|
Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
I thought Harper would be sunk after Canada entered recession is that not the case?
MONTREAL — Marijuana is “infinitely worse” than tobacco and its use should be widely discouraged in Canada, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says.
The remarks come the morning after the federal leaders’ French-language debate, in which Harper’s clash with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau over the issue of legalization was among the evening’s more memorable exchanges.
The Liberals support legalization; Trudeau argued during the debate that if pot were legal and regulated, young people would be less able to easily procure the drug than they are currently.
The Conservatives are vehemently opposed to the idea, with Harper saying that regulating its sale in the same way as cigarettes or alcohol would do nothing to keep it out of the hands of kids.
Source
|
|
|
On October 04 2015 08:45 Impervious wrote:
My concern with government bureaucracies is that they are really inefficient, getting a thousand bucks worth of benefits likely cost $1500 because of all the crap that goes into it behind the scenes. Instead of just giving the guy the $1500, he gets $1000 and the extra $500 disappears along the way.....
A popular view which wouldn't be fixed by direct transfers at all. The bureaucracies in northern countries don't seem all that inefficient given the quality of life of people living there. Our bureaucracy is heavy too, and administrative costs are a thing, and yet it has become so popular to rant about it that the issue seems disproportionate. Do you really think that a third of Canada's resources "disappears"? No question about where it goes? Do you think less money would disappear if we were to give it directly to people? Maybe it would, don't get me wrong - but I think it's worth asking the question. To my senses, people would strongly oppose direct transfers because we don't know what people would do with the money. We'd get scandals about how some woman spent her $1200 for prenatal care on new shoes and how some guy's direct transfer was spent the next day on a TV set to replace the old one. And so people would demand that public funds be spent more wisely, and we'd have new funds "wasted" to ensure that the money is going to the right place. The heavy bureaucracy wouldn't get less complicated if, instead of making large transactions to services, we made a HUGE amount of small transactions to specific individuals based on specific criterion. I think it might end up being more expensive because direct transfers don't entail less bureaucracy. It's more transactions, more checks, more verifications. Might be ways around it but it doesn't go without saying.
I doubt I would have been able to make my point in any clear or concise way if I had stated that it was an externality of a regulatory public policy. While correct, it does not convey the information well.
I work in the auto industry. If you come in and say that you have a broken knuckle, the tech knows exactly what is wrong with the car. To the vast majority of people who own cars, they likely don't know the difference between a knuckle and a hub or spindle..... While it is a general term to most people, in the specific industry it means something very specific that is quite different from it's generic term. So I completely get where you are coming from. If you have a better way to describe it than a transfer of government money that indirectly assists a business in a similar way to a subsidy, but is obviously not a subsidy, that is also clear, concise, and also accurate, I'd like to know, to save any confusion in the future. I honestly can't come up with anything.
In the rare times when you need to describe what the minimum wage, I believe you can afford the extra words. But fine I don't have the chops to invent a new word that would refer to "something with the whys and wherefores of subsidies indirectly, but isn't a subsidity". And frankly, I would bet that someone who knows more about economics and public finances would be able to bring up many ways in which the effects of the minimum wage are very different from the effects of a subsidy. I'd need to do some reading!
