the government can issue currency essentially at will.

Okay, sure, this is technically true. In the same way that technically, you can drink bleach it’s just a very bad idea.

It’s literally how we dealt with the first phase of the Covid pandemic. Was keeping millions of Canadians from being evicted a bad idea?

Covid, and emergencies like it, are entirely the point of fiscal responsibility!

In an emergency, you can max out your credit. If you do that on the regular, for non emergencies, not only will you end up paying an absurd amount of interest, but you won’t be able to borrow more when the next emergency happens!

Great ok so we at least agree that issuing currency is not the fiscal equivalent of drinking bleach, and that there are good and bad reasons to do it.

The theme seems to be “reduce operating spending, increase capital spending”. We’ll see how that will blow over with the opposition.

I mean, that’s how a lot of Canadian politics works… “passed because no one really hated it”…

Which services are you thinking of?

The major thing I’ve seen is reducing the number of public sector employees back to 2020 levels, which doesn’t seem wild. (I haven’t seen a good explanation of why we needed to increase the public sector by 20% since then, nor of what we got out of that. If you have anything, I’d love to read it!) Throw in some reductions of outside consultants etc…

There are undoubtedly some programs getting cut. But given we’re teetering on the edge of an adversary induced recession, that doesn’t seem unsreasonable.

Again, that’s a fine and valid critique of the budget.

The fundamental flaw is equating corporate efficiency with public effectiveness…

This position however, does not seem valid when the budget is putting in more than it removes from actual public services, 51 billion v 13.

Dollars are not scarce items; the government can issue currency essentially at will.

Edit: You CAN drink a small amount of bleach. Just like you CAN print money during a generational event.

A small amount of bleach will burn a bit. A small amount of printing money caused inflation that we also haven’t seen in decades. It hurts families now but that’s the price we paid to help during covid.

removing the carbon cap saying that investments in several sectors would reduce the emissions anyway. A lot of wishful thinking on the budget text, or on the worst case mental gymnastics malice.

A lot of this is through keeping and raising a carbon tax. That makes companies find the most efficient ways to reduce their footprints, rather than the government mandating it for each group. This is the approach favoured by most serious economists and think groups about reducing emissions quickly.

without details what kind of investment they are putting money in

You can look at the “nation building” projects, which include a massive wind farm (green as hell) and a nuclear plant (fairly clean, significantly better than say, oil or gas.)

That makes companies find the most efficient ways to reduce their footprints, rather than the government mandating it for each group. This is the approach favoured by most serious economists

And it is the approach Carney favored in his book (which was written several years before he decided to run for office)

Taxes, then, are disinflationary, right? Which is why we need to tax the rich especially

That part wasn’t a critique of the budget, it was a critique of your pitch for efficiency. You pivoted the discussion, I followed.

Generally speaking, reducing public servants increases consultancy requirements, not reduces.

If you don’t have someone with the capabilites/skills/corporate knowledge/experince/capacity to do X thing on the payroll, then you need to hire a consultant to do it.

Now obviously I couldn’t tell you what ministry/department/etc needs, but let’s take the Alto contract as an isolated example.

We don’t have any rail expertise in government at all, so we need to consult it in, and we pay a premium for that. In the lens of a single rail project, that makes a a lot of sense, we aren’t paying payroll and maintaining expertise for a once in a generation project.

The alternative is having something like a national rail crown corp or department, like SNCF in France. Now all the experience is at the national level whenever you need it. SNCF has a lot more staff, planning, and engineering capacity than it requires; so that gets farmed out to regions and municipalities to help them with their rail/metro/tram projects. This is instead of each of them needing consultants, driving up the costs for municipal governments/capital projects.

In this manner increased federal spending becomes an accelerant for other levels of government and reduces regional and municipal spending, and thus the overall tax burden for everyone.

So if we had something like SNCF then the Alto project might cost a little more, but the Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal recent/ongoing lines would be cheaper; plus medium cities like Victoria, Winnipeg, Québec City, and Halifax would have rail projects in their reach; and smaller cities like Red Deer, Regina, Thunder Bay, Kingston, Trois Rivières, and Fredericton would have tram projects in their reach.

Maybe re-read what you reaponded to?

It’s pretty nonsensical to claim that because you’re providing a public good you can’t do so more effectively.

Nah I’m good dude, don’t have the energy, you can have this one.

The theme seems to be “reduce operating spending, increase capital spending”. We’ll see how that will blow over with the opposition.

The theme seems to be “reduce operating spending, increase capital spending”. We’ll see how that will blow over with the opposition.

The theme seems to be “reduce operating spending, increase capital spending”. We’ll see how that will blow over with the opposition.

No, that’s not at all how that works.

At all.