Good Bye 2011

Jib Jab did it again. Every year Jib jab does a complete review of the year in the form of a song. You will notice they don't always get everything. In fact the song came out right after the world found out about the death of the North Korean president, so it's not in it. Enjoy anyway

Happy New Year!

Wouldn't it be Awesome if Ron Paul WINS!

Current polls in Iowa  is showing a three way tie. Ron Paul 21%, Mitt Romney 20%, Newt Gingrich 19%. Ron Paul might just win the Iowa Caucus. Quite frankly it is slightly scary, but also pretty awesome. I don't agree with Ron Paul on much, but there is one thing that even Liberals will admit is that he is a consistent Conservative who has believed in this Tea Party Ideal for decades. I think the Tea Party should be all over Ron Paul. Now I don't want Paul to be president, but one has got to say that Paul deserves the nomination more then anyone else in the Republican party.

Unfortunately for Paul  even though he is doing well in Iowa his numbers in other primaries aren't as good. The first states are always important, so Iowa Paul has a strong chance, but what about the other early states like New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida.

In New Hampshire Romney of course leads the race as he has done since the beginning with now 39% , Gingrich and Paul tied in 17%. Second place isn't bad, but if like Romney in 2008 too many silvers and no gold    in the early states doesn't help you get to the nomination.

In South Carolina Newt is leading with 39%, Romney a far second at 21% and Paul way further behind at 10%. This state still has a lot of time to change it's leads, but right now these numbers aren't very encouraging to the Ron Paul campaign. In Florida it's a similar story newt 44%, Romney 27%, Paul 8%.

Unless these states change their minds it is almost imperative that Ron Paul if he wants to be considered a serious candidate for the nomination win Iowa which the New York Times says he will most likely. Anyways we shouldn't count Ron Paul out at all. I think that soon Newts numbers will go so low like Perry and Bachman that voters may just in time vote for Paul. I am predicting a Ron Paul explosion very very soon.

Another Deficit Year in Washington DC!

The U.S again goes for the easy way out of a problem by extending tax cuts for two months. Just like the super committee it seems that this congress is going to delay and then delay again. Nothing this year has even seriously touched the deficit. The U.S is running out of time. The interest on the debt that is accumulating every minute will soon become more expensive then medicare. The U.S has just wasted another year arguing about how bad the current congress is at getting the deficit under control. Maybe next year they will talk about how terrible the first four years were under Obama. Hello the term isn't over you have one more year to do something. Then again I am an optimist (I think maybe the rich will get some sort of tax increase next year).

Every minute we wait the more severe the austerity is going to be in the future. Happy New Year Congress.

Compromise!?

Obama wants to push the so called compromise of extending the payroll tax cuts by another 2 years. If this is considered a compromise it a joke. Because first both sides for the most part agree with the idea, but yet there was still a lot of fighting over the bill? This bill extends tax cuts and there fighting over it! I wonder how long it would take to talk about balancing the budget? Now if they don't want to increase the payroll tax rates and do other things to balance the budget it will effect the middle class even more. See income tax cuts do help people, but if their wages go down even though the tax rate went down they make less money. WHY? Because if you don't help increase the median wage and allow the outsourcing of jobs, elimination of unions people will make less money even though the tax rates went down. With the Bush tax cuts the poor and middle class made less money then were the tax rates were higher. That why the Bush tax cuts must expire even for the middle class, because it doesn't work and the money can be better put to help people's wages go up or help reduce people's expenses like Health care. Same goes with the payroll tax it's a short term fix, and if middle class keeps dying the tax cut does nothing. That why the Payroll tax should increase to 6.2% and eliminate the Bush tax cuts for everyone. This will not only help balance the budget, but the country can help the middle class by reducing many families biggest cost like tuition, health care, and bring new good paying jobs.