|
On September 30 2015 11:00 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2015 10:20 Impervious wrote:On September 29 2015 08:35 Djzapz wrote:On September 29 2015 08:00 Impervious wrote:On September 21 2015 05:15 Djzapz wrote:On September 21 2015 04:28 FiWiFaKi wrote:On September 21 2015 03:40 Djzapz wrote:On September 21 2015 01:52 IntoTheheart wrote:
I mean, despite being "second-class," I was still able to get my security papers to clear in a week (standard time according to the secretary) at a military college so I guess it's not the end of the world. My current understanding is that:
Conservatives: Currently in power and regardless of how well or poorly they do, get a lot of hate from where I live;
Liberals: Young leader: will win Kingston (where I live) regardless of whether or not I vote
NDP: Will probably bankrupt us, not voting for them. :/ The idea that the NDP would bankrupt us was pretty much planted by the other parties and is consistently planted by the opposing party of the more left-of-center party. At this point I've heard it so many times, it's clear that people don't know what the hell they're talking about. The NDP showed no signs of being fiscally irresponsible. Sure they're idealistic, but I don't doubt they can run a budget. Hell, it's the liberals who plan to run a deficit, and if the NDP's budget happens to be unworkable because they find out that they can't draw that much money from corporate taxes, they'll just do what every single party has done historically: not live up to their promises. And remember, it was under Mulroney that debt to GDP ratio went from 70% to over 100%, then it went down when they weren't sitting and under Harper it went from 70 to 85% again (though it's more understandable). If you want fiscal responsibility, I don't think the NDP looks as bad as the people who run against them work so hard to make you believe. I'm a gun owner, and everyone in this community is against the NDP and the Liberals because they're viewed as "anti-gun"' but I personally can't stand for Trudeau, the excitable silly guy who frankly probably doesn't have the wits necessary to be PM, nor Harper who does have the intelligence but not the morals. They're parties which voted for C-51 and that should never have happened. Haven't we learned any lessons from the US? On September 21 2015 01:56 FiWiFaKi wrote:
I think I'll be voting Liberals, even though I don't like like Trudeau. I'm from Alberta, and I used to be a big Conservative guy... And currently, I'm really not a fan of the NDP, there's too much focus on equality and not enough focus on equal opportunity. For example, the $15 minimum wage that'll be implemented by 2018 is imo, quite unfair to others, when an new Accounting grad will make $18-$20/hour. It will also make the price of fast food, retail, low-education service products go up, and thus in a way, it's a double whammy negative for hard working people with university/college degrees, or tech diplomas. Although increasing the minimum wage does have diminishing returns, I feel like gradually going up does actually help with equality and eventually the economy. A $15 wage will cause some inflation but you'll also give adequate buying power to a whole bunch of people who'll now be able to consume more, which will make accountants more valuable. Essentially, the mcdonalds worker used to make $11 and now he makes $15, and the accounting grad now makes $22 because products move off the shelves more since the people who otherwise would be broke can actually afford some luxuries. In this case, you've actually made some progress regarding equal opportunity because the mcdonalds wage can be used toward paying of school and whatnot. I understand that you can't have the minimum wage at $40 without an insane staple economy, but I think that most businesses can afford to pay their employees more and stay competitive provided that their competitors need to pay their employees more too. In the end, people who make $15/hr don't save it, they spend it and it goes right back to the businesses who can sell more volume. Poor people will consume more, at the expense of others consuming less (the people paying the higher taxes to pay for the minimum wage subsidy). This link here: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil105a-eng.htm To say the minimum wage is a subsidy is to distort reality quite badly IMO. The money is not public money, it's private and it has non negligible returns for the economy. I've never heard the minimum wage being referred to as a subsidy before and frankly it's because it makes no sense. In some ways it is a bit of a subsidy though. Think about it this way. If an employee is making a livable wage, are they being supported by the government through any kind of assistance programs? No. That's the entire idea behind a living wage. It's enough to support you (and potentially your family) without outside support. When someone is being paid less than a living wage, and receives government support, that support is coming out of our tax dollars. Any job that does not allow someone to live without government support is in a sense subsidized. Every job like that should not exist in our society, because it essentially handing money to the companies they work for under the guise of being a productive job. I'd love to see the minimum wage removed completely; however, only under the condition that basic necessities are already there for everyone anyways. Things like shelter, food, clothing, access to electricity and heating, transportation (even if public), internet access (it's pretty much impossible to operate in our current society without it), etc should be accessible to everyone, without exception. All these basic necessities need to be covered for everyone in my view. If the free market cannot do that, then the government needs to step up to provide these necessities or force companies to pay a wage that allows