Today’s Toronto Star lead editorial blasts Liberals and the you’ve got to be kidding party—both of which they normally, reflexively support no matter what, all day long. But it’s just for being intellectually dishonest children and misleading the Canadian people. (Not a deal-breaker for them).
Wanted: adult talk on deficits
May 28, 2009 04:30 AM
News that the federal government will run a deficit of $50 billion this year – not the previously forecast $34 billion – has prompted howls of outrage from the opposition parties.
Liberal finance critic John McCallum called the number “shocking.” NDP finance critic Thomas Mulcair awarded Finance Minister Jim Flaherty a “dunce cap.” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff yesterday called for Flaherty to be fired.
The opposition should get a grip on itself. The deficit – while a “record” if inflation is unaccounted for – is a direct result not of Flaherty’s mismanagement but of the global recession, which has cut deeply into government revenues.
They’re partially right. I mean they’re totally right about the opposition being ignorant hypocritical and intellectually dishonest liars, but not so much on the singular cause of the deficit. Sure the excuse for the deficit is the global recession. But the cause — or as the TorStar puts it, the deficit being the “direct result” — was not of “the global recession”, but rather the result of political decisions based on what the Conservatives called “pragmatism”. Or what I call “liberalism”, because it wasn’t really all that “pragmatic” at all to be in a $50 BILLION deficit, now was it? The government could have cut spending and reduced the deficit to a fraction of what we’re facing today and as a further consequence, a fraction of what we’re going to face well into the future. That would have been pragmatic. And a “direct result” of principled conservatism.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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