BC Liberals Debt-O-Meter

[Jo]

A page worth of posts have been removed, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the topic. If you are incapable of staying on topic and not going into outlandish attacks on the 'other' party (whichever it is for you) then go to the Political Arena.

[Urbane]

People are always in favour of lowering debt "in general" but when you ask them about specific programs that's another story. And even if they're willing to cut funding to something like education in half because they no longer have kids in school there are a whole lot of other people who would nix that idea. On top of that dynamic which is not unique to BC we also had the global economic meltdown.

Now, I wonder what people would be saying about debt if the BC government had actually cut spending in 2009 and/or raised taxes instead of running deficits and keeping taxes down? We would undoubtedly have had a tremendous economic downturn in this province and the NDP would be leading the calls for the government to be removed. Remember, too, that NDP'ers were angry when the Campbell government ran surpluses before the meltdown and I distinctly recall some of them saying he was "obsessed" with balancing the books. And yet now it's "Ooh ooh . . . look at the debt."

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. I don't like seeing our debt go up as much as it has either but we've heard a constant mantra - "chronic underfunding" for just about every program in the province from the NDP and their supporters. Education? Chronically underfunded despite the steady increased with declining enrollment. Health care? Chronically underfunded despite the new medical schools, hospital additions et al. Ditto for other areas of government. One can be glib and just complain about debt but nothing is going to change until PEOPLE decide that they're willing to make some tough choices. It's easy to always blame government but the problem starts with us.

[Urbane]

Just my Opinion.

Feel free to share my art as needed.

A picture (with explanations) is truly worth a thousand words!

[maple leaf]

The point is that no one but 4-5 people on here and Christy Clark believe in her promises to control spending and reduce the debt.Although they try very hard to justify it. All evidence points to the opposite.Over the last 2 years since Christy Clark has been controlling spending ,she has added another 11 billion to the debt along with another 13 Billion in her election plan that will be added over the next 3-4 years.For a total of 24 billion on top of the approx. 60 billion already on the books .No one is buying her TV adds.

Martyn Brown: B.C. Liberals unchained

by MARTYN BROWN on APR 23, 2013 at 4:16 PM

Nothing gets Christy Clark down.
B.C. LIBERAL PARTY
ONE OF THE funniest scenes in Django Unchained is when the character played by Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz first arrives on the scene in his horse-drawn carriage, lantern swaying, with a bobbing tooth on top. The side of his cart advertised he was a dentist.

B.C. ELECTION 2013

For all the world, he looked more like a snake oil salesman—until we learn it was all ruse to mask his true occupation as a bounty hunter. His travelling office was to hide the bodies.

Watching the B.C. Liberals’ campaign bus is just as funny. There, blazoned on the side, is the equivalent of the bobbing molar: a picture of Christy Clark with the promise, “For a Debt-Free B.C.” Coming soon to a street near you.

Don’t let the smiling figure fool you. She’s not laughing at you. And she is certainly not smiling because so many of her candidates refuse to use her name or picture. In some cases, they won’t even use their own party label. Christy is just happy. Nothing gets her down.

Yet inside that smiling face beats the heart of a bounty hunter. She’s gunning for Adrian Dix, supported by a cast of B.C. Liberals who are now unchained, anxious to get even with the NDP. Or at least, to save their hides.

The bodies, like the ghosts that haunt the B.C. Liberal Party, are buried within the bus. At each stop they spring out to shoot the “bad guys”, as the partisan faithful cheer.

But we all know where this plot is headed. We’ve seen this movie before and it’s not pretty. For the anti-heroes, it won’t end well.

In an election that is likely to be a slaughter, the B.C. Liberals are doing their best to make the case for the fundamental reason why people have turned away from them. It is painful to behold.

They are following a script that only reinforces voters’ lack of trust and desire for change. It never helps when your central campaign promise is laughable. Clark’s “vision” for a “debt-free B.C.” is as unhinged from reality as any of Quentin Tarantino’s neo-noir classics. Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds come to mind.

Maybe she got that idea from Brad Bennett. Perhaps he remembers his granddad firing the flaming arrow at that barge in Okanagan Lake to burn the bonds that held B.C.’s debt. He missed, but no matter. They still went up in flames—just like this goofy notion has already done. It has already been dismissed by the vast majority of voters, along with the B.C. Liberals’ claim to a balanced budget.

Today, no one would believe that we can, or should build schools, hospitals, roads and other capital infrastructure without borrowing. Yet eliminating debt is suddenly Christy’s cause célèbe.

She feels so strongly about that, her platform promises to commit 50 percent of future surpluses to paying down the debt. What happened to the 2009 B.C. Liberal platform commitment that “100 per cent of all future operating surpluses will be used first to eliminate the operating debt”?

