Less than a week after naming his new cabinet vowing a renewed focus on the concerns of Canadians, the one name Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn’t keep out of his mouth on Monday was Pierre Poilievre. At a housing announcement Trudeau brought the Conservative leader up multiple times, from panning his policy proposals, to his leadership style.

  • knitwitt@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wanting the government to spend only as much as it earns seems like common sense to me.

    • fresh
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      1 year ago

      Basic macroeconomics: The budget of a sovereign government with control over monetary policy is fundamentally not like a family budget.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      it’s a noble “father knows best” bit of wisdom, but you’ll find ANY person, organization or even government unable to save during ‘up’ years - in this case because it’s criticized for not dumping spare money at some cause - needs to borrow money or run a deficit in the ‘down’ years or when investing in something with delayed benefits.

      This is actually how banks make money, but it’s also a neat-o vehicle for investment. Go read about it!

      This bit of falsely sage advice is a neat-o diversion from the fact that money has been used either to prevent economic collapse during a 100-year pandemic - I know: Milhouse is an expert in managing a country during a global lethal pandemic - or to restart programmes to allow people to work more and generate more tax revenue that were ditched by ‘small government / fuck the plebes’ administration before, and/or resume maintenance work skipped or killed by those same “looks good this year, fuck the next guy’s budget” administrators.

      Technical debt also accrues; and any wealthy barber will tell you to shift expensive debts to cheaper debts; and so we repair bridges with loans because we value the things we’d lose more if we didn’t.

      Stop with the “neither a borrower nor a lender be” bullshit that started as an adage to sloppy aristocrats. It’s not even a smart rule for a single normal person, let alone a family or a government. It’s short-sighted and shallow.