Balancing the budget: a bad political idea

[Niflmir]

At least the way the Conservatives are doing it:

Do you see that? It won't be balanced until 2015/2016, are the Conservatives going to be re-elected? They had better count on it, or the NDP or Liberals will be wrongly taking credit for this.

If the top 5% of income earners continued to pay 36% of income tax, we would have to about double their income tax if we were trying to recuperate all expenses from the rich. That doesn't seem quite feasible.

The conservative's strategy on the other hand, seems to be to increase spending by a modest 1.8% per year while the tax revenues are projected to increase by 4.0% per year. This seems feasible unless the increase of tax revenues over inflation are due to the increasing size of the population that would carry (by assumption) an equivalent growth in the expenditures.

Budget 2012
Perspectives on Labour and Income: High-income Canadians

 

[PoliticalNick]

There is a big factor in these projections that makes it almost impossible for it to happen. The Cons have projected the economy to grow by 0.2% this year and 0.3% in the next 2 years and 0.4% in the year after. Knowing that the economy has dipped by 0.2% this year already they are now 0.4% behind projections with no sign of trending growth on the horizon. It is a mission impossible to do anything to catch up without basically cutting of everything.

The easiest way to balance the budget is to stop spending billions in wasted programs and foreign aid and wars that aren't our business.

Joe citizen doesn't get to operate the way the govt does nor does the average business without finding themselves in bankruptcy and we need to demand the same responsibility from the govt no matter who is in power.

 

[Niflmir]

Yeah, I went to read the budget to try to find out what they were spending on and how much. Unfortunately, it is really hard to read that out of the huge document that they are publishing.

Maybe this is the problem that will make me finally implement some machine learning algorithms...

 

[damngrumpy]

There are some things to take into consideration that the Conservatives don't mention.
The hiring this government did since coming to office, the figure is nearly forty thousand,
and they are attempting to reduce their own hiring by around fifty percent.
The deficit they have compiled has led to the problem in the first place.
These people are trying to take back their own mistakes and they want average Canadians
to pay the price for their incompetence.