Editor:
As you so rightly pointed out in your Nov. 14 editorial, the ideas of the so called “new” Fair Deal Panel “have not only already been rejected by a past commission, but they would require the creation of three entirely new bureaucratic institutions requiring untold amounts of taxpayers dollars to do so."
However, you are wrong about how they will establish these new bureaucratic institutions.
With their absolute true belief in the infallibility of “the market,” they will privatise all such institutions thus handing over billions of ordinary Albertans money to their corporate masters who will manage it very successfully and unselfishly on our behalf.
Unfortunately, that would be bucking a very long trend simply because in the history of the modern world absolutely no case of corporate welfare has resulted in any benefit to the whole of society, only to those recipients of the government's largesse.
The UCP has already taken millions of dollars out of the Alberta economy via this recent budget and plans to take even more.
They obviously do not know about, or care about, the findings of Professor Mark Blythe of Brown University in the U.S., who clearly demonstrated to a U.S. Congressional panel that in every instance in the past 100 years whenever the government sought to “balance the budget” or be “fiscally responsible” by cutting tax for business and the wealthy, cutting essential services, privatizing services and reducing the income of ordinary citizens.
It always, without exception, led to increased unemployment, business bankruptcies, the stalling and reversing of economic growth and increased poverty for the majority of citizens.
You cannot have a healthy economy if people do not have good jobs and a decent income. In short, money to spend and to buy stuff.
Why does the UCP think that it can achieve a different outcome with the same set of criteria. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
If slapping lippy on the pig (ie. Fair Deal Plan “Mark 2”) is the best the UCP can come up with, then all Albertans are in for very tough years.
Alex Edwards,
Canmore