for that to happen (that was what the minimum wage was initially designed for after all). And I'm saying this as someone in that "35k-50k" range. I don't want any handouts; I take pride in the fact that I work hard for everything I have, but I really hate seeing people in need of it when there really is so much to go around in our country. I'm saying the minimum wage is NOT a subsidy, and I read your first two paragraphs twice and I don't understand if you're saying that the minimum wage is a subsidy. Saying it "kind of is" doesn't really take into account the nature of what a subsidy is, where it comes from, how it's distributed. Subsidies are transfers of public funds going toward specific problems, whereas the minimum wage is a form of regulation which prevents the private corporations from existing if they can't afford their employees decent "living wages", though frankly they get less than that with minimum wages. Now there is probably much to say about the pros and cons of the minimum wage approach vs. the direct subsidies you're bringing up, but the gist of it is the minimum wage approach takes money from the employer, thus forcing the employer, to an extent, to perform properly. I mean I haven't thought this entire question through because your approach is frankly new to me, but then what would prevent employers from grossly underpaying their employees even though they could afford to pay more, simply because you know you're able to afford them a lifestyle that's equivalent to whatever the government would pay with public money instead. This would just be a mess of exceptions and other cockery that a reasonable minimum wage handles adequately IMO. Ok, here's a hypothetical situation. Company A pays its workers $12 an hour. Company B pays its workers a wage of $15 an hour. The living wage is at $15 an hour. Employees of Company A receive a variety of different support programs through welfare to top them up to that $15 an hour wage (and costing a fair bit in bureaucratic inefficiencies in the process). Which company is likely to make more money for each man hour worked? Here's a 2nd hypothetical situation. Company A pays its workers $12 an hour. Company B pays its workers a wage of $15 an hour. The living wage is at $15 an hour. Company A receives money from the government to prop up the wages to $15 an hour to compensate for that. Which company is likely to make more money for each man hour worked? Why is the government giving any of these companies money?
if any prime minister tried to truly put a stop to corporate welfare he'd end up as dead as JFK... and he'd be replaced in 10 seconds by a pm that re-instates it.
|
To use a combat sports analogy... we are late in the fight and Tom Mulcair is hurt and down on points.
now he is desperating looking to land a haymaker right hand for a shocking KO
Mulcair is trying to bring forward the TPP as an issue in this election.
http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/tpp-talks-cast-shadow-on-campaign-trail-1.2594432
i don't think its going to work .. but at this point i don't know what Mulcair and the NDP can do to win this election.
|
|
|
|
|
So some people are trying to work around the First past the post loss of votes due to the NDP and Liberals splitting votes.
Its like a vote anything but Conservative strategy but vote so you dont split votes. Not sure if thats the bigger solution or not but its interesting to think about.
The ground game for a coalition would actually rock the conservatives pretty hard and a more surefire way to win. Heres the site for it.
http://www.strategicvoting.ca/
As a fresh permanent resident (I moved from the US after 8 years) it quite upsetting that millenials are avoiding voting simply because they feel their votes wont matter. Or they will spend a few days before the election doing some research and then maybe vote.
I think the website I linked is some degree of help but its a shortcut. An overhaul of the election process so that popular vote has some more weight would be the better solution.
|
On October 05 2015 00:52 Djzapz wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2015 08:45 Impervious wrote:
My concern with government bureaucracies is that they are really inefficient, getting a thousand bucks worth of benefits likely cost $1500 because of all the crap that goes into it behind the scenes. Instead of just giving the guy the $1500, he gets $1000 and the extra $500 disappears along the way..... A popular view which wouldn't be fixed by direct transfers at all. The bureaucracies in northern countries don't seem all that inefficient given the quality of life of people living there. Our bureaucracy is heavy too, and administrative costs are a thing, and yet it has become so popular to rant about it that the issue seems disproportionate. Do you really think that a third of Canada's resources "disappears"? No question about where it goes? Do you think less money would disappear if we were to give it directly to people? Maybe it would, don't get me wrong - but I think it's worth asking the question. To my senses, people would strongly oppose direct transfers because we don't know what people would do with the money. We'd get scandals about how some woman spent her $1200 for prenatal care on new shoes and how some guy's direct transfer was spent the next day on a TV set to replace the old one. And so people would demand that public funds be spent more wisely, and we'd have new funds "wasted" to ensure that the money is going to the right place. The heavy bureaucracy wouldn't get less complicated if, instead of making large transactions to services, we made a HUGE amount of small transactions to specific individuals based on specific criterion. I think it might end up being more expensive because direct transfers don't entail less bureaucracy. It's more transactions, more checks, more verifications. Might be ways around it but it doesn't go without saying.
