OTTAWA -- After all those billions of dollars of head-spinning election promises (frankly, we lost track), the Conservatives present their first federal budget today, detailing exactly how they plan to put our money where their mouths are.
Listening to all the political hype and hoopla over the past few months, ordinary Canadians might be excused for thinking that Stephen Harper is about to radically rewrite the way the feds will spend almost $200 billion of our money this year.
Maybe next time. Truth is, short of blowing up entire departments and programs (and that's not likely in a minority parliament) even the most grandiose of Conservative measures expected in today's budget -- for example, the 1% reduction in the GST -- won't make more than a relative dent in overall government spending.
For instance, the largest single expense for taxpayers is interest on the national debt. That works out to your paying $170 on each $1,000 of taxes pulled from your paycheques and family pocketbook.
(Put another way, if you are paying $10,000 a year in income taxes, GST and other federal levies, you will be paying $1,700 of that just in interest on the debt.)
By contrast, even Harper's rich plan to give families with pre-school children $1,200 a year per tot isn't such a crushing expense in the overall scheme of things, costing each taxpayer about $22 per $1,000 of taxes paid.
Here are some of the government's other big-ticket items, most of which won't likely change in any huge way from last year's Liberal budget to the one being presented today by the Conservatives. Again, the amounts shown are what you will pay from each $1,000 of your tax bill. (Warning: Some nausea may occur.)
- The second-largest spending item in the federal budget is old age pensions and support for poor seniors: $140.
- Federal departments and agencies such as Justice (home of the infamous money-eating gun registry); Public Works (home of AdScam), Human Resources Development (home of the billion-dollar boondoggle) and Industry (home of the great technology partnership swindles): $115.
- Employment Insurance payments (not premiums), including job-training programs and various parental and compassionate leave schemes: $75.
- Direct transfers of federal cash to the provinces for spending on health care: $75.
- National Defence: $70.
- Equalization payments intended to spread the national wealth around from richer provinces to the so-called have-not provinces and territories: $65.
- Payments under the Canada Child Tax Benefit and the GST credit, both for lower-income families: $60.
- Various forms of federal support for aboriginals: $45.
- Transfers to the provinces for post-secondary education, social assistance and other related programs: $40.
- Miscellaneous giveaways to the provinces for things such as reducing medical wait times, and Paul Martin's special equalization deal for Newfoundland: $30.
- National safety and security, including the costs of running the RCMP, the federal prison system, and policing international borders: $25.
- The cost of the Canada Revenue Agency squeezing hard-working folk for all the money to pay for all of the above: $20.
- Foreign aid and other international assistance: $18.
- Federal handouts to Bombardier (every year guaranteed) and other corporate welfare programs, including regional dole schemes: $18.
- All spending on Parliament, including salaries for MPs, senators and staff, to oversee the public purse on behalf of beleaguered taxpayers: $2.38.
As always, you get what you pay for.
By GREG WESTON
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2 comments:
Hey I can cut and paste too!
Robert Sheppard
"...This Stephen Harper government can't seem to shovel the money out the door fast enough – as Flaherty said, with 29 separate tax reductions in every area that the government collects revenue.
Most governments might want to keep a little back for a rainy day. This one either believes the good times are going to go on for a while yet, or it is envisioning a much, much smaller role for itself in the years ahead.
The pace with which the Harper government is getting rid of all its wealth is quite staggering.
Consider that between November and now, just a scant five months, Ottawa's projected underlying surplus for this fiscal year and next jumped from $27.8 billion to $37.2 billion, according to budget documents.
But now, with all the tax cuts and new spending priorities in place, the feds will be showing a modest surplus of only $600 million this year, and just a bit more next.
What this means of course is that there is not going to be anything left over to finance all the things that haven't been explicitly budgeted. These would appear to include the Arctic port and icebreaker that were part of the Tories' election promises, all the new jails that will be needed for the get-tough-on-crime plans (though Flaherty said he would be looking into that), and even anything big on the fiscal imbalance front.
Emptying the cupboard also means there is nothing left for any new social programs like Pharmacare, which a working group of provincial ministers is supposed to be reporting back on by the summer. Nor will there be any money for those who are hoping the government may yet be convinced to keep a national day-care program going, like Quebec's, even as it doles out $100 a month to parents of young children.
All these good things of course may yet come to pass, in the fullness of time so to speak. The thing is, we really don't have more than a short handle on what the Tories' real plans might be.
For all his sniping at Liberal mismanagement, Flaherty decided to swipe one of Paul Martin's more annoying habits and limit his fiscal projections to a two-year horizon. So there is not even an easy way of comparing the Conservatives' long-range plans to what the Liberals were putting forward in November.
When he was deficit fighting in the mid-1990s, Martin limited his projections to no more than two years out. But his finance minister changed that in November to a five-year horizon, probably because the Liberals wanted to keep a tight grip on immediate spending while promising the moon down the road.
The upshot, however, was to force the Conservatives to acknowledge during the election campaign that they would have to cut somewhere in the neighbourhood of $22.5 billion in spending over these next five years to afford all the tax breaks and other spending plans they were promising (an impressive $75 billion worth over five years).
Well, now we've seen the tax breaks and most of the promised spending plans. But program cuts are being limited to a fairly modest $1 billion a year for this year and next, which doesn't seem nearly enough.
Of course, by two years from now an election will likely have intervened and we will be doing this exercise all over again with a different set of priorities, and intentions. And maybe that is all this budget is really about."
PS GO FLAMES GO!!!!!
Yeah, everybody's saying this tory budget is more like a liberal budget. Where there's something for everyone and spending is increased significantly.
It's kinda like the two teams have switched sides, kinda. The tories aren't being very fiscally conservative. Where aS THE LIBERALS ARE ASKING TO BE MORe FiSCALLY CONSERVATIVE. oops caps lock.
It's weird.
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