A Billion Dollars A Month

Another run at Premier Ford and the Conservatives here...I'd rather tackle issues than politicians, but when a stern rebuke is needed, well, here it comes.

To be fair, Premier Doug did inherit one massive mess from the Liberal Party versions of Premiers Wynne and McGuinty, but he did campaign on a fairly typical Conservative promise to balance the budget...

...which he broke, electing to add five billion dollars more while we still owe hundreds of millions.

An astonishing figure here; over the last five years, Ontario has spent - donated to banks - more than sixty billion dollars in interest alone. A billion dollars a month!

If that doesn't make you mad, I have to ask why. What would you spend a billion dollars a month on? Solving homelessness? The next great green car, produced right here and owned wholly by Canadians? Thousands more nurses and teachers?

Why on Earth, with the economy recovering, could it not wait a year? Ah, right; Premier Doug thinks he can run and win - ergo more time in power - against Donald Trump.

More on him - sigh - in a minute.

Economies are complicated animals, but most Ontarians not only understand compound interest, they also clearly understand not living beyond your means; sometimes, like coming out of COVID, you just can't afford everything you want.

First...politicians who lecture their constituents generally have pretty short careers,but this needs to be said. Yes, I'm going to chastise you for a bit, my fellow Canadians.

Let's talk Trump. (Must we? I'd really rather talk about Canadian solutions that we can actually control...)

Like it or not, we depend on our next-door neighbour for a big chunk of our livelihood. For example, at any point in time, President Trump could decide that he felt like ensuring that the automotive giants "want" to move their plants just across the border. Let's not pretend that wouldn't absolutely devastate our economy.

I don't pretend to like President Trump. I sure wouldn't want my daughter to work in the White House, so I get it; he's pretty thoroughly unlikeable, and we can't just cave in just because he's the biggest kid on the block. (He is. To protect Canada, we must recognize reality, and a Trump-led White House is doing anything it feels like right now.)

But do not mistake that for me believing that we're right to antagonize him. Indeed, to be constantly dancing around giving the middle finger to our biggest trading partner is a really, really bad idea. Instead of nonsense like pulling U.S. alcohol (that we already paid them for), I would have called the White House and nicely asked for a time out until after the federal election.

Back to the economy. How would I reshape ours?

We need to refresh our government's minds on what exactly an economy is.

It's not the presence of money; an economy is the movement - spending - of that money.

People who feel secure spend money, and the only time a government can get tax revenue is when money is being freely spent.

When governments get less money, they demonstrate their lack of financial understanding by raising taxes - by trying to squeeze even more money out of our stones.

That's completely backwards.

Governments of the world are far too slowly but finally starting to recognize that you get more actual revenue - more money coming in - when you tax people less.

Imagine that I go out and spend a dollar at Sol's Grocery Store. If Sol keeps that buck, it only helps Sol - and only gets taxed once...but when Sol sends that dollar to Bill and Sheila's Wholesale in Leamington to buy more inventory, Bill & Sheila then buy a new truck from Rose City Ford, who pays Jim and Rafael and the rest of their staff, who then go and buy groceries from Sol...

That buck has now passed through four different sets of hands and circled all the way back, getting taxed each step along the way...but if Sol or Jim or Rafael think, "whoa, I just paid nearly half my paycheque in taxes", they're not going to spend and that buck stops moving.

Now imagine that, on Canada Day of all days, Premier Ford plans to let the provincial gas tax rise from nine cents a litre to fourteen.

Couple that with five more billion dollars in spending, and you can see how he - and most politicians - think; "Well, we'll just raise taxes to cover it." You've heard them say it.

Remember the quote about "the republic being great until the government discovers it can bribe the people with their own money"? de Tocqueville meant it about the American Congress, but I'm pretty sure he'd see a close parallel in Ontario today.

That's enough lecturing. What's The Big Idea?

• First, stop deficit spending. This is just what Premier Ford promised to do, and he was elected to do it; he didn't do it, so he needs to be held to account. Don't reward the Conservatives for taking five MORE billion dollars from you and your kids.

• Second, stop raising taxes. Goodness gracious, we can't afford bloody gas or groceries right now, and nearly half of what we pay at the pump is TAX.

  Less income tax means the bucks move through more hands, getting (sales) taxed more frequently per dollar, ergo more money actually collected by the government, allowing them to relax income taxes even further.

• Third, reinvest HEAVILY into education and innovation (don't forget health care!) We in Windsor rely heavily on our automotive industry, but we can't just keep on truckin', hoping that it will always be thus. President Trump just yanked EV subsidies, and I'll bet you an untaxed buck that Mr. Poilievre's going to do the exact same thing. That gulp you heard was Stellantis executives panicking. Check out my Big Idea on the environment; the environment and the economy must go together. Great ideas and innovations all need to come out of Ontario, and, amour propre, I'm definitely going to see that Windsor gets more than its' fair share.

Survive? No. THRIVE. That's where we need to be going, and we need new minds - independant minds - to get there.