CAUTION, unless Conservative...Please don't read this...

[wilagro]

Well Tom...tell that to our hidebound PC government here in Helberta. Ralphie (the clown) Klein made it illegal to run a deficit and guess what...that is what we are running. The government had to break the law in order to implement a change in policy. Inflexible government formulas and policies can't foresee what circumstances may arise that may require a corrective response.

If and when you become a part of a Wild Rose government (heaven forbid), you may find this to be helpful...don't paint yourself into a corner with rigid policies.

[cottonpicken]

Throttling back on spending?

Whats the cpp deficit?227 billion?

Whats the real rate of inflation in healthcare and
education?

Want to see a look into the future
.
Im no dtn commentator but our books will never
be balanced

[TOM4CWB]

C.P.

I read the deficit in CPP to be a reality check... that folks need to have more income than the CPP will provide...by itself... which nearly everyone has being saying for a generation.

Lorne Gunter has a good article worth reading!

The Tories haven’t changed us

Lorne Gunter, national post.com, Last Updated: Dec 29, 2011 8:03 PM ET

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/12/30/lorne-gunter-the-tories-havent-changed-us/

"Harper isn’t imposing a radical agenda on Canadians. He’s just giving them what they want.

A hat-tip to my colleague Kelly McParland for suggesting earlier this week that Stephen Harper and the Conservative government are not so much changing Canada as simply demonstrating how much Canada has moved away from the elite blueprint the Liberals began using 40 years ago. It was intended to socially engineer a new multicultural, bilingual, socially just nation in which government is omnipresent and policy is directed as much by special interests, crusading elites and activist judges as it is by Parliament and the people’s elected representatives.

For what it’s worth, I think Kelly’s right. The Tories aren’t undermining the Liberal vision of Canada, as their critics often warn in the direst terms. Canadians already beat the Tories to the punch. To the extent ordinary Canadians ever bought into the Trudeau/Chrétien worldview, most got over it years ago.

Prime Minister Harper is merely removing the false idols Canada’s elites have erected to themselves, and their vision, over the past four decades. No hidden agenda, no altering Canada beyond recognition, no reducing our stature on the world stage — just a return to the solid middle that prevailed in Canada before the Grits attempted to remake us in their image.

Pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol is not an embarrassment to the nation, as the Liberals and NDP and every environmental group in the country has insisted. Kyoto was never going to prevent global warming or dangerous climate change. I disagree that man-made global warming or climate change are occurring, but even if you believe they are, Kyoto was never the answer, nor is whatever treaty will succeed it likely to be. Kyoto applied to too few countries: No more than a couple dozen countries had agreed to meaningful emission reductions under the accord and almost none of them were likely to meet their targets except by accounting legerdemain.

Germany may be able to claim it will satisfy its Kyoto obligations, but it’s the fall of East Germany that made that possible: After the Communist bloc fell apart extremely dirty factories closed, slowly to be replaced by more efficient West German versions. That’s good, but it hardly requires the sacrifice Canada would have to agree to — in terms of jobs lost and economic potential squandered — to achieve the same “savings.” The Harper government’s decision to withdraw from Kyoto was simply a pragmatic reaction to a reality the Liberals, the UN and much of the international community refuse to acknowledge.

Ditto the announcement last week by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty that the federal government would continue to increase its annual health-care transfers to the provinces by 6% a year until 2017. By that year, Ottawa will be shipping the provinces about $38-billion annually to help pay for doctors, nurses, hospitals and medical equipment. Thereafter, the increases would be tied to economic growth (currently about 4%), but will never fall below 3%, no matter how bad the economy gets.

Six of 10 provinces objected vehemently, claiming Ottawa’s unilateral policy decision “destabilizes the federation,” is “unfair” and “un-Canadian” and put at risk universal health care from sea-to-sea.

But the Tory decision was simply a recognition that health care no longer needs to be a national icon. Canadians have moved on from defining our nation by its “free” health care. No matter how often politicians claim universal care is sacred and that all that is needed to preserve it is more money, waiting times get longer and health outcomes decline relative to the rest of the developed world. Canadians have given up believing our system is perfect, so the federal government realized that grand national first-ministers’ conferences filled with dramatic negotiations over intergovernmental funding are no longer needed, either. Here’s the money, take it or leave it, and move on.

The Tory decision to build more prisons is a recognition that 40 years of the every-boy-a-good-boy pop psychology approach to crime has failed, just as their initiative to make immigration and citizenship more meaningful is a recognition that multiculturalism has grown out of control.

Their new border agreement is not a radical sell-out to the U.S., but rather a simple recognition that millions of Canadians and billions of Canadian goods cross the border weekly, so it makes sense to ease the process.

The Tories are not wreckers of the peaceable kingdom. Rather they are simply better at divining the radical centre than the other parties."


On how we got out of our mess in the 1990's...