I have seen the mess of a result of the current system that tries to prevent people from "wasting" their assistance, or just how dysfunctional the government programs can be. The CRA legitimately tried to tax my father for 5 years after he died. I was previously in a bad financial situation with the Ontario Ministry of Finance, and they cannot currently accept online transfers as payment. When I asked them how much to send in post-dated cheques, they couldn't even give me a proper dollar amount, only an "approximately X amount" answer. No joke. At one point my family physician tried to get me into counseling for depression. I was on a waiting list that was 3 months. 3 months came and went. After 6 months I ended up moving to a different city, and had to get onto a new list that was also 3 months long. Another 3 months came and went, and at that point I pretty much gave up on it. Our current systems are fucking atrocious, or, at least pretty much every interaction I've had with them has been. Maybe in the EU they've figured something out, but here it's not working as intended. And the fact that government employees earn on average 10% higher wages than they would make in an equivalent private sector job to provide these services doesn't help my view here.....
Also, maybe it's just me, but I value liberty. Part of that is making mistakes. If someone is going to go and spend 1200 bucks on a TV, that's a pretty big mistake in my books. But at the same time, if your TV breaks, isn't your first response to go out and get a new one? For a big chunk of people in Canada, that's not an amount that is going to seriously harm your finances, you might have to shuffle a bit around, but it won't cause you any undue stress. There are also a lot of people that live paycheque to paycheque, where their instinct would be to put it onto their credit cards, rather than pay it off in full immediately. It's not ideal, but a lot of people are pretty bad at managing their finances, and credit card companies are more than happy to make a buck to help people who are like that. But when you're legitimately poor, chances are your credit is either bad or nonexistent, so good luck getting a new TV without paying cash for it.....
Maybe handing someone a $1500 cheque is a bad idea, but there's gotta be something inbetween a direct transfer and this inefficient and ineffective mishmash of programs we currently have.
On a completely unrelated note, this FPTP voting system we have sucks. The person that I feel would do the best job in my riding is not a representative of the party I would want to actually win the election, yet neither of them is the person I need to vote for to strategically get Harper out of office..... 
|
Honestly bureaucracy is just shit in general. I got my tier two licence in BC, then moved back to Ontario where I'm from. Got my license carried over and transferred from BC to Ontario without issue. A few months later I call them up and ask them when I can go for my full licence.
My line of thinking is maybe I can swing it and get my licence early by having them judge me based on the date I got it in BC. Normally it's supposed to take a year before you can get it. I got it around april of 2014, and it was transferred in october of 2014.
Guess when they said I could get it? April. Of 2016.
Why? Because at some point they had decided my licence in BC was actually revoked, the day I passed the test and received it. When I pointed it that made no sense and that there's no way I could have a Ontario licence if that was the case, they told me I had to call BC and have them resend stuff, because it was their fault.
Naturally when I called the BC drivers place they had no idea what they were talking about, and everything was normal on their end, but agreed to resend the information.
Fucking government bullshit man.
|
All the big and successful countries have pretty big bureaucracies. Now I won't defend bureaucracy too much, it's obvious that there are big problems with that, but it has become trendy for people to blame the bureaucracy for every problem they encounter when they deal with government agencies, including incompetent clerks and whatnot. Who here doesn't think it's cool to rant about the IRS?
I like to quote Stephen Colbert when he says "Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us."
Now I don't know that it applies to either of you, but there's frankly no way around it. In countries as complicated as ours, it's flawed humans that have to handle all this shit. And "small government" never really seems to happen anywhere, fast and efficient bureaucracies essentially don't exist, we have to agree that it's a necessary evil.
My point being, I would argue that the majority of the problem can be explained by politics and economy, since bureaucracy is a given and while you can solve some issues with restructuring, you can't get more doctors and nurses in your hospitals, you can't prevent doctors from working 30 hours instead of 40, you can't prevent doctors from going to the US where they get paid better. At the end of the day if you're stuck on a waiting list because there's a backlog of patients in front of you, it may feel like a problem with people pushing paper too slowly, and it partially is, but that doesn't tell the whole story.
