EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Friday, December 02, 2005

Typical Election Hand-outs

In the past couple of weeks the Liberals have made tonnes of promises and financial commitments in an attempt to shore up their minority gubmnt and perhaps retake a majority in the next election.

What bugs me about these promises and commitments is that they tend to become entitlements for all time, making it even more difficult to pare down the size of the gubmnt in the future. They also distort people's incentives, making more of us more reliant on the gubmnt, regardless of whether we think such reliance is a good idea in the long run.

Erin Airton makes another point about all these election promises. If these issues were so friggin' important, why didn't the Liberals deal with them during their previous twelve years of power?
It’s bad enough that the Liberal Party stole tax dollars to finance their political operations, but this flood of cynical, win at any cost, spending only hurts the political process in Canada.

Now, your Liberal friends and neighbours will tell you that all of this spending is important, and deals with issues of critical importance to our nation.

If that’s the case, why are the Liberals jamming it into a one week period right before their government collapses under its own corrupt weight?

Surely issues of this magnitude should have been dealt with sometime in the last, say, 12 years of majority Liberal government. To leave it to the dying days of this minority regime only serves to insult those Canadians who actually care about the military, the condition of Canadian First Nations and those who owe their livelihoods to the softwood industry.

Let’s not forget the Liberals have been in government since 1993.
 
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