And you’ll pay for it how, exactly?
December 1st, 2005
In his first major campaign promise since swearing to once again fight to restrict the rights of gays to get hitched, Stephen Harper vowed to slash the GST from 7% to 5% if the Tories are elected.
This is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to see from the Conservative party. But if you want voters to buy in, you need to convince them you’ve thought it through and you can afford the tax cut while still maintaining a balanced budget. And somehow, comments like this one aren’t doing much to reassure me that Harper understands the intricacies of economic policy:
“I’ve never supported the GST myself. I believe all taxes are bad. Lower taxes are good,” Harper said.
Wow, that statement is nearly Bush-like in its oversimplification! (Does that mean that Harper is promising us Bush-like deficits, too?)
There are lots of places where the government could cut useless spending to afford a tax cut. I’d like to see Harper suggest some of them. Otherwise, this is nothing but an empty campaign promise and I remain unconvinced.
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Don’t ask; don’t tell.
Arrrrgh! Gay “marriage”. Jeez, I,m old enough (but just barely!) to remember when the same hippy lefties now pushing for gay marriage used to denounce the whole institution as “a tool used to perpetuate the repression of the patriarchy”.
Didn’t listen to ‘em then, and I won’t listen to ‘em now!
Marriage is patriarchal but I support same-sex marriage. Its not my right to choose for anyone else.
Tré, for many of us marriage has a very restricted definition of one man/one women.
Once you expand that defintion you open a whole can of worms that may have some very unpleasant and unexpected consequences a few years down the road.
Will you, for instance, reserve some plaudits for joyful day when polygamy is introduced?
And, no, polygamy would be offset by a surge in glorious polandry.
At 48 I’m probably one of the oldest posters here. I witnessed “the summer of love” through the eyes of an observant 9 year old…….while riding the monorail!
Since the 60’s it’s been one silly scheme of societal engineering after another, and almost all of them have turned out to be massive failures resulting in untold and unforseen social costs.
One of the best examples of this is “Taliban John”, born to hippie parents and named after THAT Beatle.
His father, an open-minded and progressive professional Irishman, felt it wise to not teach his son anything about religion. “I spared him, he says, the rigors of Catholic religious dogma.”
Why yes! ‘Tis far better a muderous religious fanatic!
The tenors of gay marriage display similar blind spots in their thinking.
I’m quite confident that the introduction of gay marriage will inaugurate a long slow downward spiral in women’s rights.
Are you prepared to deal with the consequences of such an eventuality, Tré?
lowering taxes actually increases spending and tax revenue.
But let’s leave that up to economists, I could’t stand macro and micro-economics.