And Impervious, I understand that you value liberty, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If you want liberty, then what's to prevent you from paying taxes to fund another Canadian's TV set. At that point, even I would feel like my liberty is getting shit on. I pay taxes willingly because I know that they're distributed in ways that benefit me. They mutualize throughout the country the funds necessary to reduce the risks associated to getting sick, which saved my life no less when I was a child. My taxes are specifically directed at things which, unlike the way I spend most of my money, are good for the collective. If a person has the liberty to buy a home theater with my tax money, then I believe I should have the liberty to not pay fucking taxes and to buy a home theater for myself. But if a person can't pay their rent for whatever reason, or if a person needs meds, then I'm more than willing to forfeit my home theater for them, not even necessarily because I'm a particularly good guy either. There are benefits that I get out of having my money being redistributed.
My belief is that distributing money directly would cost more money and actually add weight to the bureaucracy instead of removing any, simply because they wouldn't want people to actually go out home theaters and like I said the number of transactions goes up and whatnot, but I think that even if you managed to save money, you'd find that some portion of those people, or hell many of those people would spend the government money with varying degrees of recklessness. The money would be redirected away from child care, away from the various community services and all that, and into various luxuries and vices that frankly we all fucking have, myself perhaps more than most. And the impact of that IMO would be that in the long run, you'd have less money being spent trying to diminish the problems that are caused by our society's aggressive individualism.
At the end of the day IMO that's the government's social function in a liberal democracy. It's to attempt to tackle the externalities caused by aggressive individualism by everyone and every corporation. I think people like to just not consider just how powerful certain social services are, to the point where people wouldn't use them if they weren't free, and they have hugely positive impacts on health, community, etc.
Pessimism and cynicism are ruining everything. Abandon ship.
|
Actually the bureaucracy part was how they had no real communication between the two entities. They couldn't just go "what you're saying doesn't match out records, let me get in touch with them to see where the issue occurred".
Issues happen, but when they do the system in place should be able to handle them. It shouldn't be a matter of "well it wasn't OUR fault, it was a different part of the government that messed up! Take it up with them".
|
Yeah I don't deny that there are those problems, but I'm not really concerned with you being inconvenienced and other specific instances of fuckery as much as I am with some of the costly (financially and otherwise) fuck ups. And I'm not saying that being inconvenienced when interfacing with the authorities is unimportant, but most of the issues with bureaucracy happen behind closed doors. So do their successes... but we don't hear about them.
As frustrating as it can be to try to call the SAAQ (idk what it's called in other provinces but basically the equivalent of the american DMV but in Quebec) and having to wait is frustrating, it's just about the least problematic part of our bureaucracy. People are more likely to be concerned with the billions of dollars it actually costs to coordinate all this stuff. I've spent enough time looked at this stuff to understand why it's frustrating to pay for it but at the same time it's not easy. It's not simple. And anyone with the balls to say they've come up with a magical solution, please contact me ASAP and I'll have to heavily edit my thesis.
|
Man, I've been really unhappy with the NDP government in Alberta. A 20% increase in the corporate tax rate (10 to 12%), doubling the carbon tax from $15 to $30... Seriously, what the fuck.
And that will undoubtedly be follow by a PST if the oil situation ever changes. Right now is really not the time to be thinking about how we can switch from petroleum to renewable energy, and rather focus on the 1% increase in the unemployment rate in the last year. Notley's approval ratings are slipping extremely quickly... In late may she was at 62%, she's now down to 45%, hopefully most who voted NDP are kicking themselves by now. The situation is really bad here, there are no new projects being started in the oil sands, so in the meantime, the companies are producing as their commodities go higher than their marginal costs, but not average costs... So as contracts run out, unemployment will keep rising.
I am asking everyone to please vote Conservative in the elections There is so much bullshit going on in other provinces, like having a monopoly on alcohol in Ontario... And then not being able to lower prices because it'll encourage people to drink? What kind of silly logic is that, it's obviously used as a tax revenue stream... Sorry, just a bit off topic, but some of the politics I've seen coming from the east have seemed quite odd to me.
If you go to why not vote harper, the reasons they give you:
1) Cheated in 2006 election - he spent $1 mil more on advertising than was legally allowed
2) Turned Canada's Surplus into debt - yes, since he became PM right before the global recession, and within a few years balanced the budget.
