"You get yourself into trouble if you have an ideological aversion to deficits. You don't embrace deficits but ... let's be practical here. The choice is you cut programs, you can raise taxes or you run deficits," the premier said.
I do not have an ideological aversion to deficits, although I would use them extremely sparingly.
What I do have an aversion to is government spending for every issue and everything under the sun.
And not withstanding all the economic crowing about no deficits, we're still paying 9 billion dollars in interest on the debt. That's 9 billion of a total of close to 100 billion dollars in the budget.
Why? Because we still have a net debt of about 142 billion dollars.
And the debt was foreseen to increase during the last budget:
While the accumulated deficit is forecast to decrease by the amount of the surplus, total debt and net debt are forecast to increase.
Why didn't we do more to curb spending? We didn't do it when times were good.
Right now, we're just throwing money out the window on this debt.
Think of it: Ten per cent of the debt goes to pay people who make money from the taxpayer: bondholders, bankers and the like.
I have no problem with people making money.
I have a problem with governments giving away money unnecessarily.
I don't have a problem with deficits. My problem is that governments never seem intent on paying them back when times are good. And then they build up a large debt and the taxpayer ends up financing this big money-sucking hole.
I'm in the process of renovating my house. I understand the importance of investing in infrastructure. But if I spent more than I could afford renovating, it would be worth more trouble than if I'd just left the house alone. I'd be stuck paying mountains and mountains of debt. Sure, my kitchen cabinets would be repaired and that hole in the ceiling would be plugged, but what's the point if I'm just constantly going to give away ten percent of my income with no end in sight? What happens if some other emergency happened?
I would have to go even more in debt!
That's not a smart plan.
We have to control our spending folks. We should have done it when times were good. Now we're shooting ourselves in the foot to answer to this emergency when we don't have any extra revenue to lean on.