Flarethy's Bomb Before the Holiday

Right before holidays is usually the greatest time to dumb documents that you don't want to know about. Our Finance minister follows suit with this bad tradition, and dumb the bomb that Canada isn't going to increase health care spending by 6% every year after 2017. Now for many people (including me) we all speculated even during the election that the Conservatives weren't going to increase health care sending by the same 6% like Paul Martin did. The Conservative platform barely had a page on this issue. And the paragraph that is was written on was barely worth the paper it was printed on. It had the most ambiguous promises. Like

we will work collaboratively with the provinces and territories to renew the Health Accord and to continue reducing wait times

 By the way when Flaherthy announced this "Six of them (premiers)  lined up to speak out against the decision, citing a lack of negotiation with two years left to reach a new agreement. The Conservatives love doing terrible things before a holiday break in the hope that no one will notice, but this issue won't go away Harper. This Health Care debate is going to go on till 2017.
The current Health accord increases health care spending by 6%. Jim Flaherthy says he will increase health care spending by Nominal GDP meaning take inflation and add it to GDP growth, and Flaherthy says 3% increase is the minimum increase. 


Flaherthy answer is taking us for fools by saying Health care spending will increase every year. Yes it will but the rate of increase counts! If you spend one dollar more every year on health care then yes health care spending will reach records every year, but the provinces will need more than low increase in spending to reduce waiting times like the Liberals did in 2004 and it worked! Thankfully the 6% will stay till 2018.


Now I agree we do need to think of spending over the long run. I think that our government should look at preventing people from even needing a lot of health care. By taxing junk food and fast food chains the, looking at a national policy to stop obesity etc.. if  we do this the amount of people who will need our health care system will decline and will lower waiting times. If our goverment did this then a MINOR decrease in rate of spending would make sense. Increases like 5%-4%, because wait times will be reduced by the policies mentioned above. So what Flaherty is doing isn't bad ONLY as long as he puts policies to reduce waiting times like the ones mentioned above and our Finance minister isn't.


P.S Flaherthy plan to link health care spending to growth and inflation is good idea, but it seemed like it isn't being forced on the provinces without much compromise. 3% increase in Health care spending is fine as long as prevention is taking care of reducing waiting times. If we battle obesity and tax bad food and have a healthier Canada our Health care system won't need 6% increase every year. 

Harper's Secret Taxes!

After Harper said he would like the provinces to pay half for his new (billion dollar) Prison system in which he intends to increase crime and reduce justice, Ontario and Quebec are screaming all the way to the parliament building saying NO! Harper doesn't care for his budget it's in deficit and there isn't much so far that has been announced that will make it go to surplus, but in Quebec and Ontario the primers are trying to balance the budget. something that is standing in the way is a billion dollar price tag for prisons they don't even want. If Harper get's his way our provinces will have to make deeper cuts or increase taxes to pay for the cost of the prisons that will only add more cost in the long run. So this is Harper's secret tax. Make the primers look like the bad guys increasing taxes and reducing services and Harper who doesn't care for fiscal responsibility do nothing. (probably blame the Liberals for not giving him 30 billion dollar surpluses)

I think the only fair way Harper can expect the provinces to agree to fork up the bill is if they get a say on the bill, but Harper doesn't want to. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to make a crime bill and force the provinces to pay for half of it, and the provinces don't get much influence on the matter what so ever.

Noting that it is “virtually impossible” to project actual increases, the document pegs the total cost of changes to legislation on young offenders at $717-million over a five-year period. It adds that the federal government would likely end up paying half of the price tag.

 Quebec’s Ministry of Public Security has estimated that Bill C-10 will cost the province an extra $294-million to $545-million to expand the province’s prisons and $40-million to $74-million every year to service the additional inmates.

 “Our position remains the same,” David Couturier, a spokesman for Mr. Fournier said when contacted by The Globe and Mail on Wednesday. “It’s their legislation … it’s up to them to pay the bills.”

 Ontario has also called on the federal government to cover the entire cost of the bill.

Harper and Kyoto a Bad History.

Harper since 2006 promised us that if he was prime minister he would scrap the Kyoto accord. He first just allowed Kyoto to stay alive, and just completely ignore it by creating "Made in Canada targets." Bow the Harper government has made it official we are out of Kyoto. The Environment minister even lied that extending the accord would cost 14 billion dollars. That statement was completely debunked by the Green party leader Elisabeth May.

It's completely untrue that we would risk a dime," May said.

And even if it was true 14 billion dollars should be no issue to Harper considering Harper has no issue spending 30 billion on fighter jets. Just shows that given the choice between the health of the world and building up our military Harper would chose the military hands down.

