Le National Post démolit le budget Flaherty

Excellent éditorial du National Post sur le budget fédéral. Extraits:

Instead of a budget true to Conservative themes and commitments as we have come to know them in recent years — tax cuts, smaller government, tight spending controls — Finance Minister James Flaherty delivered a truckload of blarney. The leftist media used to warn of a Tory hidden agenda. They were right. Yesterday Mr. Flaherty unveiled so many previously unheard-of Tory themes and agenda items he could win a starring role on a Las Vegas stage as an illusionist.

From no hidden agenda to a thousand hidden agendas. A large number of these new measures are even desirable, from corporate tax cuts to raising to $400 the value of goods travellers can bring back to Canada after a 48-hour trip abroad. There are dozens of such items, but for each good one there are matching programs and measures that need not have seen the light.

Some of the tax measures make sense, such as more realistic capital cost allowance provisions and a promise to keep reducing corporate tax rates, although the changes are small and dragged out over years. Some, including Roger Martin and Jim Milway on this page, see the tax moves as beneficial, and well they may be in some sense.

But they are nothing compared with the continued drag Ottawa and the provinces impose on the economy by simply taking up so much of what Canadians earn and could be spending on other things besides government priorities.

The tax measures, in short, are all minor events against the massively expanding scale of government revenue and spending. As others note through the National Post today, spending is soaring and any hints of significant future tax cuts have evaporated. All we are left with is the gimmick of the tax-back guarantee, in which the tax cuts will be limited to the amount of interest saved on the money used to reduce the national debt.

What all this means is that taxable Canadians now have no hope of meaningful tax cuts — the Tories are certainly not going to run on a tax-cut platform in the next campaign. And, logically, there is now no hope of a government that aims to cut spending.