3) For supporting bank deregulation - ehh, controversial topic, I don't think this makes him bad, considering it is generally agreed that the best economics school are in the US, and it was a pretty sound theory to describe the past until what we witnessed in 2008.
4) Opposes Universal Healthcare - Don't really know how true that is, but wants to make it provincial instead. I support universal healthcare, but again, don't really know the validity of the claim, they are just referencing what he said once.
5) Shut down parliament twice - uneducated in this topic, but the polls seem to be split on it.
6) Wants to replace CPP with PRPP - All I know is that we have a seriously aging population, and the only way we can sustain pensions is by bringing more and more immigrants to pay for them. I know we don't like the idea of raising retirement age, or making bigger contribution, but currently our system is not sustainable.
7) Shut down women and minority groups - I guess I'm biased since I'm neither, but these things seem like money dumps to me. These are handled fine through university clubs imo.
8) Economic action plan benefited the rich - Uncertain about this, but life was pretty dandy here in Alberta comparing to what I was hearing on the news with the US and other European countries.
I dunno, the list goes on and on (on top of it, this is obviously a biased list), and not to say he's been running a perfect federal government, but the things people complain about are often misinformed and controversial to begin with. If this is the worst we can come up with, I think we're doing pretty good.
I find it's a lot easier to justify left wing politics to right wings politics to the average Joe... But really, you need to look at it a little deeper (and really, only a little), to see the potential negative consequences of these actions. For example, how might a carbon tax influence our competitiveness on a global scale, what a higher corporate tax rate means for energy companies with a reduced cashflow and already in debt, realizing who is impacted most negatively by an increased minimum wage (lower-middle class) etc.
I don't have a problem with running a deficit, balancing the budget during a recession is not important, you need more government spending to offset the dip in the business cycle... To me the problem is that I see no long term plan to run a balanced budget from the NDP... I'm starting to think more and more that the liberals are even more left wing than NDP. Bleh, introduce new higher tax bracket, more Syrian refugees, more spending on veterans, more CBC, more spending on everything.
I simply feel that a fairly idealistic approach is being taken, which creates a lot of bureaucratic costs, and excessive spending is being put into thinks we view as a society view as good, yet we don't really want to spend money on it... And we'd rather just have more money in our pockets to spend as we please. Government spending is already 42% of GDP in Canada, while Sweden is 51%... I really don't think we want to go higher, and we can expect that under the NDP or Liberals, that percentage would go up at least 3-5% within 4 years.
edit: It's late, I don't think I shared my points as nicely as I wanted...But essentially, I am under the impress that a lot of people decide they want something, and then throw money at the problem (ie. raising taxes), instead of working around and living with that problem. My most common example I like to bring up that say I'm a high school student working 15-20 hours working a minimum wage job, but I want to be able to get place to place quickly... I could either spend 2/3rds on my income paying for a car, gas, insurance, and repairs... Or I could buy a road bike or use public transit. Taking the public transit or bicycling is living within your means... Don't take having a car as something that's mandatory. The same could be said for hospital wait times, since people like to complain about those a lot. Yes, you could be in the emergency room for 1 hour, instead of the say 4-6 hours you wait now, but you'd likely also be spending 25-50% on health care. Instead of throwing more money at the problem, learn to live around it.
I'm a last year engineering student and I can comfortably live off of $500/month (minus tuition costs and rent), while using minimal public services provided, living a happy and comfortable life in the process. Just a suggestion for others, before you suggest for the government to throw money at a problem (and often lose some personal rights in the process), think and research whether there's another solution.
edit2: Vote harper.
|
interesting poll results (7000 sample) from former minister and MP Garth Turner
+ Show Spoiler +
People still would rather vote conservative even though Harper is in charge.
|
My biggest issue with the Conservatives at the moment is that their entire selling point is "we're Conservative so we're good with the economy". And for the most part, that just means they don't spend money (except on things they support) and double down on things that are (were) making money. And sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Alberta in particular has seen the extreme end of what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket, and as much as people may presently complain about the NDP raising taxes, the only reason Alberta even had such low taxes in the first place is because you were pumping out oil and raking in cash. And now oil has dropped like a rock, and you're suffering the consequences.