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/15/revisiting-canadas-fiscal-miracle-a-different-take-on-the-deficit-fighting-story/

A different take on Canada’s deficit-fighting story

by John Geddes on Monday, August 15, 2011 4:53pm - 34 Comments

"With the United States and European Union staggering under debt burdens, Canada’s success in sorting out its fiscal problems a decade and a half ago is often held up as an example to emulate. But it’s a model I often don’t recognize, even though I covered the turnaround story back in the 1990s.

For instance, there’s this recent Washington Post piece, which touts the “Maple Leaf Miracle.” “Facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis, Canada got down to work,” it says. “The country passed a landmark budget in 1995. The plan tilted heavily towards cutting expenditures but also included some new revenue (the ratio was about $7 in cuts for every $1 of revenue). Canada cut the civil service by about 25 percent and overhauled its pension program. The plan worked.”

An American or, say, German fiscal hawk might well perk up at that prescription—cut public spending ruthlessly, laying off one in four government workers, while boosting the tax haul only very modestly by comparison. Sounds like a plan. Except it’s not the one that actually transpired in Canada.

What really unfolded here over the crucial decade in question is, in the broadest strokes, as follows. When the Liberals started grappling with the fiscal crisis in 1995, the Canadian government was spending $173 billion a year and taking in just $137 billion in taxes and other revenues. Five years later, the government was, after some very short-term cuts, back to spending almost exactly the same amount, but raking in nearly a third more revenue, about $180 billion. After that, with the budget cruising along in surplus, spending climbed steadily to $207 billion over the next five years, as revenues kept right on growing to $212 billion by the 2005.

So it’s accurate to say that spending was restrained for a few years after former finance minister Paul Martin tabled his famous 1995 budget. And that jolt of austerity did help wipe out the deficit faster than anyone thought possible in the fiscal dark days of 1993 and ’94. But by far the main reason the red ink evaporated—until it rematerialized after the market meltdown of 2008—is that the Canadian economy grew smartly year after year during that period, and tax revenues more than kept pace.

Then there’s the matter of a quarter of federal jobs being axed. Nothing like that happened (as we see in this Statistics Canada overview). In 1995, the federal government’s workforce numbered 382,000. That total shrank no smaller than 326,500 in 1999. After touching that low ebb, Ottawa’s hiring picked up again, to the point where 380,700 were working for a federal pay cheque in 2006, the year the Liberals lost power to the Conservatives.

The real history of the Canadian fiscal reversal, then, is that firm but hardly harsh spending restraint proved sufficient because the economy cooperated by expanding steadily and rendering up taxes. I realize that simply advising, ‘You need to grow your way out of a fiscal mess,” isn’t much help. There are, though, a few more precise lessons to be learned from Canada’s deficit-fighting experience.

Firstly, it helps to fix your tax system. Canada’s is by no means perfect, but the overhaul boldly implemented by Michael Wilson, the former Conservative finance minister, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, paid off in the revenue surge that followed a few years later (for those lucky Liberals) when the economy picked up steam. Wilson had eliminated a raft of business tax preferences, allowing him to cut marginal corporate tax rates overall, and yet widen the base by making 84.1 per cent of corporate income subject to tax, up from just 72.4 per cent before his reforms (according to this handy review of federal tax changes). More famously (or infamously, depending on your perspective) he brought in the Goods and Services Tax, hated by everyone—except anyone who really understands taxation—and precisely the sort of value-added tax the U.S. so badly needs, and will probably never get.

Secondly, it’s possible—in fact, essential—to fix underfunded entitlement programs even as you balance your books. In 1996, the federal and provincial governments agreed to revamp the Canada Pension Plan. (Paul Wells recapped the uplifting tale here a few years back.) Politicians of all stripes, at both levels, agreed to boost the combined employer-employee contribution rate (basically a payroll tax) to 9.9 per cent in 2003 and beyond, from 5.6 per cent in 1996. A pillar of retirement income for millions of Canadians went from wobbly to sturdy. Taxpayers accepted having more money deducted from their pay in order to shore up such a key program. Then again, political demagogues weren’t screaming at them about their taxes rising and freedoms eroding.

Finally, there’s the aftermath of the Liberal battle to eliminate the deficit. What might a government do after balancing its books? I’d point to two things, one to lift the spirits of fiscal conservatives, the other the warm the hearts of social liberals. In 2000, the Canadian government, now that it could afford to, introduced across-the-board personal and business tax cuts (read all about it here). And, in 2004, the federal government injected $40 billion over 10 years into health care, not perfecting universal insurance, to be sure, but reaffirming its commitment (in this deal) to the essential principle.

The path to fiscal health wasn’t as painful as we feared, or even as hard as is sometimes said in retrospect. The payoff, as it turned out, soon included something for everyone. It’s a happy, complicated story, and more instructive than the one that’s often told."

Soooo C.P. et el;, your negative views of the world... are you really sure they are justified???

[TOM4CWB]

C.P.;

The article on our Canadian Pensions:

OUR GOLDEN OLDIE DAYS

Europe's pension plans are generous -- and unsustainable. We've been smarter.