The Gordon Campbell government cut that direct debt in half, before the 2008 global economic crash. With the record deficits since then, that debt from accumulated deficits, like all types of debt, is going up under the Clark government, not down. With a debt that will have increased by over 50 percent by 2015 under Premier Clark’s watch if her government is reelected and all goes according to her plan, one has to marvel at the audacity and absurdity of making debt her party’s central campaign issue.

Like the silly throne speech speculation about eliminating the provincial sales tax through the miracle healing powers of liquefied natural gas, the latest “debt-free B.C.” boast only serves to highlight the Liberals’ fundamental problem.

Namely, a lack of trust. It is a problem they have largely wished upon themselves through claims that can’t be met, through promises belied by actions, and through hypocritical behaviour, especially in the premier’s office. Instead of acknowledging and addressing that problem, “Today’s B.C. Liberals” are making it worse.

They continue to resort to hyper-partisan attacks that mostly shoot themselves in the foot. They continue to blame others for their own mistakes. They are campaigning with juvenile “Spend-o-Meter” stunts and wild lies about NDP positions on issues like natural gas fracking, spending costs, and tax hikes. And they have tabled a 94-page platform that offers little in the way of new ideas that might create new interest or enthusiasm.

It is telling that the governing party released its entire platform even before the writ was issued. As the NDP is showing, parties that have something new to offer generally unveil their platforms over several days. They use those ideas to help focus their campaigns and to drive the daily agenda, so that those prescriptions for change won’t be lost or ignored.

For the most part, Dix has won the campaign news coverage by targeting attention to issues that are popular, sensible, and easy to communicate in a clip. And contrary to what his opponents would have voters believe, not all of those ideas necessarily involve more spending.

Outlawing partisan government advertising will save taxpayers’ money, not the opposite. Banning political donations from corporations and unions will reduce potential conflicts of interest and will force parties to rely more on individuals for their funding support rather than on special interests. That’s a good thing.

I expect that most voters will welcome Dix’s new position on the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, politically motivated as it obviously is, to the extent that they agree Vancouver should not become a major oil export port. If that was his position, he should have said it clearly in the first place, but for most voters, it’s better he did so now, before they cast their ballots.

If the NDP follows through on its commitments to increase investments in skills training, reduce log exports, ban cosmetic pesticides, support local farmers, strengthen social programs, et cetera, so much the better. Not many taxpayers are going to *bleep* about the NDP’s plans to pay for its promised service enhancements with higher taxes on banks, large corporations, and upper income earners, or even with larger short-term deficits.

The difference between the two parties’ approach is not just strategic and tactical. It’s substantive.

With every new serious, popular, and contrasting commitment that Adrian Dix makes, he is also amplifying his chief opponent’s weakness. Clark’s “same-old, same-old” partisan attacks and shop-worn ideas are mostly reinforcing that she and her party are very nearly yesterday’s news.

From Day One, the premier’s main problem has been her lack of vision, focus, and credibility, her inability to shoot straight, and her penchant for firing at the wrong target and still missing the mark.

By contrast, Dix has built voter confidence by showing that, his Kinder Morgan pipeline shift aside, he is not inclined to shoot from the hip. He is answering the B.C. Liberals’ rickety road show and its quietly backfiring campaign strategy with one winning message: “Free at last.”

Time will tell if he can seal the deal through his performance in this Friday’s leaders’ debate and in Monday’s Great Shoot-Out. He should have fun with the B.C. Liberals’ “bobbing molar”, as he also remembers that, in politics, no one’s ever bulletproof.

Martyn Brown is the author of the new e-book Towards a New Government in British Columbia, available on Amazon. He was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff, a top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia.
http://www.straight.com/news/374821/mar ... -unchained

[logicalview]

The point is that no one but 4-5 people on here and Christy Clark believe in her promises to control spending and reduce the debt.

And what the NDP tried and have obviously, if the polls are any indication, failed dramatically at doing, is using the "look over there" technique of trying to discredit the Liberals for talking about reducing the debt, while they put out their toilet paper platform that deliberately talks about drastically INCREASING the debt. While INCREASING spending. It's all well and good to talk about increasing taxes to pay for our current expenditures, and to pay down debt, but the idiots at the NDP want to INCREASE the debt. You can laugh and post nonsense all you want, but at least two parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, want to do something about the debt, or at least think that it's an issue. The NDP, typical socialist boneheads, think that you can continue to spend yourself right off a cliff, just like the Spanish and the Greeks did. Dix should be talking about deficit reduction, but he isn't, he's talking about increasing it even more. And that, among other things, like his flip-flop on Kinder Morgan and his personal presence resembling that of a weasel-faced coward, are why the NDP is sliding dramatically at the polls.

[Urbane]

The point is that no one but 4-5 people on here and Christy Clark believe in her promises to control spending and reduce the debt.Although they try very hard to justify it. All evidence points to the opposite.Over the last 2 years since Christy Clark has been controlling spending ,she has added another 11 billion to the debt along with another 13 Billion in her election plan that will be added over the next 3-4 years.For a total of 24 billion on top of the approx. 60 billion already on the books .No one is buying her TV adds.

