I don’t mind governments going into debt for reasonable reasons. I just want to know they take it somewhat seriously and have plans to reduce it and to spend our money carefully.
The difference is, of course, on what one thinks “reasonable” and who is put on the hook for paying. Typically, those who benefit the most are not the ones who pay it back, while the lenders make out like bandits. That’s why some economists are talking about “Modern Money Theory,” to propose ways to borrow to look after those in need without borrowing from banks. Not advocating MMT, only saying borrowing and spending and paying back are political decisions quite as much as economic decisions, and the more “the people” are represented, the better.
I also note that the Conservatives seem to have a private pension scheme for gig workers in their platform. This looks like a continuation of their attempts to privatize the Canadian pension program, which is just a way to hand over money to private interests.
A) They often don’t have a choice, and countries have been bankrupted by war spending. The US was the only major combatant that wasn’t thrown into recession in WWII, for example.
B) Wars are temporary, and don’t structurally change the finances of the country in the long term. After WWII ended, most countries returned to a much lower spending footprint.
C) The last time we funded major wars we started from a position of relative solvency, with low debt and low deficits.
In comparison, the kind of domestic spending proposed now is more like permanent entitlements that will have to be paid for forever. For example, the day care program is hugely expensive and once people adapt their lives to it, it will be impossible to kill. And we are starting this spending from a position where we are already running deficits Canada has never seen before, and our debt is at record levels.
You can survive a few years of crazy spending if there’s a good reason and investors trust that things will go back to normal. But if the crazy spending looks like a new normal that isn’t going away, markets and the financial system will begin to respond.
One more thing: Who do you think is purchasing our debt? When our borrowing was reasonable, the government could borrow from citizens and foreign investors. This imposed a certain amount of prudence on the part ofmthe government, because if it could 't find buyers for Canada Treasuries (or US treasuries in the States), they would have to raise the yield to attract buyers, raising the cost of debt.
Now, the central banks are buying the treasuries from the government. In other words, they are essentially printing momey. They issue the money as a transfer to the government, and the treasuries go on their balance sheet. Since the bankmis guaranteed to buy them, government loses all market information and has little incentive to reign in spending - until everything goes to hell.
Financial crises are not predictable, and you often don’t see them coming until everything crashes all at once. Remember what happened in 2008? Imagine it this time, except with more than twice the debt, with no room to lower interest rates tomcombat a recession,
A) Canada has always had a choice
B) Inflation and depression are also temporary
C) The last time Canada funded a major war it was in the grip of the Great Depression. It managed to control prices, wages, and speculation pretty effectively, as did the US. Again, the question is, why are lenders happier to lend money for governments to blow people to bits than to properly feed, clothe, and house them?
Neither the stagflation of the 1970s nor the crisis of 2008 was caused by “governments printing money” or by what you call government “entitlements” and I would call “minimal efforts to redistribute wealth a little more fairly.” They were caused by problems hard-wired into capitalism. Economists who were not committed to apologizing for capitalism did in fact predict the crash of 2008.
The question to ask of economic theories is “cui bono?” and we may judge those theories, and their supporters, by the answer. I’m not content with a system that primarily rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of the great majority and am happy to support left wing ideas and parties that seek to share the wealth more equitably. And that takes us back to the topic of the election.
With the recent shenanigans in Bolton, Ontario, resulting in a Liberal campaign stop being cancelled, I was interested to see how O’Toole would respond.
Frankly, I was expecting kind of a nudge-nudge-wink-wink “gosh that’s terrible” sort of statement, so that’s genuinely nice and a welcome surprise in a campaign that’s otherwise failed to rouse any interest on my part.
I guess it’s also “nice” seeing Bernier do his usual nonsense. I can’t have less respect for him than I already do, but it’s not every day when you see somebody try so very hard to surpass their previous levels of contemptibility.
The polls now have the Conservatives ahead by 2-10 points, depending on the poll. And momentum is still shifting their way.
In terms of seat projections, it’s now neck and neck between the Conservatives and Liberals. The NDP appear to be doing slightly better than last time, but the Bloc and the Green Paety are falling, with the greens at risk of not winning a seat.
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The Green Party is influential to the extent people care about environmental concerns. There is good reason to care about them, so other parties have made more serious proposals than in the past. The Green Party should perhaps be focused on improving the debate around these issues and specifically not on commenting on abstruse foreign policy, resulting in a needless leadership crisis.
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Not sure Trudeau should have cancelled the speech. Lots of people have lost patience with anti-vaxxers, but this was likely more bark than bite.
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Going into debt for an existential war like WW2 is different than one like Afghanistan with nebulous goals. However, I accept social priorities are generally as or more important than abstract military ones. I was interested to read about Britain’s leasing agreements with the US, which are not given ample attention but were economically crucial to the Allied victory. Wars used to be temporary (Afghanistan is Canada’s longest involvement in any conflict).
