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Monday 28 March 2011
Remember the concern about Harper's Hidden Agenda that has kept Canadians in three elections from giving Harper a majority in Parliament?
Well, It's back!
And with a vengeance, because it is true.
"Abuse of Fiscal Capacity". Remember those words. Abuse of Fiscal Capacity.
They will be heard again and again in this campaign, because they are at the heart of the ferocious Liberal attack on Stephen Harper's mismanagement of Canada's economy.
His Coalition is Evil theme has exploded in his face, with reporters pushing each other to ask him questions about his own attempts to grab power in 2004 even though his Tory party gained 38% fewer seats than Martin's Liberals did (Harper was one of the Losers in that election, according to his own definition).
And his second theme – that he is the best person to manage Canada's economy - is starting to wobble alarmingly, because the Liberals are attacking this Big Lie head on.
And they are doing it by giving the facts about yet another Harper abuse – this time it's Harper's Abuse of our Fiscal Capacity.
Here's Harper's Old Mother Hubbard 2.0 fiscal policy in a nutshell:
It's all about reducing the government's capacity to take care of it's citizens. If they can spend the cupboard bare, they can use that as an excuse to cut programs.
"Starving the beast" is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to create or increase existing budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government...
A well-known proponent of the strategy is activist Grover Norquist who famously said "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Ralph Goodale fingered the Harper Abuse of Fiscal Capacity policy when he explained why the Liberals were opposed to the Harper budget:
Goodale said the Liberal Opposition drew its line in the sand with the Harper government's plans to spend billions of dollars on jets, jails and corporate tax cuts."The budget is premised on a $65-billion or $70-billion black hole and that consists of $30 million for the jets, somewhere around $10 billion or $15 billion for the jails and, over five years, a total of $30 billion for the extra tax cuts."Goodale, a former finance minister, said spending "totally absorbs every ounce of fiscal capacity that the government of Canada has and there is no explanation in this budget of how they're going to fill that hole."
We can see that Harper's Old Mother Hubbard 2.0 policy has even hurt his ability to try and buy votes from mini-segments of Canadian voters. Take his very first policy announcement this morning, targeted at working parents.
It fizzled, like a damp squib, and has gone out in an embarrassingly short time.
Stephen Harper is kicking off the 2011 campaign battle for the middle class vote with a $2.5-billion tax break pledge aimed at parents of children under 18.But there's a huge catch to this: It wouldn't take effect until the deficit is eliminated – a date that could be four years in the future.
Michael Ignatieff jumped on the Harper proposal and knocked it out of the park:
“It’s like you come to a family and say, ‘I’ve got good news. First, I’m going to cut taxes for the biggest and most profitable corporations in the country and then maybe in five years, if you take a ticket and you’re patient and you vote for us a couple of times, and we’ll do something really great for you,’” Mr. Ignatieff said in Toronto.“Is that credible? It’s just not credible.”
Poor Old Mother Hubbard's starving dog, if Harper forms the next government.
Poor us, then, too.
Why don't we just have Canadian policies, made in Canada, for Canadians, for a change?
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