Canadians to pay for governments' pandemic overspending with their tax dollars: report
Canadians to pay for governments' pandemic overspending with their tax dollars: report
C.D. Howe says lack of transparency in budget process left governments unaccountable for spending decisions during the pandemic. Read on.
I'm pretty sure most people are aware governments use tax dollars to pay for things.
"Future historians of public finances in Canada will see from a glance … that something remarkable happened in the 2020/21 fiscal year,” the report notes.
Yeah that'd be a global pandemic the likes of which have never been seen before. Brilliant report.
What? Do you expect some other country to pay?
I'd expect corporations that had big windfall profits from the pandemic to pay.
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Where in it did they say we were fucked? I haven't read it yet but I'm guessing that's not in there. 1% higher taxes or whatever isn't great but it's more than worth it. Especially if you're in a lower bracket and don't see much or any of that anyway.
Edit: It doesn't say anything about future costs from a skim of the paper, or even say the expenditure was too much. They mostly focus on how governments presented what they were doing, which in their opinion was skewed.
I find it weird that these academics wrote (with the text equivalent of a straight face) that politicians shouldn't dissemble and spin things, when that's basically their entire job, but whatever.
I thought we were talking finance, not global warming.
Try to keep up.
Why would you expect that? If I've learned anything, it's that nobody has ever paid more than lip service to the effects on future generations. Pollution, overfishing, everything we do is for ourselves.
I'm shocked -- shocked, I say -- to hear that the National Post thinks the government shouldn't help people. Obviously the only thing it should spend money on is corporate subsidies.
Oh my god who cares
People who are very concerned about paying an extra 10,000 CAD on their 1,000,000 CAD income.
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Lmao yes because investing in a population during a global pandemic is lighting money on fire.
I enjoy surviving an international pandemic. That’s not free.
Anarchy is super edgy in homeroom, but was obsolete the first moment humankind banded together for safety and specialization.
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Good bot. It caught all the valuable stuff.
I dislike the FP and CD Howe Institute as much as the next Lemmite, but the press release, as presented, is a cry for accountability:
Estimates of revenue and spending are consistently incorrect, Robson said. “What we’ve seen over the past 20 years is that there’s very consistent under-projection of revenue and under-projection of spending … So there’s something wrong with the way governments are presenting the numbers there.”
And what should be done?
Much of the blame lies with elected members of Parliament. “I think part of the problem (was) that you didn’t have enough MPs standing up and saying, wait a minute, like you’re totally sidelining Parliament,” Robson said.
MPs raising legit questions about government policy and spending? Sounds good to me.
The federal revenue projections are based on an average of economic projections from the private sector.
This should have been noted in the article.
Finance Canada stopped relying on its own internal modeling for economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s when the Mulroney government ran up huge deficits based on overly bullish estimates for economic growth. As a reaction/response, a protocol was established in the mid nineties for using a basket of private sector forecasts, mainly from the major banks, the Conference Board, and one major university. Statistics Canada’s forecasts used to be kept in the basket, but it doesn’t even look like their estimates are in their now.
This then begs the question, how is it that the private sector estimates of economic growth, that are the fundamental driver for tax revenue, so consistently off?
Why isn’t the CD Howe Institute posing that question?
Or if it’s a problem with Finance Canada’s tax model that crunches out the estimate of how much tax revenue will be gained for how much growth, then CD Howe should look a bit more deeply to be able to show that. Are there specific sectors that are consistently being under forecast for a specific level of growth?
Those are questions for the CD Howe Institute.
Everything you say may be true, but the article/press release also complains to provincial government budgets, nonstandard accounting between levels of government, inconsistent delivery of budgets (not just due to the pandemic, if I'm reading it right), and, most importantly, MPs and MPPs giving budgets a pass.