As if it couldn’t get any worse the following damning report on the future of Ontario’s Economy and future for the hard working citizen’s of this “once great Province” is the stuff of a horror novel!
When faced with this type of criticism our Dear Leader and his “hand puppets” roll out the psycho-babble and use their tax payer funded “policy consultant whankers” to provide talking points and BS spin to feed the never ending mass media “bingo callers” who pump this crap into the TV screens and newspapers across our once fair land!
Escape the nursery
Special to Financial Post Feb 27, 2012
State’s real danger goes beyond Drummond’s numbers
By Marcel Boyer and Tom Velk
The government of Ontario’s Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty is spending beyond its means. Postmedia News
Big governments spend too much, borrow too much, and tax too much: They push their way to the front of the economic queue and grab resources before private spenders can get them.
When the government’s treasury enters the capital market it bids money and economic energy away from all other players, driving up interest rates and reducing credit availability for everyone else in the market. The projects that get built by government, when it is in command all this borrowed and taxed-away money, are constructed, at least in part, with political goals in mind: to buy votes, to please constituents, to enrich supporters, to pay off ideological debts. In order to avoid the tax burden resulting from the big government’s agenda, the citizenry employs lawyers and accountants to discover loopholes and financial tricks, while other clever rascals learn about back alley dealings and corrupt practice.
Because so much of the national dividend is absorbed by government, there is not much profit left in the marketplace. And so entrepreneurs with new products, engineers with imaginative solutions, investors willing to take dramatic risks all become endangered species. The after-tax, after government “take-home pay” for these most productive citizens is reduced so that they partly withdraw from the economic playing field, impoverishing us all.
Don Drummond, former chief economist at the TD bank, currently Matthews fellow in global public policy at Queen’s University, chairman of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, submitted the commission’s report earlier this month. The report deals only with the elementary and obvious problems, in an almost exclusively spreadsheet style, of excessive government debt and spending. Because it fails to talk seriously about the deep changes that have occurred in the relationship between the state and its citizens as a consequence of big government, Drummond’s policy solutions won’t repair the damage big government has done to our civil foundations.
The report says Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government is spending beyond its means. Without a “sharp degree of financial restraint” Ontario’s direct public debt will soon reach Quebec levels: 50% of GDP. It says that Ontario’s tax base is weaker than it used to be, its labour force less skillful, its productivity impaired, and its export capacity reduced because of the strong dollar. This is downbeat but unremarkable stuff……………………………………
………………………………………..The power of the modern state is deep, subtle and dangerous: If uncontrolled, in the words of Tocqueville, “Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
