- Cops are 300% more wonderful than anybody who isn't Jesus.
- Stephen Harper sure is smart and adorable. If only he was a cop.... why, we'd marry him if we weren't against gay marriage!
- Black folks sure are violent. They should always be presumed guilty. As a matter of fact, everybody should be presumed guilty. Except for cops who are found with large quantities of cocaine in their lockers and a penchant for extorting transexual hookers. They deserve a fair trial.
There. I just saved you the cost of a subscription to the Sun. That's a good thing, because I read that paper on a daily basis and can almost physically feel myself getting stupider. To give the Sun its due, at least it's proudly stupid. The Star is pretentiously stupid, which makes it even more annoying. The Sun appeals to a construction worker who furiously masturbates in his truck to the Sunshine Girl, while the Star is geared to to a angsty stockbroker who furiously masturbates in his breakfast nook thinking about Linda McQuaig. I think we all know which of the two is more morally disturbing.
Christ, I'd give almost anything for a cocksucking newspaper that just tells me what the news is and lets me decide what I think about it. Few things get on my nerves as much as being told what my opinions are by someone dumber than I am. And few people are as fucking dim as journalism students. Those goddamn people go to school for three to four years to learn how to write a pyramid story and I can teach you how to do that in about ten minutes.
I will say one thing for the Sun's editorial stance, though. In keeping with Bush-era modern conservatism, they don't know the first fucking thing about money.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in town to announce a $14.2 billion surplus, which will certainly come in handy if, as expected, his minority government falls and an election is called this fall. But Harper seemed pretty proud of himself, which is unusual because human emotion tends to confuse him.
Some of the surplus is going to tax cuts, but the overwhelming majority of it is being used to pay down the national debt, which currently stands at $467.3 billion.
And the Sun, through its columist, Joe Warmington (who wears a fedora to let you know that he's edgy,) is going predictably nuts.
Mayor David Miller must have upchucked when he heard this news.
The Harper government has a $14.2-billion surplus and not only can Miller not have any of it, it's going straight onto the national debt which, since the Conservatives have been in Ottawa, is down to $467.3-billion from its peak of $562.9-billion.
But is this the right approach? There are varying views. Heaven knows this $14.2 billion could operate a lot of outdoor hockey rinks and community centres. Hell, we could build a wicked subway train system with that kind of scratch and maybe actually become an environmental leader in eliminating gridlock and smog.
Thinking of news ways to spend your savings before the bills are paid never used to be considered particularly conservative. Now it is. Go figure.
Now for the really mature, "Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie" part of the column...
But seriously, you have got to hand it to Mr. Fun (another good nickname for Harper). He's actually taking the money and slapping it on the whopping national credit card bill. He said the money is "going back to where it belongs in the pockets of hard-working Canadians."
Yeah, sure. Too bad they overtax us in the first place but some quick math in the room decided this move will result in as little as $15 eventually going back to each Canadian. Wow. Brace yourself. It's $5 less than the $20 it cost me to park to cover this event and it didn't get me a table dance at Jilly's last night or even a bottle of Dan Aykroyd wine.
Even if the personal saving went as high as $35, as some folks estimate, it's still chump change for the individual.
Look, I'm for a federally sudsidized lap dance just as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure that the country should go deeper into debt to finance it. Maybe that's just me. My father always told me that I have fucked-up priorities. Besides, lap dances are how I spent most of an $8,000 student loan about fifteen years ago and wound up in endless trouble. Also,
Jilly's is a dive in a pretty shitty neighbourhood. The discerning gentleman about town much prefers
the Brass Rail (
link NSFW.)I'm not a fool. I'd love a big, giant tax cut to blow on a handjob from a stripper. I even have a specific one in mind. She's a Guatamalan who danced at the Brass Rail in 2003, had a beautiful face, a perfect rack and a clit the size of my thumb. If Harper paid to get me a piece of that, it would be the best Christmas
ever!Sadly, I'm neither insane or stupid and I know that both debt and tax cuts are government spending by other means. My American friends learned this when their president's $1.35 trillion dollar tax cut largely fuelled what became a $700 billion dollar deficit and raised the American national debt to $9
trillion. The Canadian federal debt reached a high of $562.9 billion when
Brian Mulroney was prime minister. His predecessor, the socialist demogogue monster,
Pierre Trudeau was spending a $1.23 for every incoming dollar in revenue. Eventually, the government of Canada was spending thirty-three cents of every tax dollar just to service that debt.