PAUL WELLS | Jun 16, 2003

WE SPEND so much time noticing our problems, we never notice the problems we don't have. Until we visit, say, France. You drop by the neighbour's for a little vin et fromage. After a while you notice there's an elephant sitting in the corner of his living room, scuffing the hardwood floor. Hey, you think. Where's my elephant?


These days the elephant in the French living room is the pension system, which is generous and beloved and, sadly, unaffordable. The baby-boomers are rushing toward retirement. They didn't leave enough children behind to pay for everything. The new prime minister, the wily and spheroid Jean-Pierre Raffarin, wants to fix it. Work a little longer, he says -- 40 years instead of 37.5 -- and everything will be copacetic.

Continued Below


Hundreds of thousands aren't buying his argument. Which is why, as I left the G8 summit at Evian last Tuesday, France was racked by its latest general strike. Flights grounded, newspapers undelivered, roads blocked. Raffarin won't bend. "The street may give its views," he said, "but the street cannot govern." He'd better hope he's right, because if the street keeps governing Raffarin can't. This confrontation will break his government and poison Jacques Chirac's last term as president if the strikers win.

There is a lot of this sort of stuff going on. Pension reform has led to the largest protests in Austria since the Second World War. Gerhard Schröder had to touch base in Berlin before the Evian G8 summit to sell his social-program review to a skeptical Social Democratic Party. And here in Canada? The Canada Pension Plan hands out about $21 billion a year to 3.7 million Canadians. If there was something fundamentally wrong we'd be in the streets too, wouldn't we?

But we're not. Because there isn't. Something wrong, I mean. Canada, almost alone among gently greying North Atlantic countries, saw this problem coming and fixed it. And because we did, we're short one big problem as a nation, and we've been able to trade that blessing in for a big opportunity.

In 1996, Paul Martin and the provincial finance ministers met to look at the evolution of the Canada Pension Plan. Why? Because the law governing the CPP said they had to. They saw the same baby-bust funding crunch that has since hit a bunch of Canada's neighbours. If premiums didn't nearly triple to 14.2 per cent by 2030, the system would become unsustainable.

Politicians from four parties sat around that table, yet they managed to agree on a fix. Premiums would rise, but only from 5.6 per cent to 9.9 per cent. The rest of the shortfall would be closed by investing pension-fund assets in the financial market for faster gains. Government actuaries say the pension system will now be sustainable indefinitely.

This is not painless. The average Canadian has seen his or her paycheque erode as CPP premiums climb -- until this year, when the creeping increase ends. Repairing public pensions was easier in Canada, where company pensions and RRSPs also cushion our old age, than it would ever be in France, where state pensions are all they have. But still, an amazing thing has happened -- or, rather, hasn't. Canada has dodged the bullet racking Europe. And while it's fun to watch Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin fight for credit, you and I deserve our share too.

Allow me to flatter you. Since 1996 your contribution to somebody else's comfy retirement has increased by more than 75 per cent, yet we haven't heard a peep out of you. Meanwhile in France, workers are being asked to extend their own working careers by less than seven per cent -- and they have descended into the streets. So it's no wonder that, before he faced down the unions in the fight of his political life, Raffarin found four days last month to visit Canada. "This country where reforms work," he said in wonderment.

And since we're not stuck with overdue repairs to catastrophic system failures, Canadians can get moving on some other useful work. In France I noticed agonized articles about the decline of France's university and high-tech sectors. "I'm a lot more worried about a brain drain among our researchers than I am about losing managers for tax reasons," Alain Etchegoyen, a senior government financial planner, told Le Figaro.

And he should worry. France is losing more and more of its finest young researchers. Raymond Chrétien, our ambassador in Paris, says a lot of them are moving to Canada.

Beginning in 1997, with the pension fix in place and budget deficits declining, the federal government -- in parallel with several provinces -- began making modest investments in the so-called "knowledge economy": university labs and research grants and grad-student scholarships and the like. In recent years the pace of that investment has become breathtaking. From 1998-99 through 2004-05, new federal spending on these areas will have grown nearly sixfold, from $400 million to $2.3 billion per year. Martha Piper, the University of British Columbia president, told me that so many research labs are springing up on campuses, "it's like popcorn." Fourteen Canada Research Chair holders on her campus were working outside Canada a few years ago. One was from France. Eight were from the United States.

When you dodge trouble you can grab opportunity. Life here isn't perfect but it could be worse. Just ask the neighbours. Pat yourself on the back. Go on, I won't tell.

To comment: backpage@macleans.ca"

http://www.macleans.ca/columnists/article.jsp?content=20030616_60687_60687

[Burbert]

Herr Harper is gonna build a bunch more
prisons and throw away the keys. Next
comes some really efficient ovens wit big
smoke stacks to deal wit politico foe.
Law and order its the only way ta go,
roundem up and shippem out, the final
solution to Comedian opposition!
Chancellor forever, and ever.