Canadian Budget

My one-word summary on how I feel about the budget: wonderful!

In fact, I like it so much that I might even vote for the Liberals in the upcoming election, which will be the first time I have ever done that.

As long as I can remember, the budget has been about screwing our generation in order to help out the baby boomers. Education has been slashed along with our futures while money was pumped into health care. The debt remained the monster that it was, with the baby boomer philosophy of "spend it now, let the children pay it off later".

A quick subject breakdown:

(1)Health: The real money-sucking part of the budget. Somehow, despite all the pressure, Martin was able to hold the line on this one, promising not much more than the $2 billion he had already promised. The $500 million for some hockey health council is of course garbage, but in the long run, half a billion is peanuts in the health care game.

(2)Education: This was the part of the budget that usually got the shaft, until this year. Grants, increased loan limits, increased loan forgiveness. I could not have imagined anything better. Universities get to keep their money, students have better access to University.

Is it enough? Of course not, but once the program is set up it will be trivial to increase the dollar amounts should it become necessary.

Of course, Martin couldn't resist pissing away $175 million on aboriginal education, because they don't get enough money already. Again though, this amount of money is small potatoes in the health/education game.

(3)Science: More money, wow! We are actually spending on things that will help us in the future. This is very un-Canadian.

(4)Cities: GST relief, costing a whopping $7 billion dollars... over 10 years. Ok, so its only $700 million a year. Offhand, the provinces should be the ones giving the money since they are the people that screwed over the cities, but this works. I would have preferred the feds giving a portion of the gas tax earmarked for public transport, but this budget is only very good, not perfect.

(5)Environment: $4 billion to clean up contaminated sites. Again, this is thinking too much about the future. The baby boomers can't possibly benefit from this, is Paul Martin out of his mind?

(6)Security: $600 million down the drain for security, but with the states spending tens of billions, we kinda had to at least put on a show. I think we probably could have skimped a bit more and gotten away with at least half that, but I'll accept it for now.

(7)The Debt: $4 billion contingency reserve which will go to pay down the debt. Not as much as I would have hoped, but given all the pressures to actually run a deficit (its true, the baby boomers have no shame), $4 billion is half-decent. At that rate we can have the debt paid off in only 125 years.

Overall: A big thumbs up! This budget was made with an eye to the future instead of coddling to those who can't see beyond the present. Not only that, this was done right before an election, which takes guts, and might have earned the Liberals my vote.