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.

This budget is ass.

That’s how all politics works. You can’t make everyone happy, so you just try to make every less unhappy.

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.

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

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

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)

Not at all surprised to hear that! (The book is sitting on my shelf, unread and judging me.)

No, that’s not at all how that works.

At all.

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.

It’s not like we’d have rail experts on the public payroll just sitting around.

And one of the mandates is to reduce consultancies (in large part because there’s been a lucrative pipeline of folks going through the public service, retiring, and then acting as consultants at a much inflated wage.)

Are all consultancies unnecessary? Absolutely not! But have all of them been necessary? Again, ask anyone who has worked in any sort of governmental agency and they’ll laugh as they regale you. (I still don’t know wether to laugh or cry at the guy who earned hundreds of thousands with the recommendation of “you should use this basic microsoft product.”)

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

Phew, I was thinking the same. I have no idea what you are trying to say.

Cheers.

Awesome!

Wow…that is roughly $2000 per Canadian.

No more private planes tax, no more capital gains tax… middle and lower class Canadians to foot the bill for this “investment”

This is trickle down economics with a tik tok song in the background

Sorry, but if the first claim is that government spending is inflationary, then there’s no way to claim that taxes aren’t disinflationary.

Lol, wait, what?

Just… Walk me through how you think this would work, say as Canada’s inflation rate hit 8% in summer 2022. Who would you have taxed, what would you have done with said taxes and why you think this would somehow lower inflation?

Ever heard of modern monetary theory?

It’s a way of thinking about the economy. Picture a bathroom sink …

(www.marketplace.org)

Really just linking this for the diagrams, which are the most succinct explanation for this that I know of - but this is the theoretical basis for what I am talking about

I get the misunderstanding now! I figured it was something similar to this, which is why I asked whom you would tax and what you would do with the taxes.

So, a handful of things. First, this is a theory that is pretty much rejected by almost every mainstream economist (it’s rare you see both the Chicago school of economics and Paul Krugman on the same side but here we are.) You might take a quick google at Modern Monetary Theory critiques.

But, ignoring that, if you dive into the theory a bit, you’ll see it doesn’t work as you’ve outlined. Looking back to your original point “Dollars are not scarce items; the government can issue currency essentially at will. Taxes aren’t there to fund services. They exist to reduce inequality.”

In the MMT, taxes both fund services (say, the CERB) as well as help stabilize inflation. So, in your CERB example, sure, government prints a bunch of money which would cause inflation and then, you’re now saying the government should just tax it back to get to a neutral rate. Which, fine, tax the CERB back. But then what was the point of issuing it in the first place? If the answer is “well we just tax the rich” then what’s the point of printing a bunch of currency instead of just using the tax proceeds from the rich?

To quote Kelton:

That means the government then has to start slowing it’s rate of spending, or you can open up the drain and let some of those dollars out of the economy. And that’s what we do when we collect taxes.

So, to stop the inflation caused by government spending on CERB, we just tax the money back and hold onto it (instead of using it on services, otherwise you’re back to the same inflationary pressures.) In essence, you’ve just changed all the programs from help to those who needed it, to a predatory loan.