Budget Thoughts (II)

After yesterday's media sampling, I've been reading the forums at the Globe, the Star, and CBC.ca to get an inkling of what average Canadians thought of the budget.
Not that I needed to. I could have told you the whining would be deafening. Still, the shrill, high-pitched scream ("MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!") eventually caused me to bolt away in horror.
I'm a single man in my fifties. Where's my tax break?
I walk to work and support the environment by caring for my pets. Perhaps I should get a tax break.
Quebec cries, Ottawa shovels. (Oh, yeah, and where's my tax break?)
Why I am supporting other people's kids?
These are all comments I saw. If the four or five hundred responses I read are representative, this has got to be the most selfish, uncaring, entitled country on the face of the earth.
Harper scattered his tax breaks around, but most of them were loosely targeted at suburbanites with children: the same group he courted last year. In CPC terminology, they're Tim Horton's people, not Starbucks people. They, or rather their children, are also the future of the country, such as it is: unless our birthrate jumps dramatically, Canada will look increasingly different in coming decades. (Google "world demographics" if you don't believe me.)
We don't have kids. It was not our decision. But we have no problem subsidizing the future of the country. I for one can't understand the mindset of people who do: it's like they have a deathwish, or something.
Yes, we'd all like a tax break. These days, I'm happy when my taxes don't go up. But I don't hold with the idea that reducing everybody's taxes by some huge amount will have any positive consequence. It would drive the economy. Yeah, the economy seems to be driving itself pretty well right now, and besides, there's more to life than accumulating a bunch of crap. And tax cuts cost money. What services do you want to see cut? If you're anything like the Canadians whose comments I've been perusing, you want to see MORE services. Universal childcare--so you can be relieved of the burden of raising those kids you inflicted upon yourself. Free, of course. More money to health care...hell, why not just put all the money in health care? Free tuition. Hey, as a university dropout disgusted with the high cost of education, I like this one...on the surface. But we should maybe pay professors something, not to mention the costs of running our institutions of higher learning. You get what you pay for.

The more environmentally-minded people seem to want greenhouse gasses cut dramatically, which would have the first order effect of putting most of us on welfare. Quick question for the Suzuki school among us: what do you propose would run our post-industrial society? I've yet to see so much as a single factory that runs on solar or wind, or gamma rays, or whatever other imaginary panacea is de rigueur of late...let alone a whole industrial park. And there's a big difference between reducing consumption (which I'm all for) and eliminating it. As Spider Robinson once said, there's a word for things that don't consume. That word is dead.

As for Quebec, hey, rail against it all you want. I do too. But it's how politics works in this country. It didn't take long for the Bloc-heads to announce that all that "fiscal imbalance" money Harper threw it would go to funding programs in an independent Quebec. Until a Canadian PM has the cojones to force the Bloc out of Parliament (easily done, too: all it would require would be a rule that poltical parties must run a candidate in every riding, coast to coast), we're stuck with this model. Besides, what Quebec does isn't any different than what Ontario does. Or Newfoundland. Or British Columbia. Every one of those provincial governments looks to the feds to bail them out. Every one of the cities in every one of our provinces looks to the provinces and the feds to bail them out. It has always been thus, and always will be, until we do something really sensible and abolish the provincial governments.

No, I am not an enthusiastic supporter of this budget. But neither am I a knee-jerk dissenter. The Harper/Flaherty budget is nothing if not pragmatic. Could there have been other priorities? Of course. But no matter what they were, they wouldn't have reduced the bitching one iota.

The lifelong Canadian search for the Free Lunch continues...