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However, while I agree there are many flaws in the simplifications of the Chicago economic school, the current idea debt is not important at all is stupid. It is. The rationale about ratios may have some merit, but not if it is manipulated to include stuff that should not be there, and not include other important things. A sensible discussion of taxation is in order and taxing foreign property ownership and stopping the exploitation of loopholes may be both popular and sensible.
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O’Toole comes across much better than Scheer. Singh is capable but NDP support is static. In all likelihood the Liberals will pull out a minority win. But calling an election before the Covid costs become clear was a risky strategy given Pearson, Peterson and Harper’s setbacks after going for majority in an early election.
Because some people don’t understand debt and inflation. If you were looking for a literal answer, there it is.
The Green Party is engaged in an internal civil war, so they’re in no position to really even be campaigning.
The Conservatives are increasing their support outside of Quebec. The NDP is making some inroads in BC and becoming a little more popular.
I think it is possible the Conservatives win the popular vote but the Liberals keep a slim minority. Things are up in the air, though, and I guess more than a few parliamentarians are wishing that the election had been postponed.
To those who care:
I find these generic canada-wide polls to be pretty much a waste of time. The election always boils down to individual seats in a few ridings. It does not matter if a bunch of folks in Alberta hate Trudeau even more than last time. Fewer votes in Alberta will mean nothing at all.
I’d like to see more individual riding polls, especially in close ridings.
I don’t trust any of the polls to be honest. I live in a riding that does lots of polling and I hang up when they call. The questions are ALWAYS incredibly badly formed, as to be ridiculous, in a clear attempt to get the outcome they want.
Polls are literal nonsense, in my humble opinion.
Pollsters seem to have miscalled the Nova Scotia election by almost twenty percent. There was a lot of discussion about “surprise” but little explanation why there was surprise.
Yes, Canada wide polls are a blunt tool. I would like to see more localized polling. I also do not generally answer them. Not all polls are equally biased, however.
This is, of course, exactly what happened last time, which is why the Liberal promise to do away with FPTP was always nonsense.
As of today 338 predicts the Conservatives will win a slight minority, but
- There’s three weeks to go and this looks like it may be a zenith, and
- In such a case I would think the Liberals and NDP might form a coalition.
I don’t know what polls you mean, but election polling is generally straightfoward.
The evidence shows that it works. They do not collectively miss national elections by much at all. One poll might be off, but a solid analysis of all of them will get you pretty close to the truth.
I can’t remember, but did the polls predict the red sweep through the Maritimes? I seem to remember broadcasters being quite surprised, as the results came in, but I could be misremembering of course.
Polls have been accurate in the past, but they depend on polling models that assume a certain understanding of the body politic, such as likely voter models, the rough breakdown of how many peoole are liberal/conservative, etc. They have been getting less accurate in the past few election cycles.
If there’s a problem with polling, it’s likely that rapid changes in society have upset their polling models and pollsters just don’t have a good handle on who is voting and why. There may also be baked in assumptions, such as voting patterns of new immigrants, that don’t hold up.
This just is not true. Individual polls are often off; an aggregate analysis demonstrates they will, as a group, always come pretty close to the truth, at least in larger elections.
I don’t presently have 2018 final poll numbers, but immediately prior to the 2015 general election, every major polling firm was right; all of them called a Liberal victory. All got the Liberal vote share within the MOE except Angus Reid and IKOS, who just barely missed; all got the CPC vote within the MOE and EKOS got it right to the decimal point. It is impossible to honestly look at the figures and say the polls were wrong; they were incredibly accurate, actually.
They were also off in 2016, with pollsters,giving Hillary somethjng like a 92% chance to win.
And in Canada, the pollsters in 2019 got the final result for the Liberals correct, but undercounted support for the Conservatives by a substantial margin.
All of the polling error in the U.S. and Canada has gone in one direction - they always seem to underestimate support for the right-wing candidate. There could be many reasons for this, but it’s been pretty consistent through the last several election cycles.
There was a time when people might have been reluctant to express support for some groups. But the Conservatives are barely right wing and I do not think that is the problem. I think people do not like receiving junk calls or feel obliged to answer random ones after years of consumer exploitation. This probably makes random polling a little tougher, but is hardly an insurmountable problem.
It should be a criminal offence, in my view, to spoof numbers or similar activities of little social benefit. If a party really wanted to get elected, they would enforce more reasonable behaviour in every sphere. I suspect the telcoms could do much more about it if they had to.
Sure, there’s the ‘shy voter theory’, especially as applied to Trump voters who might not want to admit it, but the head of the Trafalger Group, which was closer than most in the last couple of elections, believes there’s another reason: In the past few years pollsters have tried to collect a huge amount of crosstab data, which leads to 15-30 minute questionairre sessions. He said that they found that conservatives were more likely to refuse such long surveys, so they shortened theirs to just a handful of quick questions and got a better, more even response rate.
I know I have blown off a lot of such surveys. 'Hi, we’re from polling research firm X, and we’d like you to participate in our voter survey. It should 't take more than 15-20 minutes of your time."
That’s a pretty heavy lift for a cold call, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it distorts the data they collect in a number of ways.