EDMONTON, AB, Nov. 14, 2012/ Troy Media/ -- There are three ways in which a government can balance expenditure against revenue and ensure a balanced budget. The first is to ensure that the revenues (taxes, royalties, returns from investments, fees for service) match or exceed expenditure. The second is for expenditure to be managed in such a way as to ensure that it matches the available revenue. Finally, the government can use a variety of instruments or techniques to take expenditures hitherto "on the books" off the books for the future, making it look like the expenditure is less. There is a conservative philosophic position that "debt is bad" and "deficits, because they create debt, are bad". This is nonsense. Some debt -- such as debts incurred because investments have been made in the future -- are smart debts. Some other debts -- incurring debts by killing contracts that should never have been signed in the first place (think Ontario and energy) are inappropriate. Alberta has debt but there is a second philosophic position taken by our politicians that gets in the way of a solution. That is that the idea of raising taxes is "out of the question". This too is nonsense, though it is the kind of nonsense we hear from both the Wild Rose and the Progressive Conservatives. It is driven by the idea that Alberta needs to be a low tax economy so as to be competitive with other jurisdictions. This would be fine if we