As that graph clearly shows the Liberals did in fact run surplus budgets in the years before the global financial mess reared its ugly head. And during those years there were many NDP'ers blasting the Liberals for not running deficits because they said we had "chronic underfunding" of everything in sight. Since 2009 the government has been running deficits like almost everywhere else in the world. It's disingenuous to ignore those surplus budget years while also ignoring the world financial situation with which the Liberals had to deal. And why anyone complaining about Liberal debt would deliberately vote for a party planning on spending much more is beyond me.

[Veovis]

And why anyone complaining about Liberal debt would deliberately vote for a party planning on spending much more is beyond me.

I can actually answer this for you. You see it's not a vote FOR the NDP it is simply and angry vote AGAINST the Liberals. IT's not based on analysis and rational calculations, it's based on emotions. You know the concept, just like the HST there is no thought just emotional reaction to rhetoric "THIS'LL SHOW THEM LIBERALS!!", and in the end look back in a few short months and realize they just hurt themselves and no liberal party member is sitting around thinking, "wow they sure showed me"

[maple leaf]

.
[/list]
As that graph clearly shows the Liberals did in fact run surplus budgets in the years before the global financial mess reared its ugly head. And during those years there were many NDP'ers blasting the Liberals for not running deficits because they said we had "chronic underfunding" of everything in sight. Since 2009 the government has been running deficits like almost everywhere else in the world. It's disingenuous to ignore those surplus budget years while also ignoring the world financial situation with which the Liberals had to deal. And why anyone complaining about Liberal debt would deliberately vote for a party planning on spending much more is beyond me.

Your math is as bad as Christy Clark,when you get a plus when you subtract 13 billion from 2.5 billion .
I've been told for the last 12 years that the things that go on outside BC during the 90's had no effect on our economy ,that it was all the NDPs fault (you know the lost decade).Now all of a sudden that is the prime go to excuse for the Liberals.You can't have it both ways.
Besides that we are talking about Christy Clark claiming that her government is controlling spending,and while she has been pretend Premier her government has added 11 billion to the debt and is forecasting to add another 13 billion,with no plan that anyone believes to not add more debt.You guys can fear-monger about the NDP spending 2.5 billion,that is clearly accounted for were it will come from and were it will go all you want ,but the real problem is the Liberals,not the NDP.

[steven lloyd]

And why anyone complaining about Liberal debt would deliberately vote for a party planning on spending much more is beyond me.

Well, some people might believe that $13 billion in planned Liberal spending is actually more than the $2.5 billion in planned NDP spending. I don’t know. Maybe there is some new fancy math where 2.5 minus 13 equals a positive number.

You see it's not a vote FOR the NDP it is simply and angry vote AGAINST the Liberals. IT's not based on analysis and rational calculations, it's based on emotions. You know the concept, just like the HST there is no thought just emotional reaction to rhetoric "THIS'LL SHOW THEM LIBERALS!!", and in the end look back in a few short months and realize they just hurt themselves and no liberal party member is sitting around thinking, "wow they sure showed me"

I have to agree with this though. Here we have a party (the Liberals) who have arrogantly believed they could get away with anything and keep getting away with it simply because (they thought) the electorate would never vote in the NDP. Well, guess what? That arrogance is getting really close to turning around and biting them in the *bleep*. As I’ve stated before, more than ten years of rationalization and excuse-making (since even before Campbell’s resignation in disgrace) by the Liberal apologists has brought us to this point. I really doubt there is any way the majority of British Columbians want a NDP government – but they do want the Liberals gone. If the NDP win a majority I put most of the blame where it belongs and that is solely at the feet of the Liberal apologists.

[flamingfingers]

'Balanced the budget?' - not a very good record from these 'prudent fiscal managers':

[Urbane]

Those of you who are now criticizing the Liberals for running deficit budgets after the global financial meltdown sure don't understand basic economics. If the Liberals hadn't done what they did you would have a legitimate cause to complain now. But they didn't so you don't. That chart says it all - surplus budgets (under protest from the NDP who wanted deficit budgets all along) and then deficit budgets because stimulus was needed.

[flamingfingers]

^Just no end to the excuses from the Liberal apologists.

[Urbane]

^Just no end to the excuses from the Liberal apologists.

Calling just about every economist in the world (not to mention the leaders of most other jurisdictions in the world) all Liberal apologists is a bit over the top.

[LoneWolf_53]

Over the top is putting it mildly, we can't source all our data at the Tyee and Alex Tsakumis' blog.

[flamingfingers]

Well, I am sure that any economist would say that to have a premier who boosts the debt by $1 BILLION per year like premier photo op has done is not a "prudent and responsible fiscal manager".