Imagine no city welfare, pension or paycheques. A social time bomb waiting to explode.
A pretty sobering reminder you cannot continue to spend more money than you collect in taxes.
While some insist Canadians are somewhat sheltered from such nasty things, the facts are the Canadian household debt is somewhere around $128,000 for a family of four, compared to $140,000 for a Greek family, and Greece is considered to be living on the proverbial edge of fiscal collapse.
Despite those glaring warning signs, spending is spiraling out of control, while our politicians continue to waste literally billions of dollars on programs, that do not pass the basic needs test.
Why are we arbitrarily committing to replace billions of dollars worth of military hardware, without first trying to determine what our military objectives are, and what tools we need to serve those objectives?
Why are we pouring billions of dollars into the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development that continues to produce no results and with no end in sight?
Why are we wasting more billions on security to protect politicians when we could have held the G-8 and G-20 Summits on one of our many military installations where security would have been far superior and already in place, no inconvenience to the public, and at no extra costs?
And why are municipalities and the provincial government wasting millions of dollars buying silly carbon credit certificates, insisting those worthless pieces of paper reduce a governments carbon footprint? Why are we awarding contracts without the benefits of a competitive public tendering system?
Why are politicians shamelessly filling the pockets of government employees to buy their loyalty, their silence, and their vote? The time to get spending under control is today, and with existing revenues.
Forget about those pie-in-the-sky LNG revenues until that natural gas is flowing through those illusive pipelines and loading facilities.
If politicians do not get spending under control promptly we will have no alternative but to follow the footsteps of American municipal and state governments, and take public spending to referendum.
Andy Thomsen
Summerland