This afternoon I see a number of bloggers reacting to the news that the federal government is already flirting with a deficit early in the fiscal year and all those years of Liberal surpluses are gone. This is the plan, folks.
Of course they don't want to run too big a deficit too early in the game because it might endanger the reputation that fiscal conservatives have for being better at managing money. (People who are paying attention know that's a crock of shit but it's one of those zombie lies that lives on.) But threatening to dip into the red is okay. If they manage to bring the books back into balance at the end of the fiscal year it will be due to their awesome ability. If they end up in deficit it will be someone else's fault or entirely unavoidable.
Either way, it will be the signal for another round of cuts to social programs and to departments that do things like inspect food to make sure that what we eat won't kill us. This is the movement conservative school of government at work and the idea is to cripple the government's ability to do anything. (The military budget will be untouchable, of course. Afghanistan. Support the troops. Terrorists.)
It will also be the cue for yet another column from John Ibbitson suggesting that some kind of fiscal union with the United States (assuming the U.S. is still standing) is the only sensible option. And Jeffrey Simpson will be along with yet another column telling us that our health care system is doomed. Doomed, I tell you!
Is there anything about this that isn't predictable?
This is, of course, just another manifestation of the famous or, rather, infamous Norquist Doctrine.
This was summed up in a May 25, 2001 “Morning Edition” interview on National Public Radio when he delivered the Conservative Mantra "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."The strategy consists of "poisoning the well" by making excessive expenditures to the point where successive governments regardless of party have no alternative but to raise taxes or cut programs or both.
My first experience with this in action was in Saskatchewan where the Conservative government of Grant Devine inherited $100 million in the bank from the outgoing NDP government and had managed to rack up a debt of $12 - 14 billion by the time they were booted to the curb 8 years later. With the province teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the incoming Romanow government was left with what I refer to as "The Romanow Dilemma" of either having to raise taxes to maintain programs and pay off the debt or cut programs to pay off the debt.
There has been some debate on these pages in the past about how unhappy Romanow was or wasn't about having to cut programs but that is largely irrelevant since raising taxes would have been at least as unpopular. In this case, the Conservatives got to enjoy (as I'm sure they did) watching the NDP cut programs it had spent years putting together.
Of course, Devine is a piker compared to what Bush and Cheney have done in the US. Any promises of increased programs or tax cuts in the US election campaign by either presidential candidate are either lies of fantasies since the post Bush US government doesn't have the funds to do either.
There should be no surprise at Harper's actions - he seems resolutely committed to repeating in Canada every policy tried and proven to be a failure by the Bush regime. I expected this as soon as Harper started pouring truckloads of money into the military. As pogge has said in the past, you can't expect to get good government from people who don't believe in government.
Actually, the strategy doesn't even require cuts to program spending. All they have to do is to not expand those programs so that program expenditure as a share of GDP falls automatically.
The other part of the strategy is to continually cut taxes so that anyone who wants to increase spending has to sell a tax increase first.