Taxation and the middle class

[ijmorlan]

I remember during the Chretien/Martin years they got heat from the opposition for budgeting with a reserve, so the final results tended to be slightly better than originally budgeted. I suppose I understand why the opposition did that, but to me it looked like obvious prudence — you don’t budget for everything to go perfectly well. I defy anybody to explain why continuing to budget with a small surplus (maybe $5-10 billion per year) would have been worse than what actually happened. If we’d continued that through the Harper years then when Covid hit we would probably have gone from maybe 15 to 35 % debt to GDP rather than the actual 30 to 50 %. Also I’d like to see the occasional discussion of “we’d like to do this for all of us, but we have to pay for it so we’re proposing the following tax increase” rather than the usual lying about increasing government services while putting money back in our pockets.