Courtesy of Bourque Newswatch comes this story in the Globe and Mail.
A senior Canadian economist warns the $4.6-billion in new spending the minority Liberal government announced last week to buy NDP support in Parliament will make it harder for Ottawa to offer major personal income tax cuts over the next five years.
"The thing that concerns me about it -- which I don't see anybody talking about -- is the more they ramp up spending, the less and less likely we're ever to see a significant personal tax break," says Toronto-Dominion Bank chief economist Don Drummond. "That's my big worry in this thing."
This is kind of a no-brainer. The personal tax cuts in the last budget were insulting and with a Liberal-NDP alliance you can bet they will not be improved upon. With an increase in spending already announced and with NDP pressure to spend more on Kyoto and Institutionalized Daycare tax-cuts become not only an impossibility eventually we will need tax increases or risk going into deficit financing.
"If you take it together, the February budget plus the [NDP] deal that was consummated recently, it's . . . very, very heavily weighted towards increased spending," Mr. Egelton says. "It, to me, suggests that you are not really concerned about the productivity situation in Canada."
Their only concern is saving their own skin.
