No, unfunded spending isn’t future austerity. It could be in some cases, but it rarely is. In fact unfunded spending could mean future prosperity. For example building high speed rail or doing R&D for vaccines. We should spend the money for both today as both produce much more in the future than what’s spent. Austerity is usually ideologically driven, not by necessity. We’ve understood this since the Great Depression and we’ve battle tested the Keynes approach. The austerity periodically practiced since the 70s-80s required convincing a lot of people to believe in the free market fundamentalism preached by neoliberalism. It’s time to relearn what we knew before that.
We need to tax the rich, not to fund our government, but to decrease the drastic power they have over our economy, the state and our lives.
Our per capita GDP is basically unchanged since Liberals took over, as the US did very well. So clearly we didn’t build infrastructure with the money which is my problem with the Liberals.
100%. However Carney has come out and said in clear terms this is going to change in concrete ways. Also I liked something he mentioned in a presser the other day - they’ll be getting rid of external consultants and contractors (often large companies) as well as looking at procurement. I read this as curbing public money from going into the Accentures of the world as well as reducing how much we pay service providers like Azure. I suspect curbing dollars going to US companies would also be a priority.
No, unfunded spending isn’t future austerity. It could be in some cases, but it rarely is. In fact unfunded spending could mean future prosperity. For example building high speed rail or doing R&D for vaccines. We should spend the money for both today as both produce much more in the future than what’s spent. Austerity is usually ideologically driven, not by necessity. We’ve understood this since the Great Depression and we’ve battle tested the Keynes approach. The austerity periodically practiced since the 70s-80s required convincing a lot of people to believe in the free market fundamentalism preached by neoliberalism. It’s time to relearn what we knew before that.
We need to tax the rich, not to fund our government, but to decrease the drastic power they have over our economy, the state and our lives.
Our per capita GDP is basically unchanged since Liberals took over, as the US did very well. So clearly we didn’t build infrastructure with the money which is my problem with the Liberals.
100%. However Carney has come out and said in clear terms this is going to change in concrete ways. Also I liked something he mentioned in a presser the other day - they’ll be getting rid of external consultants and contractors (often large companies) as well as looking at procurement. I read this as curbing public money from going into the Accentures of the world as well as reducing how much we pay service providers like Azure. I suspect curbing dollars going to US companies would also be a priority.