And so as we slide ever lower down the standard-of-living ranks -- we used to think of ourselves as second, or third, or maybe fourth or fifth in the world, but now we're 11th or 12th at best -- we are not even talking about how to turn that around.... Marginal tax rates remain as high as ever, and no party has any intention of changing that. Strike that: the party in power is doing its best to ensure that it cannot be changed, by siphoning off available revenues into massive payoffs for the provinces or mult-billion dollar cuts in sales taxes.
The federal government is little more now than a bank machine for the provinces, raising the taxes they don't feel like raising themselves, and every party agrees that is how it should continue. Parliament is as useless as ever, and no party has any proposal to change that. Politics, at least at the federal level, has ceased to have any relevance whatever. There are no issues that divide the parties, other than who can spend the most and deliver the country to the provinces fastest. Nor is there any prospect of that changing.
Everyone's excited to know whether there will be an election this spring. But really, after this, who cares? What possible difference could it make?
3/20/2007
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This ornery is high comedy.
Mr. Coyne - fortune bless him - came of age politically when neo-liberalism was ascendent around the world. He is, as many of us are, a victim of his frame of reference. What we see in this budget is that the critiques of the neo-liberals have been internalized by the traditional parties - all of them - while the excesses of that ideology (emphasis on tax reduction over public investment for example) have been abandoned, thankfully.
The darker part of this budget is simpler: we are ruled by technocrats. I would like to see more public investment but I think all of us could think of 1000x better ways to invest this money for a better Canada, nay, a better world. But this budget is the triumph of the technocrats over the idealists.
Indeed, it is a dark day with no light on the horizon.
Those countries ahead of Canada on standard of living tend to have higher marginal tax rates. They also have more government regulation and more government programs. By all means, let's talk about how to raise standard of living.
"Those countries ahead of Canada on standard of living tend to have higher marginal tax rates. They also have more government regulation and more government programs. By all means, let's talk about how to raise standard of living."
Indeed. There is enough data out there - and enough real world proof - that shows the correlation between Standard of Loving and MTR is next to zero.
AC - I think you're bang on in your reaction to the budget, and I share your frustration with the Tory government - a government that so many of us had such high hopes for, even as a minority.
It may be too soon to ask this question, but what can we do who don't want to give up the fight? I look at friends like Adam and Tasha who went out and wrote a manifesto for conservative Canadian governance - a manifesto that had at least some influence in the early, heady days of the Harper government - and I wonder: do we just need more voices saying the same? Do we need a stronger voice than Adam's and Tasha's and yours? It's hard to imagine a stronger voice. A weaker voice? Are they right who say that Canadians are simply not ideological - or simply not conservative?
The natural reaction to the failure of ideological commitment on the part of politicians is to create more ideologically committed politicians - but then that happened fifteen years ago, and the Harper government is the result, and we're seeing what ideological commitment gets us.
What's to be done?