Lose your job yet?  Keep voting Liberal

Dalton McGuinty’s fiscal policies appear to be designed to bring Ontario’s GDP on par with that of Burkina Faso. His finance minister, Dwight Duncan (Donuts) unveiled the province’s budget last week to great fanfare from the Left and dismay from everyone else, including federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who had urged the McGuintyites to cut corporate taxes.

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This is one of those truisms that Liberals seem to have a tough time with. If you want businesses to invest in the province, then you must create a climate that is friendly toward investors, meaning that they should be able to keep a larger portion of their profits. But despite being urged by economists and business leaders to cut corporate taxes, the Liberals decided they couldn’t afford to do so. “Who’s going to pay for that $5 billion in tax cuts we would be giving to corporations,” the Liberals ask, “When already close to 75% of the entire provincial budget goes to healthcare and education?” That’s a good question, given that throwing all that money at the health and education sectors have yielded mediocre results at best. But an even better question would be, “What happens when the Ontario manufacturing sector collapses completely and unemployment climbs up into double digits?” Maybe Mr. Duncan believes that all those workers getting paid from the Employment Insurance Fund would be a new way to transfer money from the feds to the province. One thing for sure, if that does happen, there are going to be large numbers of Ontario voters who will be really peeoed at the Ontario Liberals. History has shown that massive tax cuts actually increase government revenue as the increased economic activity caused by those tax cuts translates into more people working, hence more income tax revenue and more people shopping, which translates into more sales tax revenue. John F. Kennedy proved that back in the 1960s, as did Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Instead of cutting business some slack and encouraging new investment, McGuinty and his band of stalwarts have decided it’s much more important to dole out the remainder of the nearly $100 billion budget that isn’t gobbled up by health and education in dribs and drabs to low income families. You see that makes for good optics among marginal families and translates into future votes. Rather than give a $5 billion tax break to investors in Ontario’s economy, which would create thousands of new jobs, the Liberals would rather dish that dough out to low-income families, thus creating a whole lot more low-income families in the process. So as a result low income families will be getting a tax credit of $250 per child per year, they’ll get a $100/month housing allowance to help pay their rent while those on social assistance will get a 2% increase in benefits. (Yet politicians can vote themselves a 25% raise at will). The province will also increase the minimum wage by 75 cents per hour, plant more trees, let seniors take more tax-free money out of locked in retirement funds yada yada yada. What the adipose Duncan donut has given the province of Ontario is a poverty budget, predicated on the recognition that the economy is getting worse and more people will join the ranks of those considered “low-income”, yet unwilling or unable to do anything about it. But, hey, those silly Ontarians just keep on voting Liberal. Serves them right.