Here’s a good catch I wish I hadn’t let get away:
The Star misses Ignatieff’s signal on tax cuts
Posted: January 11, 2009, 1:30 PM by Kelly McParland
Full Comment, Canadian politicsMessage to the Toronto Star: Things have changed.
On Thursday as Michael Ignatieff set off on his “listening tour” of Canada he set out the basic elements of his platform for dealing with the economic crisis. As reported by the CBC:
“Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says he would consider speedy tax cuts, infrastructure projects and changes to the employment insurance program if he were prime minister.
Ignatieff, finance critic Scott Brison and John McCallum, chairman of the Liberals’ advisory committee on economic strategy, appeared at a Halifax town hall meeting on the economy, a meeting that’s part of a cross-country tour ahead of the Jan. 27 federal budget.
When asked what he would do during his first 100 days in office if he became prime minister, Ignatieff said “quick tax cuts” will help stimulate the economy.
“Tax cuts targeted at medium- to low-income Canadians will boost their purchasing power,” he said. “There’s a strong case for tax relief for the more vulnerable.”
Get the message? Tax cuts are good. Unfortunately, no one told the Star, the official party paper. On Friday the Star ran an editorial headed: “More tax cuts not the solution.”.
As the Jan. 27 budget draws nearer, it sneered, “Finance Minister Jim Flaherty appears to be reverting to his neo-conservative roots. In recent days, he has been making noises about putting tax cuts in the budget in order to leave “more money in peoples’ pockets so that they spend it, so that they help strengthen the economy.”
Um, neo-conservative? Is The Star suggesting Mr. Ignatieff is a neocon? But there’s more. The Star opines that there are two reasons tax cuts don’t work: One, people don’t actually spend the money, they save it. And two, tax cuts that stay in place once a recession is over erode the government’s revenue base, creating deficits.
Holy crap! So those deep tax cuts introduced by Paul Martin and Jean Chretien are the real reason we’re heading for a deficit? And Mr. Ignatieff is dead wrong when he says “tax cuts targeted at medium- to low-income Canadians will boost their purchasing power.”
Someone better call The Star. 100 years of slavish fealty to Liberal dogma is on the line.
National Post
Allow me to clean the fish for frying:
Moreover, we don’t need to rely on Thucydides to spot the internal battle surely being waged within the Left today, post Dion and the election of Barack Obama, and the economic reality facing that Axis today. An internal conflict must exist within the Star’s editorial board as it does within Ignatieff’s Liberals, and within their erstwhile hero Barack Obama and his so-called “Office of the President-Elect”, as all those squadrons of the liberal-left are now advocating exactly what conservatives have for years, and which they fought tooth and nail against: tax cuts—for all—as one of the sure ways with which to stimulate an economy without eroding tax revenues. Just as they did with balanced budgets, they on the liberal-left are forced by necessity to come to terms with what works, and it turns out it’s conservative. Darn the luck and all that tax and spend ideology.
Will the Star “progress” its fealty to the further left NDP now? Or will they continue to appease their futile, impotent lords, the Liberals, and Obama, despite both their rather quiet admissions as to the rightness of conservative economic thinking on taxes all along?
What the Star embarrassingly calls “neo-con” tax cuts is nothing short of the straw man fallacy laid bare, and a tacit admission as to the weakness of their argument.
One clue is right here, in this quote from the Star’s editorial, in which they advocate—by way of blatant acknowledgment—their reverence for the Canadian round table of socialism advocacy, to which they had hoped the 5-year plans and central committees of Team Liberal and their Team Obama would adhere:
“Better for Flaherty to address the recession with more spending … as suggested in a report this week by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives…”
—Toronto Star Editorial Board
Friday January 9 2009
Nobody bothers to ask them: How come they think government spending works, and citizen spending doesn’t? And: do they really think citizens are inept and should be vassals of the state?
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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