Nov 24 2008
I’m Not Feeling Down - It’s Just a Happiness Recession
I know, I know…there’s nothing more exciting than writing about the economy. Unless it’s reading about the economy! Am I right, people?? Huh? Am I?
One of the staples of Canada’s Conservative Party is it’s fiscal responsiblity. Or so they claim. I seem to remember my younger days when Tory governments rang up massive deficits and added to our debt like it was going out of style.
Then, for a few years (after the Tories were out) we had record surpluses, paid down the debt and seemed to be heading in the right direction…mostly.
Now, I’m no big fan of the Liberal Party either, but it did seem for a while that at least in the fiscal sense, we were fairly secure. Some people complain that a surplus means that the governement is taking more of our money than it needs, but to be honest with you, given my track record of taking care of my own money, I’m not sure that’s all bad.
This week a report of the Parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page was released. Page was appointed by the government to provide independent analysis to Parliament on the state of the government’s finances.
The report states that the federal government would likely post a $13-billion deficit next year, and that future deficits could total as much as $50 billion over the next five years.
Now, given the current state of the world’s economy, one would think that finger pointing would be silly. Except, in his report, Page doesn’t seem to think the answer lies outside of our own government.
“The weak fiscal performance to date is due to previous policy decisions as opposed to weakened economic conditions,” Page said in his report.
The Tories’ decision to reduce the GST by two percentage points in 2007 as the main culprit, according to Page. And he wasn’t the only person to jump in on this criticism.
Ralph Goodale, a former Liberal finance minister pointed out that cutting the GST saves the average Canadian less than a dollar a day, but the impact on the treasury is about $13 billion every year.
Stunning stuff.
Hey I’ve been doing this thing on my blog where I interview people from different countries than the U.S. and see what the election of Barack Obama meant to them (did it change the U.S. reputation, etc…) and I am badly in need of an interview from one of our neighbors to the North. It would only be about 6-7 questions at most. Afterwards I would publish the interview on my site, along with a link to your blogs and some blog-love too. If you’re interested you can shoot me an e-mail or leave me a message on my blog. Lemme know,
-Cheers