Le National Post démolit le budget Flaherty [2e partie]

Un autre must-read... Extraits:

At various points in the course of its 477 pages, the budget pauses to declare itself "historic." As in: "Budget 2007 makes a historic investment of ..." Or: "Budget 2007 takes historic action to..." They got that right. With this budget, Jim Flaherty officially becomes the biggest spending finance minister in the history of Canada.

It's true. The $200-billion Mr. Flaherty proposes to spend this year works out to about $5,800 for every citizen. Even after you adjust for increases in prices and population, that's more than the Martin government spent at its frenetic worst, when it was almost shovelling the stuff out the door. It is more than the Mulroney government spent in its last days, when it was past caring. It is more than the Trudeau government spent in the depths of the early 1980s recession. All of these past benchmarks of over-the-top, out-of-control spending must now be retired. Jim Flaherty has outdone them all.

In two years of this "conservative" government, spending has climbed a historic $25-billion. Bear in mind: that's on top of the wild rise in spending during the Liberals' last term. The Tories have taken all of that fat, all of that waste, and all of those hundreds of priorities --and added to them.

Is this what you voted for, you loyal Conservative followers? Is this what you suffered for, through all those long years of Liberal rule, dreaming of the Conservative revolution to come? "Hiring 50% more environmental enforcement officers?" Increasing "the share of meal expenses that long-haul truck drivers can deduct?" Tax credits for lacrosse? Exactly how does this differ from any Liberal budget -- other than outspending them, I mean?

What was it Stephen Harper was saying the other day, about the people who didn't have the time to organize a protest or the money to hire a lobbyist? Well, they're the ones that got left out of this budget: the common, ordinary, undifferentiated taxpayers. If you perform little tricks for the government, do the things it wants you to do -- ride the bus, live past 65, invest in a manufacturing company -- you get a cookie. But there isn't one real, honest-to-God, across-the-board tax cut in the entire document. The government that raised personal income tax rates in 2006 cannot scrounge up enough revenues to lower them in 2007.

Of course they can't: They gave it all to the provinces. The ad hoc mess that Mr. Martin made of the equalization program -- it was equalization, without the equalization -- has been replaced with a carefully rationalized, formula-run, principle- based mess

[...] equalization, at a time of shrinking disparities between the provinces, will grow by $1.5-billion. And Quebec's share? Why, all of it, of course. (More than all of it, in fact: Don't ask me how, but Quebec gets 109% of the increase.) Even Gilles Duceppe could not think of a way to find this humiliating.

It is good news, at least, that the "fiscal imbalance," the notion that Ottawa is systematically stiffing the provinces -- a rank falsehood, but appealing in its simplicity -- somehow wandered into the impenetrable thicket of equalization and got lost. But what a price! All told, this year the federal government will transfer $43-billion, a fifth of every dollar it collects, to other levels of government [...]

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.

Le bon sens commun

Remplacez "Harper" par "Dumont" et "conservateur" par "adéquiste". Mathieu Bock-Côté dans La Presse du 9 août 2006:

Il existe au Québec comme ailleurs une majorité de sens commun qui préfère la loi et l’ordre à la complaisance envers les délinquants, qui ne se glorifie pas de ses impôts élevés, qui ne tolère plus l’hégémonie sur l’école d’un pédagogisme débilitant, qui ne supporte plus le ralliement de l’intelligentsia à la vulgate altermondialo-écologiste, qui croit nécessaire de restaurer le mérite individuel contre la systématisation d’une culture de l’irresponsabilité et surtout qui se désole de la faible représentation d’un certain bon sens dans le discours public. C’est parce qu’il est parvenu à politiser ce sens commun qui sert toujours de matière première au conservatisme à l’occidentale que Stephen Harper est parvenu à gagner la confiance de plusieurs Québécois. Ce n’est pas malgré son conservatisme qu’Harper est parvenu à gagner la sympathie des Québécois, mais grâce à lui.

Paradoxalement, les souverainistes, qui se sont enfoncés dans un cul-de-sac progressiste en transformant la question nationale en un affrontement entre le Québec « de gauche » et le Canada de « droite » sont les premiers responsables de la popularité actuelle du pouvoir conservateur. S’ils désirent éviter une désastreuse marginalisation, ils auraient avantage à se réconcilier avec cette majorité de sens commun qui s’est moins éloignée d’eux que ces derniers ne se sont éloignés d’elle. Le souverainisme ne doit plus être la poursuite du progressisme par d’autres moyens. Les souverainistes devront bien finir par renouer avec le pays réel. Sinon l’histoire à venir s’écrira malheureusement sans eux.

=> Sur le même sujet.