You know, Jim Flaherty's winning an award for being the Bestest of the World's Finance Ministers loses some of it's special sheen when you consider that the rest of the world's finance ministers suck balls for breakfast. Wow, Canada's doing better than the Greeks and the Americans after they blew up the world! Do we get a fucking cookie, too?There's a special arrogance that comes with being an allegedly conservative finance minister that not only blew through a $13 billion surplus in just under three years, but added $54 billion in debt on top of that in year four. Although I really shouldn't be so judgemental, I guess. Maybe he has an allergy to prosperity.
But the fact is that Flaherty and Harper are being lauded for policies that were instituted by Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, specifically not letting our banks merge into monstrous blobs of gluttony and stupidity. The Tories simply did have the time to create the perfect conditions in which the banking sector would destroy life as we know it. The last I checked, they didn't hand out prizes for that.
Now Big Jim wants to prove, yet again, how phenomenally goddamned dumb he is. Call it a victory lap.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty believes the crystal balls of economists go only so far. Mr. Flaherty was asked today on CBC's The Current about critics who said Canada was slow to see the looming recession and a bit too quick to forecast the recovery, and about how confident he is in his current assessment. Here's what Mr. Flaherty told the radio interviewer: "No disrespect to people who offer economic opinions, but none of them - I mean not one of them - predicted the recession coming to Canada in the last quarter of 2008. And I consult with economists regularly as Minister of Finance, and I respect the views expressed, but their predictive power is limited, and that's based on the past few years."That might just be the greatest goddamned thing I've ever read, since it illustrates perfectly Flaherty's record of ignorance on almost everything.
Consider this: On September 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers crashed and took the world economy with it. You might have read about it. Pretty much everyone knew that the End was Near, and we were within days of life becoming an economic version of On the Beach.
On November 27, 2008 - over two months later - the Minister stood before Parliament and dribbled out the following nonsense;
We were fully aware that difficult times were ahead when I presented our Economic Statement last fall.That all sounds neat, but it misses three central points;
We planned for it. We made choices to help put Canada in a stronger economic position. In fact, since 2006:
- We have reduced the federal debt by $37 billion;
- We have reduced taxes by almost $200 billion over 2007–08 and the following five years;
- We will have reduced the tax rate on new business investment, leading to the lowest level in the G7 by 2010;
- We have made historic investments in job-creating infrastructure; and
- We have invested in science and technology, education and training.
Our Government, from last year to next, will have doubled the level of federal funding for provincial, territorial and municipal infrastructure projects.
Canadians and Canadian businesses will pay nearly $31 billion less in taxes in the next fiscal year, thanks to the tax reduction measures introduced since 2006.
That’s equivalent to nearly 2 per cent of Canadian GDP.
This is a substantial fiscal stimulus—stimulus with staying power.
- None of those actions were anything resembling economic foresight; they were campaign promises, and fairly boilerplate ones at that.
- The did little more than piss away a $13 billion surplus that could have better served as stimulus money and minimized the resulting debt.
- None of them addressed a credit freeze, which is what really precipitated the Great Recession. Erecting Bridges to Nowhere from Sea to Sea to Shining Sea does nothing to convince capital markets to loosen credit. In fact, it may have convinced them that a politically craven government might have actually gone insane and started pissing it's pants.
In fairness, I should point out that Harper and Flaherty aren't solely responsible for all of this nonsense. After all, they have never done better than win a minority government because they suck. But the (supposedly) opposition Liberals were there for the Conservatives every step of the way. Flaherty couldn't have done any of it without Bill Graham, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
It really does take a lot of people to put together a federal government this stupid. the only difference is that Flaherty is doing federally exactly what he did here in Ontario. How this douchebag hasn't actually been deported yet will always confound me.
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