What's happening with the Canadian economy is basically an extension of what happened in Alberta. The Conservatives doubled down on oil, and then the market was pulled out from under them.
My view of Canadian politics is that it's far more of an equilibrium than anything else. Give some years to one party so they'll expand certain projects and programs, and then when they've become too entrenched give another party some time to cull things back and do other things. And I think we've reached the point where the Conservatives need to get out so another party can fix some of the things that got broken.
Also Harper's a giant asshole who drags every single one of his social crusades to the Supreme Court where he gets shot down every single time, and I'd basically never vote for the Conservative party as long as he's running the show.
|
On October 07 2015 15:39 WolfintheSheep wrote:
My biggest issue with the Conservatives at the moment is that their entire selling point is "we're Conservative so we're good with the economy". And for the most part, that just means they don't spend money (except on things they support) and double down on things that are (were) making money. And sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Alberta in particular has seen the extreme end of what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket, and as much as people may presently complain about the NDP raising taxes, the only reason Alberta even had such low taxes in the first place is because you were pumping out oil and raking in cash. And now oil has dropped like a rock, and you're suffering the consequences.
What's happening with the Canadian economy is basically an extension of what happened in Alberta. The Conservatives doubled down on oil, and then the market was pulled out from under them.
My view of Canadian politics is that it's far more of an equilibrium than anything else. Give some years to one party so they'll expand certain projects and programs, and then when they've become too entrenched give another party some time to cull things back and do other things. And I think we've reached the point where the Conservatives need to get out so another party can fix some of the things that got broken.
Also Harper's a giant asshole who drags every single one of his social crusades to the Supreme Court where he gets shot down every single time, and I'd basically never vote for the Conservative party as long as he's running the show.
Harper does have a pretty classical approach on the economy, but I think it works decently...
Bring in investment, promote competition (ie privatize everything, create a market for everything, maximize trade), maximize disposable income, so people can spend their money the way they want to.
My issues with the Liberal and NDP platform (especially the NDP platform), is that it seems like they have no plans for expanding the economy, and thus unchanging standards of living.
NDP is all about redistributing money from the rich to the poor in whatever ways (higher progressive tax rates, affordable child care, obtaining fair (bona fide - higher) rates for companies extracting Canada's resources, and taxing anything and everything that potentially has negative consequences (to align individual self-interests with societies self interests)), and of course, putting a larger emphasis on environmental protection (which short term always has an inverse relationship with the economy, so it's finding about a balance), and doing things that are perceived as "good" by society, whether that's helping people who willingly don't want to work, making workplace regulations more lax so people don't get offended by having to work, foreign aid, etc.
The problem with all these things is that you aren't doing anything to expand the economy, so at the end of the day, sure, your middle class might be richer, but your overall GDP is still the same, and people have less options to spend their money how they want (freedom to spend your money your way favors the responsible and educated)... While long term, you're driving down the propensity to consume, the investment within the country, and ability to compete on the world stage - all of which will lead to a stagnation or reduction of the economy.
You need to increase the "technology factor", or efficiency of your production to increase economic output, and thus raise GDP. This is done by promoting efficiency within people and companies (not government employees that will never receive a pay cut). You achieve this through incentives to work hard as a person (promotion and pay based on performance, not seniority), competition within the market (goods will be produced by the ones who can do it for the cheapest, not by the one who is assigned to do it)... All these things are that Harper did quite well.
Now, keep in mind, in Canada, provinces have more autonomy than states in the US, and actually most companies are provincially regulated, so there is only so much you can do when you have a left-wing party in power in the province... Harper is trying to shift everything for the provinces to handle unless it's something that truly requires an interprovincial regulation. Needs can be better met when looked at by people in the locale. When the provincial government wants heavy unionization of workers, or the municipality wants very high property taxes, it's a bit counter-productive to the federal goal... Seems like that's what happens in the East a lot, meanwhile B.C., Alberta, and Saskatchewan seem more or less on board with a similar mindset (or so I thought).
