There is a lot of opposition going around regarding the Sask Party's latest budget.
Kevin Doherty, the Saskatchewan finance minister, was in Yorkton last week to sell the budget with a presentation at the monthly Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Despite widespread outrage over the provincial budget, despite vociferous criticism that this government squandered the opportunity of the boom to build a nice nest egg for the bust, it is clear Brad Wall, Kevin Doherty et. al. genuinely believe in what they are doing.
“If you go back and do a comparative analysis of where we have spent taxpayers’ money over the last 10 years, people say ‘well, you might have overspent and not saved any.’” he said, “First of all, I reiterate, we put money back in pockets of taxpayers, we paid down three billion dollars in operating debt, it’s back up now, I agree, because of the resource revenue decline, but we have more than doubled funding in the priority areas of health, education and social services.”
This is conservatism, low taxes, personal economic (but not social) liberty, small government, reliance on unstable revenue. If you’re a conservative it makes perfect sense, because you think like a rich person, or like a person who thinks he can get rich if the government just stays out of his way.
For most people, it doesn’t quite work that way. If there is a little bit more money, you won’t complain, but it is quickly spent and not necessarily on luxuries. In good times, it works out okay, but when things get tough, it’s those who can least afford it who pay the price.
Consumption taxes over income taxes also make a lot of sense, if you think like a rich person, or an economist.
“The basic idea comes down to the role of taxes in determining the rate of return on investment,” says Stephen Gordon, a professor of economics at Laval University. “Higher returns generate higher levels of investment and—as investment accumulates—higher levels of productive capacity. That increased capacity in turn generates higher levels of output, employment and wages.”
To the middle or lower class person, that is a bunch of gobble-de-gook, but it sounds just enough like ‘you will benefit from this’ to perhaps vote against your own best interest by electing conservatives who are still selling this “trickle down” voodoo even though there is ample evidence it doesn’t work.
As voters, we should know enough about political ideologies to know that this is what you get with conservative governments.
It is a belief system anchored in economic Darwinism. It is not government’s job to hedge against hard times. Undoubtedly, we all should have been filling up our tax-free savings accounts, buying investment properties in the Caribbean, and diversifying our stock portfolios with all those tax savings they’ve been so graciously “giving us” over the past 10 years.
It is not their fault we are in this mess. We get what we vote for and this is what we voted for, not once, not twice, but three times, knowing full well someday we would be right where we are now.
