All Your Fiscal Stimulus Belong to Me!
Dear Mr. Flaherty – Please send me $20 billion dollars. I have a lot of really good business ideas I would like to pursue with this money, and none of them involve building cars that nobody wants to buy.
Seriously, though, it seems we are about to embark on a “fiscal stimulus” here in Canada. This after scrimping and saving for decades to balance our budget and pay down our debt. Sigh.
As somebody who became a Conservative because of deficits that drove the country to the brink of bankruptcy, the prospect of having a “Conservative” government run a deficit irks me a wee bit. But lets face it, the economic problems that we’re experiencing are not the fault of the Conservative government, and some action is going to be necessary.
If these budget deficits are “temporary” and not a return to “structural, budgeted deficits”, I suppose I can bite my tongue. (I suggest we repay these in fiscal 2011-2012 by selling the CBC, the CMHC, Canada Post, Purolator and AECL. Hey, I can dream!)
But I ask – Instead of sending cash to backward automobile manufacturers with their crappy gas-guzzling cars, power-crazed union bosses, inept management, and unsustainable wages, why not send the money to me!?
All the talk about auto bailouts has other corporate welfare candidates salivating at the possibility of being “bailed out” now, too, since their underlying business sucked before (but suck especially bad now that the economy is in the tank), like the forestry industry, and the ever-teetering “wooden arrows for children” industry.
Let me guess – we are going to attempt to pitch this auto bailout as an “investment” in the “future”? Back the sugar truck up, because this medicine isn’t going down easily.
We might as well dig a hole in the tundra and drive a gold-filled armoured car into it. I suspect the “investment” effect would be the same in the short-term (although in the long term, somebody would dig the armoured car out of the hole, making the gold-filled tundra hole a far better “investment” for the “future”).
I have a small business (and not in forestry or auto manufacturing). Where the hell is my cash?
For that matter, my family is certainly willing and able to spend some money “for the sake of the economy”, if asked politely.
And maybe that’s what Canada should do … send a $600 cheque to every man, woman, child (*and other) in Canada ($20,000,000,000 / 33,390,000 = $598.98).
I can buy an awful lot of beer and popcorn with that kind of cash! Or I could use it towards a down-payment on a quality automobile – like a Nissan Altima or a Honda Accord.
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