Today will see the release of the Canadian job numbers for last month, which are expected to reveal losses of somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 jobs.
Yesterday, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff also addressed a town hall meeting, in Halifax where he emphasized the need for tax cuts for low and middle-income Canadians in the upcoming budget. So far, Ignatieff has shown very few signs of seriously wanting to bring the government down over the budget and has even taken what appears to be a jab at fellow opposition leader Jack Layton.
The Liberal leader said that he will not make a decision on the budget until he has thoroughly read it and won't take 30 seconds to decide he's against it -- which seemed to be a shot at NDP Leader Jack Layton's response to the Tory's fiscal update in November.This seems to show a renewed disinterest in the coalition by Ignatieff. So far, the Liberal leader has looked favourable to the measures hinted at by Flaherty, which may lead to a new period of stability in Parliament.
Commentators either support the new leader's "measured approach" seen as constructive, while opponents smile at what they see as a conservative-minded stance.
2 comments:
The small-c fiscal, social and judicial conservative that Conservative Party members misguidedly thought they were voting for as our leader in 2002 would, under no circumstance, tolerate the country to return to a colossal, superfluous 30 plus billion dollar deficit which will undeniably not be short term and could do more harm than good. Anyone who believes that this deficit will be transitory has no sense of history, nor does he have an IQ in double digits. History validates how quickly so-called “temporary” spending programs are converted into the permanent financial structure paid for by enduring tax increases.
Rather than believing that “only the government can break the vicious cycles crippling the economy”, the small-c fiscal conservative that we understood we had elected would know that a country can not spend its way out of a recession, and would permit the market to heal itself. Fiscal conservatives know that if additional spending was the solution we wouldn’t be in this recession since comrade Harper’s government is spending more than any preceding government.
The genuine conservative we sought would slash wasteful, profligate and peripheral billions from the $230 billion Federal budget. As an economist he knows that tax cuts are more effective market place healers than government spending, and, therefore a small-c fiscal conservative would recover dollars for tax cuts. The conservative we thought we had elected would expedite across the board cuts to all program spending, cut million of dollars of improvident foreign aid that ends up in dictators’ banks accounts, eradicate ineffectual programs, sell government assets, close worthless crown corporations ( specifically the far-left bias CBC). He would also save hundreds of millions of dollars by diminishing immigrants levels by 33% for the next three years. He would recognize that tax dollars are not government dollars, but taxpayers own money; therefore he would apply those resuscitate tax dollars to retroactively lower all personal income taxes for 2008 and beyond, cut payroll taxes, corporate taxes and capital gain taxes which would put dollars into the hands of people who would immediately spend it and expedite the market place healing process. A fiscal conservative would also allow business to immediately expense new capital purchases. The cut in capital gains taxes and corporate tax cuts would attrack foreign investments which is required to end this recession and allow the economy to expand.
The most interesting aspect to the tax cuts will be the actual amount of personal tax cut, as opposed to the amount of tax credits to people who don’t actually pay any personal income tax and, therefore, do not warrant a personal income tax rebate. For these people a tax credit is simply a welfare payment, not a tax cut. People maintain that if these people are working they forfeit pay-roll taxes and therefore deserve a tax rebate. Fine; but give them a cut in their pay-roll taxes rather than a welfare tax credit. Also, pay-roll tax cuts are cheaper for the government to expedite since checks do not have to be printed and mailed.
The structure of his deficit package will be a sign of just how far to the extreme left our Prime Minister is willing to intervene in the economy with his new, far-left economics. Hopefully it won’t be too far, but don't count on it!
Harper’s plunge to the left by bailing out the auto unions, and creating a unnecessary, credulously massive deficit are illustrations that legitimate small-c fiscal, social and judicial conservatives are not represented in his Conservative Party.
In 2002 when we thought we were electing a small-c fiscal, social and judicial conservatives, unfortunately most of us were not aware of what Tom Flanagan would later write in his book, Harper’s Team: "Some socially conservatives constituency presidents and councils remained skeptical of Harper”. As it turned out it was not only the social conservatives who should have be skeptical of Harper.
Unfortunately, it seems most of the citizens actually WANT the deficit. OK, nobody claims "I want deficit" but almost everybody wants the government to do something against the crisis. And people see in countries around, that "do" means bailouts, liquidity injections, government guarantees...so generally it's like Conservatives don't have many options, if they want to survive...
Jay
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