Blaming Trudeau for stuff is so much fun that I've devoted large parts of my life to it. For example, I blame the fact that I haven't gotten laid in 21 months on him, and the motherfucker's been
dead for seven years. Seven years today, as a matter of fact.
But blaming the debt situation solely on him, while endlessly entertaining, is fundamentally dishonest. The Great Man's collectivist impulses were never much of a secret and the Canadian people elected him on four seperate occasions between 1968 and 1984. Trudeau didn't throw us into debt as much as we voted ourselves there.
Which brings us to the great fallacy that Canadians are "overtaxed." That is demonstrably nonsense and anyone who propogates it should be beaten with a fucking hammer. For the last 50 years, Canadians have been voting themselves all manner of health care programs and are now looking into federally subsidized babysitters. It just so happen that free shit is much more expensive than voters think it is on election day.
The real sin is that the Marxists who promised these programs hid the cost from the public by borrowing heavily to finance them. But ultimately, the responsibility rests with the voters who put people like Trudeau in office in the first place. It wasn't like he came to power in a coup. These people were actually elected. Time and time again.
So let's cut the shit, okay? If anything, Canadians are
undertaxed.
When Mulroney attempted to bring some reason to program spending early in his first term, he was very nearly shithammered into oblivion for his trouble.
Recognizing that Canadians - and particularly senior citizens, to whom much of it is spent on - would never support significant cuts to program spending, Mulroney introduced the 7%
Goods and Sevices Tax to actually
pay for that which the citizenry wouldn't allow to be cut.
And that's how Brian Mulroney became the most hated man in Canadian history. Upon his retirement from politics, Mulroney had a 9% approval rating, Lower even than
Karla Homolka. Although, to be fair, Ms. Homolka liked to be tied up and get fucked in the ass and there's a
lot to approve of about that.
The
Toronto Sun didn't like Brian Mulroney much toward the end, either. Now he's on the board of Quebecorp, which now owns the
Sun. Funny how times change, innit?
For a guy who might have to get out in front of voters in the immediate future, Harper is being surprisingly responsible with this surplus.
Jean Chretien would have used it to bribe us with our own money, as he so successfully did just before the 2000 election. It might surprise you to know that Chretien always maintained very high approval ratings, despite being involved in more criminal activity than Karla Homolka.
Stephen Harper seems to understand something that traditional conservatives know, but that their Bush-variety counterparts don't: that the combination of large tax cuts and deficit spending creates the illusion that government is cheaper than it actually is. And when something is perceived as being on sale, people naturally consume more rather than less of it. That folks, is how big deficits become giant ones, and it's where all of that crippling debt comes from.
The temptation for Harper to give us big, splashy tax cuts before calling an election must have been intense. It's a trick that worked for the Liberals repeatedly during their seemingly endless 13 years in power. But Harper didn't do it. I don't like the man and I didn't vote for him, but I have to give him credit for being the first grown-up about fiscal policy in North America in a good long time.
Obviously, a $750 million tax cut isn't big enough for Joe Warmington and his shitheel brethren at the
Toronto Sun. What those assholes don't understand is that there's only two ways to introduce meaningful tax cuts in a country like Canada. You can either throw the money away in a swamp of deficit spending like George W. Bush is doing, or you can match them with equal cuts in program spending and get destroyed politically. Because if there's one bedrock fact about the Canadian electorate, it is that we will never tolerate any encroachment on our socialist paradise.
It appears that some people lived through the Mulroney years - when the Tories went from 211 seats to 2 in less than a decade - and didn't learn a goddamn thing. But these are the same stupid bastrads who supported the borderline autistic
Stockwell Day and his doomed and foolish
Canadian Alliance until its last humilating and long overdue breath, so I shouldn't be surprised.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Everybody Wants Some!! By: Van Halen