Where the conservatives went wrong is putting all your eggs in one basket, like you said. It's a bit odd really, nobody saw the crash coming, but analyzing it now, it almost seems too obvious... Most profitable industry on the planet, oil price is increasing... More countries will start producing, and start placing emphasis on production, more resources will become reserves... And you'll saturate the market, there's always a delay since legislation might need to get passed, wells take a while to drill, funding needs to be found. But even here in Alberta, it was just like... boom, so sudden. So many of my colleagues had their internships cancelled and such.
Anyway, natural resources are Canada's edge over the rest of the world, and operating a resource based economy decently stable (there's almost always recovery), so putting all your eggs into oil, mining, forestry, etc (always having to deal with the environmentalists though) probably appeared as a reasonable postulate.
Bringing the manufacturing sector is not really a thing. This isn't 20 years ago, all simple manufacturing can be outsourced to China, Malaysia, and the Philippines... And Mexico can handle anything else where more communication is required. It's too low level to be a successful industry in a developed country with high wages, only things like micro/nano-machining and other higher tech stuff can survive.
I guess what it really comes down to is whether we want to utilize our vast space and resources and base our economy about that, or whether we want to do massive reforms and go the SK, Germany or Japan route of becoming a hi-tech economy, or become "the most advanced third world country economy", where we don't really do much of anything, and focus on societal and environmental impacts, create massive bureaucratic costs for everything, and stay decently well off because we are a huge land mass and can utilize and exploit it.
|
1 thing i don't get about the NDP and other left wing economic policy makers. They always want to go into debt and go on a temporary government spending spree. with borrowed money you always have to pay it back.
also, as left wing guys they hate corporations, banks, and the mechanisms, people and organization behind making the money system work.
but, by going into debt on their spending spree all they are doing is making themselves beholden to the monetary system and the very "money men" they claim they hate.
the best way to protect government services in the long term is to never go in debt so that your government can make decisions regarding social services that are independent of any obligations to banks and money men.
|
JimmyJ, I don't know if your explanations are intentionally simplistic or if your understanding is poor, but either way know that what you're saying is ideological and not a fact of life. Realize that the conservatives have run deficits too, not any less or at least not much less than the liberals (and the NDP have not been in power). This is true for the last years too. As for the notion that left wing guys "hate corporations, banks,..." betrays a very emotional reaction by you that seems completely irrational to me.
It's especially irrational because like I said before, it occurs to me that you may not understand what you're saying. Like, you're talking in very simple terms and I would like you to actually flesh it out so that I can see that you actually understand the doctrines that you're supporting... but when you say that the government should "never go into debt", I wonder, are you saying that the government should never ever have a debt? Even during full out recessions? Not even to promote growth? In my experience, people who don't recognize the importance of borrowing money at least in some circumstances don't understand how anything works.
Forgive me if I sound patronizing but I've seen your posts and I can't take you seriously as it is. You've been railing on Wynne without substance (though not without justification), your posts all seem super shallow to me. Even if you have something good to say, it doesn't come off that way.
|
in Canadian Federal Politics and in Ontario the NDP and Liberals are always willing to incur more debt in any specific concrete situation.
when the economy or the world economy drastically changes for better or worse of course a Conservative government may have to incur more debt and when the economy booms a left wing government may run less of a deficit than expected.
if you'd like me to go through the history of P.E.T., Mulroney, Chretien, Martin, Harper i will
regarding Ontario ... if you want me to start with Bill Davis and move forward from there i will.
federally, we can even go before P.E.T. if you'd like.
The trend is most evident when the government in power holds a majority.
I'll start with the very first example: Trudeau started his government with negligable debt and no deficit. By the end of it if you just do your research you'll see the debt. During the Mulroney years the only money added to the debt was interest on the existing debt trudeau left him with.
In Ontario the most glaring example occurred during the Rae years and after when Mike Harris cleaned it up. Rae began with a fairly low debt taking over from the Liberal Peterson. The Liberal Peterson took over from a zero debt conservative government. If you go through Ontario politics for the past 50 years the Rae/Harris contrast in policy is evident in reality in Ontario's actual fiscal status. may God bless William B. Davis. 
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.greaterfool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/NEW-CHART-1.png?8f4c78)
![[image loading]](http://www.greaterfool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Poll-Results-September-24-2015.jpg?8f4c78)
