Let's Make a Deal! You give me $150 Billion, I give you less than nothing!

I don't really have much time to blog these days but I gotta do something. So today's effort is simply to remind everyone how revoltingly stupid our present political-economy is. You know, the media, the political parties, most sources of opinion are working to normalize the atrocities we're forced to live through, whether it's illegal wars, torturing immigrants and Canadian citizens, war crimes, assaults on health care, the continued rape of the environment, etc., etc..

I'm not a 100% fan of parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, ... he's too much of a deficit hawk for me, but he's honest and he says what he wants to say in spite of stephen harper's petty attempts to bully him. Given his integrity, let's hear what he has to say about Flaherty's fiscal projections:

Page projects the federal deficit will fall from C$56 billion ($56.57 billion), or 3.6 percent of GDP, in the 2009-10 fiscal year to C$10 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, in 2015-16.

Look at it this way: The masters of the universe, the grown-up, fiscally responsible "conservatives," the economist stephen harper, the small-government/free-market Jim Flaherty, are set to deliver on over $150 billion in deficit spending over the next few years, and they'll tell us to pay it back through cuts to public services, increased EI premiums, and so-on, and what are they spending that money on?

Are they spending it to move us from carbon-emitting energy sources? Nope. Can you imagine those guys telling us they're spending $150 billion over four years on alternative energy research?

Are they spending it on Canada's health care system? Improving access to education? Creating new jobs?

None of those things. Because of the incompetence, stupidity, and criminal greed of the world's big "investors," the economy has screwed the pooch. Because of the neo-liberals' control of policy in the OECD, the populations of these countries can't afford to buy the goods and services that the Chinese and the Mexicans are making for us. As a result, in order to keep the economy from spiralling into a tail-spin, Flaherty, like all the other finance ministers, has had to prop it up with deficit spending.

The $150 billion (and then some) that's required for this could have come from taxes on the useless parasites who have sucked us dry for decades. It could have been spent earlier in the real economy and produced benefits for the majority. But that would have been crazy pinko nonsense. So instead, we let the bankers soak us, con themselves, produce a disaster, bail them out, and then suffer for it, while mainstream opinion gives Flaherty a pass by not pointing out that the dim bulb never saw it coming and that his whole economic worldview is apparently nothing but shit.