To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
25
Apr
2021
Sunday April 25, 2021
The federal budget is in. As presented by Finance Minister Christia Freeland last week, the budget expects to run a $354 billion -- yes, that’s billion -- deficit for the current fiscal year.
Plus $152 billion next year.
And $59 billion the year after.
On top of somewhere over $400 billion thrown at the economy during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce the carnage caused by closures, shutdowns, lockdowns, and travel restrictions.
The federal government itself has no money. It operates on money it collects from us, in taxes. If it doesn’t have enough money on hand, it has to borrow from us, so that it can feed that money back to us, to get us through an economic crisis, and then we have to re-pay ourselves the money that was borrowed on our behalf from ourselves.
Does that strike anyone else as somewhat circular?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: government, deficit, credit, borrowing
24
Jun
2018
For a hundred years, the Canadian government took children from their parents and incarcerated them in Indian Residential Schools. For their own good.
The feds have since issued apologies. They’ve paid around $5 billion in compensation. And all governments have paid many billions more in welfare, prisons, and social assistance.
In the 1950s, the B.C. government took Doukhobor children away from their families, and locked them up in a prison camp in New Denver. For the children’s own good, of course.
In the 1960s, various governments did the Sixties Scoop. Once again Indigenous children were separated from their parents and placed with white foster families. For their own good, of course.
We’re now reaping a bitter harvest of alcoholism and drug dependency, of depression and suicide, of adults who don’t know how to be parents.
And then the Trump administration set a policy of removing children from parents who enter the United States illegally, and locking the children up in detention centres.
Can’t we ever learn from past mistakes?
Tags: verses, Bible, Jeff Sessions, St. Paul, Romans, government