quote:

Originally posted by gilboman I don't see why this is a surprise. All conservative governemnts from the past few decades have spent like drunken sailors and it always takes the liberals to fix their screwups. Raising Taxes or taxes in itself is perfectly fine, its needed and required. It's the cons approach to cutting taxes yet increasing spending that makes no sense. Cutting the stupid GST by 2% and some token minimal cuts to income taxes is creating a huge problem for us. The cons are bad manager of finance when economy is good, and atrocious when economy is bad. Liberals have always been the remedy to fix the fiscal mismanagement of the cons. There's nothing conservative in spending by the cons, they're only conservative in shoving right wing religious views.

Nothing you say in this post is consistent with what's actually happened. Canada had a "good" economy but lagged significantly behind the U.S. during the Cretin and Martin administrations. Now during Harper's 2nd term we're kicking their asses during the recession. I'm not necessarily saying that Harper's government is solely responsible for this but it certainly doesn't jibe with your statements.

Could they be doing better? Absolutely. But they have a minority government, and as such, their ability to make spending cuts is severely curtailed. What's "needed and required" other than redundancy is not tax hikes, it's spending cuts. But often what happens with a minority fiscal-conservative government is that the tax cuts go through (because they're popular with everyone) but spending cuts get shelved (because they're unpopular with tax-and-spend liberals).

It's also very easy to say that Conservative governments from the past "few decades" have spent like "drunken sailors" when the only Conservative government we've actually HAD in the past few decades was Mulroney's - and if memory serves, the problems were largely during his 2nd term, which is why he got re-elected the first time around.

I would love to see a government of fiscal conservatives and social liberals - believe me, I don't like the social conservative ("right wing religious" is a tad dramatic) views either. But real life involves trade-offs, and in the long haul, social conservatism is less damaging than fiscal liberalism, largely because society naturally becomes more socially liberal over time whereas fiscal mismanagement and nanny-statism almost always gets worse if left unchecked.

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