading up on oral sex when in a fifth grade classroom.

Perhaps that’s something to look in to?

The move to include the more advanced dictionary – targeted at college-level readers – is that some of the students are reading at a college-level.  It only stands to reason, then, they those students should be given access to learning materials that further their ability to learn.  Doesn’t it?

Obviously no one is advocating a big fluorescent bookmark in the “O” section to draw attention to the term, but there are plenty of words that people could consider contentious in the college-level edition of this particular dictionary.  For example: abortion, creationism and the n-word.  All of which, it should be noted, come before “O” (again driving home the point: WHY THE HELL WAS THIS WOMAN LOOKING UP ORAL SEX WHILE SITTING IN A FIFTH GRADE CLASSROOM?!?!?!  Creepy).

Now I’m usually the first person to say that news websites shouldn’t have comment sections on them.  I just feel that it makes it way too easy for the stupid people to have their say (yeah, yeah, I’m for censorship of morons, if you’re one of them, feel free to piss and moan).  But this is one comment that I absolutely love!  It’s so rare a find I had to repost it:

Comment by: Jeff Posted: January 25, 2010, 1:11 pm

This is a joke, right? Like, a story in The Onion? Man, there are some dumb people in the word.

Coming up next: ban the alphabet, since you can arrange the letters in it to spell all sorts of bad words!

Best comment ever (aside from the spelling error).

Posted in In The News, Pure Opinion | No Comments »