The most indefensible subsidies are those which end up subsidizing businesses with average payrolls in the multi-millions of dollars.
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A useful question came up among social media comments recently
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For NAFTA countries, free trade has been beneficial, not harmful, as the increase in employment demonstrates: 40 million more people are at work now in Canada, Mexico and the United States
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In 2014, those whose incomes exceeded $100,000 represented more than 8 per cent of all tax filers, garnered slightly more than 33 per cent of all income and paid nearly 52 per cent of all federal income tax.
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Once governments “invest” through loans or equity stakes, or otherwise become enmeshed with a company via other corporate welfare schemes, politicians are in an inherent conflict of interest. They feel the need to defend their—or more precisely taxpayers’—“investment” from competition, domestic or foreign.
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Taxpayers, through local taxes, the value of land and a tax surcharge on event tickets will pay $520 million, or 74 per cent of the new arena and related “blacktop” costs.
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Reality check: Blue collar workers in mines and others with specialties related to minerals will not easily find employment elsewhere, not when Alberta already has 202,000 unemployed workers.
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Supply management is a relic of 1930s Soviet central planning influenced by Karl Marx. It never should have been introduced into Canada. So let’s call supply management what it is: Marxist economics applied to dairy cows.
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I prefer that the soft Alberta economy, competition,and insurance industry pressure spur dental bill declines, not government politicking accompanied by veiled threats.
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The author does a fine job flipping between the biographies of Churchill and Orwell, guiding the reader through their almost uncannily similar experiences as soldiers, civil servants, travellers, husbands, and ultimately as gifted writers....
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Opportunities for four lanes and tunnelling the TransCanada have been repeatedly sacrificed to government spending best described as “impulse buying” — popular in political minds now, but of little lasting value.
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Political messiah-worship can be disastrous because it is difficult to dislodge an autocrat once in power.
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“Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” But one cannot extrapolate from that to an assumption that ever-higher taxes equal ever-more civilization.
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Switzerland is a good example of how referendums organically promote a more engaged public. The Swiss have voted on matters ranging from EU membership to minimum wages to abolishing the army.
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100 years ago, the politicians of the day were actually reluctant to impose new taxes except in the most extreme circumstances: war.
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To promise a certain pension amount decades out assumes the actuarial wisdom of a deity.
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Science and medicine are not “alternative,” “conventional” or “Western,” any more than gravity can be described as European or Chinese.
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Consider Britain’s greatest accomplishment in the field of freedom: Abolishing slavery at home, then in its empire (as of 1833) and battling slavery elsewhere
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