FREDERICTON — New Brunswick’s government has delivered a budget that plunges the province deep in red ink with a record deficit and burden of debt, but also boosts big project spending to historic highs with an election months away.
The provincial government tabled the $8-billion budget Tuesday for 2010-11 with no expectation to get out of the red ink until at least 2014, two years later than it originally had planned.
Finance Minister Greg Byrne forecasts a $754-million deficit for the current 2009-10 fiscal year, the highest deficit in the province’s history.
The government is also forecasting a deficit of $749 million for the next fiscal year — their third consecutive deficit.
The provincial net debt is expected to grow to $9.5 billion by 2011 — also a record — meaning the share of the debt for every man, woman and child in New Brunswick would be about $12,700.
Newfoundland and Labrador has the highest net debt per capita in Canada, with $15,500 for every person in the province, according to its budget earlier this spring.
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NB has been increasing program spending at a rate of 7% annually for the last 5 years. Unless their economy was to grow in tandem at a Chinese rate then the math won’t work. But aging demographics will cause even more spending on health, which will need an Obama-like death panel to ration it.
This perpetual enabling of failed fiscal behavior in certain provinces will not work. That’s why equalization is a redistribution program that must stop. All it does is prop up fiscal despotism just as oil props up real despots in the middle east.
A big chunk of NB’s debt is caused by NB Power that will now have to be sold to Quebec Hydro which is also part of another fiscal mess with its excessive socialism that we in Ontario fund instead of our own population growth needs. This whole ponzi game makes Enron look like a well run company in comparison.
Plus they must have wasted tons of taxpayers money making their province the only official bilingual one in Canada thereby helping to chase many of their citizens elsewhere in Canada.
http://www.asnb.ca/
When you add together the debt for all provinces, municipalities and Canada, it must be getting pretty close to $1 trillion dollars. That’s money that you and I, the taxpayer, owes. It’s nice to see how well Progressive government is working out. It’s sending us all to the poor house. But what else can you expect from Progressives? They’re already taking over fifty percent of our wages and still have the audacity to tell us we’re selfish because we get touchy about protecting the rest. Without private property rights there is absolutely nothing to protect us from the insatiable greed of the State.
‘You aint seen nothing yet,’ potato as the old saying goes cause just wait until the dreaded HST kicks in next year here in Ontario & BC.
UV, i’m counting on the possibility that a lot can and will happen before July 1/10 kicks in that threatens to change the economics of it all. As they say the science of economics is certainly one that’s never settled. People might see the advantages of stampeding away from investments in so called green technologies. Then there’s the oldest adage, ‘you can’t take blood from a stone.’
see Washington Times poll re prospects for President Obama’s jobs conference. poll results are as expected. Washington Times doing some decent report. The Guardian, NY Post AND CBC going down the tubes –no pun intended.
Jobs on horizon, blood sucking lawyers defending the defenceless??