From: jmorriso@ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison)
Subject: Re: Tories blame Liberals for economy
Organization: University of BC, Electrical Engineering
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 07:23:46 GMT

In article <5183@disuns2.epfl.ch> riese@litsun.epfl.ch (Marc Riese) writes:
>
>Radio Canada showed a clip of a Tory money raising dinner held in
>Toronto Thursday (or Wednesday). While addressing the audience,
>Mulroney made some claim to the effect that the majority of the blame
>for Canada's current economic mess should go to the Liberal party.

It's true that the Liberals got us hooked on this debt-deficit spending
addiction. The Conservatives attacked this, but now seem just as seduced
by spending, and are just as hooked. One would have though they would
have had more resolve. 

You have to wonder whether there would have been public revolt if they HAD
attacked the debt and deficit. You can't change it unless you want to, and
that appliess to the government and the public. The government has no 
willpower to do what's right, and it doesn't look like the general public
does. Just look at Ontario: $10 billion, Quebec: $4 billion, BC: $2 billion
(very high for this frugal province).

Blame it on the recession? bullshit! Canada has had excellent growth, and
the Tories did little to eliminate the deficit, and the root causes of
deficits during the fat years, and it's very difficult to try and cut
deficits during the lean years affecting parts of Canada.

Canadian governments and citizens have a bad drug habit (deficit spending)
and it's going to take drastic action to kick this habit. I happen to think
cold-turkey (or as close as possible) is the best solution, because this
deficit spending is a psychological HABIT: it is a lack of willpower to
make tough decisions, and nobody seems to have any of that. Face it,
the cupboard is bare, we can justify borrowing money to invest in
long term needs that will pay themselves back, we can NOT run up
the credit cards to pay for things which will not pay themselves back.
It's like using visa to pay for rent and groceries: you can't do it
for long before they throw you in debtor's prison.

Dragging out the deficit reduction will just help sidetrack the issue,
and let every special interest and political group with a handful of
marginally useful jobs to protect grab their piece of the pie. ENough
is enough. We have real industries and real people who need to be
protected from these policies that will ruin the economy (with high
interest rates that borrowing creates, inflation etc.)

About all we can pray for is a short term bounce in the economy caused
by the bottoming out dollar. Whether we get clobbered by massive inflation
remains to be seen. We can
either use this growth to deleverage and get out of the debt trap, or
we can just go on business as usual (and then we'll be in for worse).
>
>In the very same edition, the CBC showed that the Tories have yet
>again managed to have a budget deficit above $30 billion, and that
>this year it is more than $3 billion worse than planned.
>What irks me is that despite the record of the Progressive Conservative
>party, some people still believe that they are particularly good at managing
>the economy. One begins to think that a ten year-old could do better.
>
>Who will pay for this irresponsability?
>Voter should not accept this.

We shouldn't ask who can do the best job, rather, who can do the least harm.
Given current idiots in Ottawa, the PCs appear to be the least stupid
economically, when you consider what the others would have done.

Now if we consider the non-traditional parties, perhaps we can argue about
who can do better.

>
>Marc Riese
>Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
>Suisse


-- 
__________________________________________________________________________
 John Paul Morrison                     |  
 University of British Columbia, Canada |  
 Electrical Engineering                 |   .sig file without a cause
 jmorriso@ee.ubc.ca              VE7JPM |  
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Newsgroups: can.politics,soc.culture.canada