RESOLUTION: For the long term good of Canada, we need to cut government spending in order to decrease the debt.

Mr./M. Chair, M. Wasylycia-Leis, St. Mary's staff and students:

In the 1960s, hippies practiced free love... today we're vigilant against AIDS.

In the 60s, graduate students were offered jobs for life by dozens of Universities. Today's young intellectual elite flip burgers.

In the ‘60s, people leaving school and University cared less about finding a job than the particular job they would choose. It was an era inscribed with a sense of optimism, and opportunity, a time to set up generous social programmes designed to redistribute economic wealth from the haves to the have nots, from the productive, to the unproductive. Medicare, and the Canada Pension Plan were ushered in as the universal solutions to a careless society.

In the 60s, students protested against a society of privilege for the elite and went on about class war. In the 90s, people are waking up to a new society of privilege and discovering a generational war. The 90s are by no means the 60s. The cost of living and employment are pale reflections of the golden year's economic success.

Canada's experiment in big government social engineering is coming to a close. For 25 years or so, we witnessed the fevered expansion of governments everywhere.

Because the baby boomer generation allowed governments to constantly overspend, Canadians rich and poor face a rapidly expanding public debt. The exploding interest payments on that debt now threaten the very core services the public expects from government.

The 60s generation has placed a terrible burden on young people and the unborn. They will pay higher taxes for fewer services and fewer jobs in a debt depressed economy.

The national debt, estimated at around $600 billion, represents a huge inter-generational transfer of wealth. The sum was created mainly from overspending by federal, provincial and local governments.

Canada welcomes every baby born in Canada with a small token of the government's two-decade long overspending experiment - a $66,000 government debt. It is a painful and unfair obligation for those who had no part in creating this debt.

Borrowing money from the accounts of unborn children and saddling them with a $66,000 debt is in itself a form of child abuse. The generation that inherits this debt will work the equivalent of roughly 2 to 3 years of unpaid labour in order to pay down their portion of the debt.

A recent survey indicated that a minority of Canadians aged 18-24 resent paying taxes. Generation X, your generation and mine, are less inclined to pay taxes because they are fed up with supporting the excesses of past generations. They fear that the benefits from the public goods and services will have dried up once their time has come to collect. For example, recent reports have indicated that the Canadian Pension Plan will not exist after the baby boomers loot it for what it's worth. Then what would compel you people to contribute to such a plan? Why support high taxes for diminishing services?

The bottom line is that Gen X will have to pay more for less services in a debt depressed economy.

The current phenomenon of angry, young, self-reliant Canadians advancing their personal interests over the common good of their fellow brethren should come as no surprise. Youth unemployment is running nearly double the national average. On the bright side of things, economic distress has fostered a new breed of self-motivated entrepreneurs who earn their own money, as opposed to collecting government handouts. 10% of those in the workforce are self-employed.

Unlike their spend-happy parents who borrowed money out of future generation's bank accounts, today's youth have been conditioned to expect less from government. They believe that government should expect little in return. When support for the common good, through taxation, makes victims of youth today, say many young Canadians, it's time to ditch taxes.

The trouble with the current system of social programmes is that it fails to live up to its initial conception. Although governments and the general population think of social welfare as an economic transfer from the haves to the have-nots, an alarming number of transfers are from the poor to the poor. In the name of social justice, the government has taken, in the form of taxes, from the most industrious poor to subsidize the least industrious poor.

The left will tell you that big government is the solution all our problems. We need more money for the education system, for the health system, for this minority and that minority, and the army of bureaucrats whi will administer these programmes, they say, and to pay for it we'll seize wealth from corporations and individuals to pay for it all. This is the same stale thinking that has driven our economy for the past 25 years. By increasing taxes we drove corporations out of the country, raised the rate of unemployment, lowered the tax base, and borrowed like crazy to pay for our precious social programmes such as welfare for the unemployed.

The best substitute to welfare is employment and a vigorous economy. Cutting taxes means more money for investment, which translates into more jobs, which takes people off the welfare roles and makes everyone in the end happy.

Consider for a moment, how would people on welfare, dependent on government spending, view this line of reasoning?

The question summarizes the tension many families feel. On the one hand, people are concerned about the relentless growth of government spending and taxation. On the other hand they don't want to see Canada's social safety nets eliminated.

Suppoerters of increased government spending seem to aggravate this tension by insisting that spending must rise so that these services will not disappear.

Ironically, the greatest threat to Canada's social programs is not fiscal restraint, but uncontrolled government spending. For many years, government spending has out-stripped the ability of the ordinary taxpayer to pay for it. The result has been persistent annual deficits, and more interest payments that relentlessly crowd out more and more spending on the valued social programs.

CHOICES will tell you that the menace of the defecit is the "Big Lie" of the political era, that its OK to squander the money you personally earn on the interest payments of the debt. Preaching further from their "gospel of greed", the Left will reproach you as selfish for chosing to spend your money on your families instead of "worthy" social programmes, such as pensions for politicians. Is this what they mean by social justice?, taking money through taxation from working Candians and redistributing it to a combination of debt payments and programmes?

All of us now pay dearly for our politicians' failure to keep spending in line with revenues. On the federal level, taxpayers pay over $6000 annually for a family of four just to pay interest on the operating debt. Add to this over $2000 for the interest on Manitoba's operating debt and you have an annual interest bill equal to over $8ooo for every Manitoba family of four.

Anyone who is truly concerned about preserving social programmes cannot afford to be complacent about the rising levels of government spending and debt. Unless we fix this problem, our social programmes will indeed fall into risk, not because of the limits on spending, but precisely because of the lack of them.

When Ms. Wasylycia-Leis asks you to keep footing the bill for programmes you no longer can afford nor have faith in, she is actually contributing to the deterioration of the very programs she claims to defend.

For the long term good of Canada, it is incumbant upon us to cut government spending in order to decrease the debt.

We cannot decrease the debt by government sponsored job creation.

We cannot decrease the debt by lowering interest rates. (locked-in bonds. interest rates drop only when debt drops. 1970s is proof positive).

Nor can we decrease the debt by refering to it as a Big Lie and turn a blind eye.

Nor will tax increases help streamline the debt. (cause economy and tax base to shrink)

The only way to pay-off the debt is to cut spending.

By: Victor Vrsnik
Posted: December 31, 1999
Topic: Manitoba

Contact the regional director Colin Craig for further information.

Type: Related

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