Budget blahs and Interac insults

Stephen Harper's first budget underwhelmed me.
Sure, he kept most of his promises--excepting the one about cutting the GST off fuel. But the more I look at the numbers, the less they really mean.
There are some good measures here. The tax credit for a transit pass is smart. So is making scholarships and bursaries non-taxable and instituting a tax credit for textbooks. And money for our military is always welcome, especially since we're fully engaged in Afghanistan.
The consensus at my work is that Harper's much-ballyhooed $100/month for each child under six is a joke. We didn't have that when I was growing up, one woman said with what I at first thought was envy. Turns out it wasn't: when I was a kid, we didn't expect help from the government. We made our own help. We sacrificed. And what are they going to have to cut to get the money for this? This won't even pay a babysitter for two days.
Fair enough. I'm very much against the Liberal/NDP vision of a national child care system--as far as I'm concerned, anyone putting their kids in the care of the same folks who "manage" our health-care system might as well be charged with neglect--but I understand that $100/month is a pittance.
Trouble is, as a taxpayer without kids of my own, it's about as much pittance as I'm willing to fund. Because my colleague is right. Parents should be sacrificing. If they wanted the yearly vacation and the new car every four years, perhaps they shouldn't have had kids.
The 1% (eventually to be 2%) cut in the GST is, likewise, pretty paltry. I was fully expecting to see the Liberals' income tax cuts preserved. Some of them were, granted, but not enough of them in my view. Flaherty made a big deal of saying that many Canadian families pay over half their income to the taxman. That hasn't changed overmuch.
I'll reiterate: I don't mind paying taxes. High taxes, even. As long as I'm getting value for money. To my way of thinking, the government has done very little to earn half my paycheque.
I'm reserving judgment, too, on Harper's environmental mesaures, at least until I see what they will be. It's blasphemy to a subset of our population, but I maintain Harper was absolutely correct to axe our Kyoto Accord funding. Everything I have read has suggested it would be flat-out impossible to meet our obligations--and even if we did, the net positive change to our environment would be negligable. So we'll see what Harper replaces it with. Some concrete measures to reduce air and water pollution, as well as incentives to citizens and industries geared towards greater efficiency and conservation...these would be most welcome.
Another group whining that they didn't get enough money is the Native Canadian lobby. And--sorry for the political incorrectness--I say tough titty. If you divide the billions of dollars spent on this particular group of people by the number of people in this particular group, you get a number per capita that is much higher than my family's combined gross income. So find the efficiencies.
If Harper goes on to address the so-called "fiscal imbalance" in some meaningful way--as Gilles Duceppe is betting he will--my opinion of this Conservative government will rise dramatically. Because this will mean gutting the federal government--and it is my firm belief that we could cut the number of government employees by at least one third without anybody noticing.

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The debit lines were down for much of the day today. Not in our store alone: a wide area was affected. This provided countless opportunities to watch human stupidity and bitchery in action.
Despite announcements every ten minutes or so ("Attention Customers: our debit machines are currently down. We can accept cash, Visa, or MasterCard. Sorry for the inconvenience"), dozens of people tried to present debit cards to pay for their purchases, as if somehow their cards would work. When informed that debit was not an option, many people got cranky.

Well, I have to pay by debit. It's all I have.
Sorry, ma'am, but there is an ATM right over there, and it's working.
I won't use that. You say on the sign out there you take debit: take my debit.
Ma'am, the system is down over a wide area. We don't know why, and we don't know when it will be back up.
You broke it, didn't you. I'm never shopping here again.

You have to laugh at these people. It's either that or scream. Yes, we broke it. On purpose. For two reasons, really. One, we wanted to lose about 70% of our sales. (More then 20% of our sales are by credit card now; less than 10% are cash.) But really, the biggest reason we broke the debit system in these four square blocks was just to inconvenience you. Personally.

It's scary, when you think about it. Canadian society is so utterly dependent on a system of machines that their absence, even for a few hours, provokes mass hostility. Imagine what would happen if the whole system crashed for a week.