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- Xref: sparky can.politics:11680 soc.culture.canada:10347
- Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!torn!news.ccs.queensu.ca!qucdn!spraggej
- Organization: Queen's University at Kingston
- Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 12:38:39 EST
- From: John G. Spragge <SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA>
- Message-ID: <93025.123839SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA>
- Newsgroups: can.politics,soc.culture.canada
- Subject: Re: NDP "communism?" (was Re: A vote for Reform...)
- References: <93022.0220182893684@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <C1B22B.7qA@mach1.wlu.ca>
- <93024.0053342893684@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <C1Eop4.Gtz@mach1.wlu.ca>
- Lines: 49
-
- In article <C1Eop4.Gtz@mach1.wlu.ca>, dmccrea6@mach1.wlu.ca (doug mccready F)
- says:
-
- >Where Rae is being untruthful is when he blames the federal government for
- >the economic malaise in Ontario. He has the ability to stimulate investment
- >(which is the most volatile part of the gross provincial product) by
- >spending an effort at creating an atmosphere which is attractive to business
- >through tax breaks, etc. Instead, he has driven investors out in droves, as
- >well as citizens which then lowers the revenues from income taxes etc. which
- >then causes the deficit to grow even more. With 500 people leaving the
- >province per day and more who would like to leave but are looking for a job
- >before they do, it is not hard to figure out why Ontario is in financial
- >trouble.
-
- Doesn't the inability of those who would "like to leave" to find a job
- elsewhere tell you something? Also, does your out-migration rate refer to
- gross or net population transfer? If gross, I suspect more people come to
- Ontario than leave it; and if net, 500 people per day does not work out
- to a massive population drain, particularly when you consider the
- massive restructuring, which has caused us to haemorrhage jobs. And that
- restructuring would have happened whether we elected Rae or not.
-
- As for incentives to investment, what do you do with the way in which
- bad business decisions squandered so much of the investment that the
- Reaganite tax cuts supposedly "stimulated"? Consider the way so many
- lemmings (opps, sorry, investors) jumped into commercial real estate,
- leaving us with vast overcapacity and a major homelessness problem.
- As one horrible example, consider Olympia and York. Or Robert Campeau.
-
- Our business community has perfected ways of making economic opportunities
- disappear that no government would ever dare contemplate. That's why
- some of the NDP laws (such as the empowerment of unions) that senior
- commercial bureaucrats deplore (and use their investor's money to
- savagely attack) will increase productivity in the long run: because
- if you force the devolution of power from the executive suite, the
- ego or stupidity of the folks at the top can't wipe out wealth by
- the billion.
-
- >Rae is less than honest here since he blames the federal government but
- >except for those people who leave the country, most of those people who are
- >leaving are staying in CAnada, just not in Ontario.
-
- Of those who don't leave the country, most stay in Canada? Pray tell,
- where does this minority who neither leave the country nor stay in
- Canada go? Beamed up by an orbiting Klingon warbird? Assimilated by
- the Borg Collective? The twilight zone? Or merely lost in the cracks
- of some rather sloppy thinking?
-
- standard disclaimers apply ----------------------- John G. Spragge
-