Stephen Harper seems like he is more interested in making sure that the Oils sands can expand then care about the health care of the planet. Extending Kyoto and making real cost will help us in the future weather the environmental and economic changes. The planet is moving away from fossil fuels. More money last year was invested in clean renewable energy versus fossil fuel. The planet is moving, and Canada is staying behind with Stephen Harper. 5 years already wasted, and hopefully no more than 5 years more to go!

"The message to the rest of the world is pretty clear: Canada doesn't give a damn," she said. (Elisabeth May)

"The Harper government has imposed a death sentence on many of the world's most vulnerable populations by pulling out of Kyoto," Greenpeace Canada campaigner Mike Hudema said.

Peter Kent: Let's do Nothing!

Our Environment minister wants Kyoto to die and wait until 2015 to make a new accord. Why not just start a new accord now why wait three years? Our Environment minister is playing in the past were it would be just enough just to say that we should talk about making an accord. While almost the rest of the world wants to do something now. The talk is over! action must be done now, and with the Conservatives doing nothing to help create a global accord we have no credibility when it comes to the environment. Why should the world listen to us if we are doing nothing? If we wait till 2015 we will be one of the only countries in the developed world to not have a carbon tax. Even China and India have a carbon tax. Kyoto isn't something from the past it is our environment minister and government.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who is also in Durban, says Canada's involvement in the negotiations has been overshadowed by reports it plans to withdraw from Kyoto a year before it officially ends.

 "I've heard some people suggest that given how badly Canada has performed, and how negative and obstructionist our delegation has been in meeting after meeting, it will be easier if Canada is not in the room."

Read more here

Canada Moving Years Back!

With The Kyoto deadline at the end of the month Canada is in no way going to reach it's target of 6% below 1990 levels. In fact in 2008 the only provinces who actually reduced their emissions below 1990 levels is Quebec and PEI. All the other provinces increased. I think it would be a complete miracle if Harper is going to have a strong new target. With Harper it is business as usual allow companies to continue to pollute the air we breath, The water we drink and the environment that allows us to live. It ecology 101 we need a sustainable planet on order for us to survive. The biggest polluting increase for the next decade will be coming from Transportation and Energy. Ways to fix that have been proposed for years. A carbon tax to reduce the consumption of CO2, Invest heavily like Ontario in changing the energy grid, Invest in high speed rail and mandate more energy efficient cars. Even though Harper isn't doing anything. BC, Quebec and Ontario are. In BC they have a 25$ carbon tax, 15$ in Quebec and The Liberal green energy plan in Ontario. The cost of doing nothing is mounting. The economic effects of Climate change will hurt Canada. From unpredictable weather that will effect the prairies, to more stronger storms and pollution increasing asthma rates and increasing health care cost will cost billions.

Arcand noted that the price of not acting on the climate crisis would be much higher than the cost of these emissions reduction programs.

“In Canada, the costs (of inaction) could go from $5 billion per year in 2020, to between $21 billion and $43 billion by the 2050s,” he said, noting leaving this bill for future generations to pay would be wrong.

Read more here

Democrats are Dreaming

In a somewhat strange turn of events it seems the Democrats who contiguous talk themselves as being the party that will save Social Security is now the party that quite frankly is giving it lip service.  The Payroll tax (the tax that generates a lot of income for Social Security) is at 4.2%, but it is usually at 6.2%. This tax cut is set to expire by the end of the year. If the tax cuts aren't extended then that would mean that the people making  in the low income brackets (as low as 35,000) will pay 700 dollars more and people making more than 110,000 will pay a few thousands more. Granted that the expiration would hurt people in the middle class, but the U.S is running a deficit it time to make hard choices. The Debt to GDP is too high and extending tax cuts like this will hurt the economy in the long run. Because the less money the U.S tries to save now means more than that amount they are going to have to save later. In Fact Obama and some Democrats want to not only extend the tax cut, but expand it to make people pay 3.1% he claims he will pay for it by taxing the rich more. Granted this tax cut will help people in the lower bracket and that the taxes on the rich need to increase, but the U.S can't live off on just revenue neutral ideas they need revenue positive plans.  So I say the best plan would be to eliminate the payroll tax cuts to the people making over 100,000 and in fact make it 7%, and for the middle class I say compromise on slowly re-introducing the 6.2% by only increasing it by 0.5% in 2012 year and 0.5% the next year and the other 1% the third year. The U.S has to start getting serious on debt , and make long term plans to stop the social security deficit and the countries deficit.

Read more here