Dire Straits Politics
That would be a reference to the band, rather than a ridiculously portentious title.
Jay, replying to my musings on the proposed new Alberta health care system with far more detail than I initially provided, points out that in the end we need more money for public services before all of the other good reforms we should enact (he mentions a few of them) will amount to anything. He makes the entirely correct point that if we don't pay for things publicly, we have to let people pay for things themselves if they have the cash. It's as just an outcome as you're going to get.
I recently filed my taxes. For the first time in my life, the government will be keeping some of the money that I earned with the sweat of my...uh...well, I didn't really sweat for it. As I was doing the arithmetic that the return entailed, I thought that tax time is sort of a necessary check on my left-wing utopianism-the social democrat's Good Friday.
All of which is a convoluted way of saying that I don't mind paying taxes. I don't look at a paycheck and see the money in the "taxes deducted" column as some sort of theft. But if you listen to public discourse here or especially in the States, there's a widespread belief that we're all groaning under the burden of sky-high taxes. Politicians from all parties (even the NDP, for God's sake) offer tax breaks of one kind or another and nobody proposes raising taxes. Down south, where they have, of course, a deficit of mind-blowing proportions, the consequences of said mind-blowing deficit is always pitched by gentlemen wearing metaphorical green eyeshades as being gigantic cuts to social programmes. No one talks about fixing the problem on the revenue, rather than the expenditure side of the imbalance.
Or take the much vaunted "fiscal imbalance" here in Canada. Provinces complain-rightly-that they don't have the money to perform the services they're required to. But almost no one proposes raising provincial tax rates as a solution. And when they do, as Dalton McGuinty did, they get hammered for it.
Organizations like the Canadian Taxpayers Foundation and the like always talk about how government programmes "are paid for by taxpayers," in a tone that casts the unfortunate taxpayer as the long-suffering martyr of the national drama, beset by a plague of bureaucrats, wasters and layabouts, watching their money being frivolously misspent. Conservatives talk about the new government "restoring" the "freedom to earn." Everywhere, we hear that we are overtaxed.
And then we hear that the public supports things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, universal public primary and secondary education, financially accessible universities and colleges, a stronger military, more foreign aid and on and on and on. The real anti-tax activists don't want all of these things, to give them their due. But the mass of people do in fact want to have their health care for nothing and their chicks for free. And I'm not sure this is going to change unless some charismatic politician or politicians go out and actively make the case for higher taxes.
The whole thing does not speak terribly highly of democratic electorates and their collective maturity. "I've got mine-go get yours" is a social ethos that I think most people rightly reject. The trouble is that they also reject the only other sustainable social model, which is the far less cool "everybody pitches in" model. Instead, we either have the "put everything on the credit card model" they use in the States, or the completely half-assed approach to health-care finance we use here.
"Money For Nothing" is one of my favourite songs. But it's a bad, bad way to run public programmes.
Jay, replying to my musings on the proposed new Alberta health care system with far more detail than I initially provided, points out that in the end we need more money for public services before all of the other good reforms we should enact (he mentions a few of them) will amount to anything. He makes the entirely correct point that if we don't pay for things publicly, we have to let people pay for things themselves if they have the cash. It's as just an outcome as you're going to get.
I recently filed my taxes. For the first time in my life, the government will be keeping some of the money that I earned with the sweat of my...uh...well, I didn't really sweat for it. As I was doing the arithmetic that the return entailed, I thought that tax time is sort of a necessary check on my left-wing utopianism-the social democrat's Good Friday.
All of which is a convoluted way of saying that I don't mind paying taxes. I don't look at a paycheck and see the money in the "taxes deducted" column as some sort of theft. But if you listen to public discourse here or especially in the States, there's a widespread belief that we're all groaning under the burden of sky-high taxes. Politicians from all parties (even the NDP, for God's sake) offer tax breaks of one kind or another and nobody proposes raising taxes. Down south, where they have, of course, a deficit of mind-blowing proportions, the consequences of said mind-blowing deficit is always pitched by gentlemen wearing metaphorical green eyeshades as being gigantic cuts to social programmes. No one talks about fixing the problem on the revenue, rather than the expenditure side of the imbalance.
Or take the much vaunted "fiscal imbalance" here in Canada. Provinces complain-rightly-that they don't have the money to perform the services they're required to. But almost no one proposes raising provincial tax rates as a solution. And when they do, as Dalton McGuinty did, they get hammered for it.
Organizations like the Canadian Taxpayers Foundation and the like always talk about how government programmes "are paid for by taxpayers," in a tone that casts the unfortunate taxpayer as the long-suffering martyr of the national drama, beset by a plague of bureaucrats, wasters and layabouts, watching their money being frivolously misspent. Conservatives talk about the new government "restoring" the "freedom to earn." Everywhere, we hear that we are overtaxed.
And then we hear that the public supports things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, universal public primary and secondary education, financially accessible universities and colleges, a stronger military, more foreign aid and on and on and on. The real anti-tax activists don't want all of these things, to give them their due. But the mass of people do in fact want to have their health care for nothing and their chicks for free. And I'm not sure this is going to change unless some charismatic politician or politicians go out and actively make the case for higher taxes.
The whole thing does not speak terribly highly of democratic electorates and their collective maturity. "I've got mine-go get yours" is a social ethos that I think most people rightly reject. The trouble is that they also reject the only other sustainable social model, which is the far less cool "everybody pitches in" model. Instead, we either have the "put everything on the credit card model" they use in the States, or the completely half-assed approach to health-care finance we use here.
"Money For Nothing" is one of my favourite songs. But it's a bad, bad way to run public programmes.
posted by Ian Gray | 10:01 p.m.
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