The Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity, in a report prepared for Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government in Ontario, has declared that the answer to economic development in less-prosperous provinces in Canada is that the federal government should, instead of transfers, offer tax relief in order to stimulate private-sector investment, thus increasing productivity.
The report explains that currently, overtaxation-caused federal budgetary surpluses are not reinvested in ways that promote future prosperity, but rather are simply spent or redistributed for immediate spending by citizens, mostly in less-prosperous areas, like Atlantic Canada.
In other words, the Liberals under Paul Martin are blowing our tax dollars on the present to buy votes rather than using them to ensure a more prosperous future. Rather than, for example, using the year-end surplus to reduce the federal debt and provide real, broad-based, long-term stimulatory tax relief for the coming years, they have simply gone on year-end and pre-election spending sprees, practically eliminating the surpluses we would have had if they had behaved like the fiscal conservatives Paul Martin has always claimed they are, but obviously are not, certainly not anymore.
Not since Trudeau's most socialistic spending era has Canada seen such tax-and-spend insanity. Paul Martin has destroyed his once carefully-crafted image of a serious, careful-with-spending finance minister and lately has made of himself a hedonistic, wasteful election-buyer.
Not only that, he has committed the government and us, the taxpayers, to spend much of this extra money not just once, but each coming year, during which there will be no guarantee of cash being available for such ratcheted-up spending. How many times have they made announcements of "...over five years, ...over seven years..." and so on? It's impossible for ordinary folk to keep track. No wonder each year the budget skyrockets a la Trudeau's most flamboyant Seventies' spending spree. Paul Martin is, therefore, driving us full speed ahead towards deficit spending, and he obviously doesn't care!
This behavior will help no province, least of all the less prosperous ones. The report by the Insitute also explains that it simply takes some of the prosperity away from the haves and gives it as a handout for current consumption to have-nots.
This continues the endless cycle of socialistic redistribution and dependence that only serves to foster resentment and alienation in the West, particularly Alberta, and in Ontario, which also loses far more than it receives back from Ottawa. What this does is not only hold back the have-nots, preventing them from achieving their economic potential, but it also limits the haves' prosperity due to the redistribution of their income.
Therefore, the prosperity of Canada as a whole is less than it would be if the economy were freer, less-planned and -controlled via federal red tape and if there were a focus more on tax relief than on redistribution.
With this in mind, it's particularly disturbing that in addition to the Liberals' misguided, unworkable, socialistic economic policies, they continue to cavalierly waste our tax dollars throughout the federal government, its departments, agencies and institutions with reckless abandon and without accepting accountability. This is, after all, a party in power illegitimately, having ignored a Parliamentary non-confidence vote and a vote ordering the government to start an Air India Inquiry this past spring. We see no evidence of genuine measures being taken to end the corruption, wasteful spending or unethical conduct. How has this come to be?
How much longer can this astonishing corruption continue? The world over, regimes such as Paul Martin's Liberal one have fallen not only by devastating landslide defeats, but by way of revolution by the population. Does Paul Martin care how his government falls? Does he care at all?
The future of the federation is actually at stake, not just the economy. Does Paul Martin care? Let him prove it.
I'm not holding my breath for Paul Martin.
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