- You Heard It Here First Folks, The New Harper Con to Pay For Health Care, and Everything Else - 'The Heritage Card'

Posted: 11:00 AM on October 22, 2010
We want more health care, but we don’t want to pay for it, Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail, 22 Oct.'10
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/we-want-more-health-care-but-we-dont-want-to-pay-for-it/article1767721/

"So Albertans, like other Canadians, dream on that more public money can be put into health care without finding new revenue sources, without adversely affecting spending in other areas. Very few politicians, it would appear, want to spoil the dream."

I thinks that Canadians understand the economics of health care with its sharply increasing costs both due to advanced and complex treatments and the double wammy caused by 'baby-boomers' reaching 60 years of age and more - increased odds of increased needs for health care and retirement thus negatively impacting the tax base.

If we can help it they don't want to pay any more for it, very understandable and very natural.

The problem is that we have politicians like Stephen Harper, Jim Fleherty and all the Con's who, on a totally emotional bases and devoid of rationality and fact based logic, play on this desire.

A prime example is the Fleherty line that Canada will simply grow out of the deficit (as long as we let them run the country for the next 6 years, of course) and that is even with the 6 billion in Corporate tax cuts per year the 12 billion in GST cut per year, the 16 billion on 65 F-35 Strick Force jet fighters, 10's of billions on increased prison facilities, wasteful spending of billions on thing like the G-8/G-20, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

People choose to listen to Harper because it is what they want to hear. Harper knows this and deliberately and for partizan purposes tells them that.

Harper's policies are akin to the federal government issuing a credit card to each of us - the 'heritage card' to pay for health care. What makes such a credit card different is that not only are we obliged to pay, so are our children and our children's children. The debt isn't extinguished when we are.

It is not Harper that has to pay for his 'policies'. Harper reaps the benefits.

We are the ones, each and every one of us to a man, woman and child, that will have to pay. But, worse, it is also our children and our children's children that will be left to pay the crippling financial debt as well as the impacts of Harper's policies regarding just about everything.

We must prevent leaving for future generations a debt burden that is so crippling that the economy collapses into third world oblivion like almost happened with Mulroney.

Let us not leave our children with the resentment that we were ever given a turn at the helm.

Lloyd MacILquham cicblog.com/comments.html