Ah, Boxing Day. A time to look at the excesses of the past year and begin drawing up some resolutions of the coming one. Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has resolved to make Ottawa trimmer in 2010, which is a good thing. If the federal government were a person, it would be a prime candidate to be a contestant on The Biggest Loser.
The federal government is beyond huge. It’s morbidly obese. What’s more, its waistline is out of control.
In 2009, revenues were down $16.1-billion, thanks to the recession, while program expenses were up a staggering $17.4-billion, thanks largely to increased payouts to the elderly, major transfers to provinces, the auto bailout and other stimulus spending. Just the increase in federal spending this year — the increase alone — is greater than the entire annual spending of all but the four largest provinces.
Little wonder, then, that this fiscal year Ottawa will show a$56-billion deficit, and earlier this month the national debt climbed north of $500-billion again. Only two years ago, the debt had fallen to $458-billion, its lowest, inflation-adjusted level in a generation.
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In order to obtain and keep power governments all over the world have built up bloated overpaid bureaucracies to obtain and keep power.
Data from the NP editorial says “The federal government employs over 425,000 people, up 11% just from 2005 and up nearly 40% from the lows in the 1990s ..The average private-sector administrator makes just over $55,000 a year while his or her federal counterpart makes around $68,000.”
Catherine Swift, President & CEO of an association for small and medium sized businesses (see CFIB.CA site for details) says she:
“Believes the unfairness has gone on long enough and is calling for increased efficiency, transparency and accessibility to the pension system. Information on pension plans and pension benefits is scarce …the lack of research data also hinders our attempts to estimate the extent of the real deficiencies and unfunded liabilities of both public sector and private sector pension systems and to offer more practical solutions …. Demographic realities indicate that inadequacies and inequities in our current pension environment will come to a head very shortly”
Since McGuinty was first elected he has expanded his apparatchiks by 200,000 while the net increase in real economy jobs was only 6000. Although highly productive, the real economy cannot carry on their backs that many rent seekers behind the castle walls of our feudalistic governments. We have moved away from championing the middle class toward a 2 class system of elitist parasites seeking rent from the peasants.
We need to shrink Ottawa and Queens Park, faster please.
Exactly #1. Government collects far too much money from us and power over us. ‘Services’ provided by government can be replaced far more efficiently by private providers – or not at all in some cases considering many organizations that recieve millions of dollars of our money don’t actually do anything for us.
Some easy things both the Ontario & Federal governments could do to cut costs is to get rid of all consultants; stop all patronage appointments; freeze all salaries; stop funding social/cultural groups; stop funding bilingualism; cut the number of MPPs/MPs and Ottawa must cut their federal transfer payments to the biggest recipients.
Will it happen, probably not cause that would take leadership.
“Will it happen, probably not cause that would take leadership”
It would also take willing followers. That’s what we’re missing, not leaders but enough followers to howl for what UV suggests.
Oh and I forgot to add ’scrub the HST’ to my list — On a clear day I can see the taxman.
UV, We agreed there for a whole 17 minutes.
Amend “scrub” to read: implement the HST but waive new taxing on items such as fuels and new housing.
On a clear day I can walk and chew gum.
As Bush would say ‘on a clear day I can walk and chew a pretzel at the same time – well except for that one day I almost choked to death on one.’
I wonder if there’s a meaningful way to balance public sector wages with private sector wages? The figures which they quote ($55K vs $68K) are fairly stark. The public sector’s frequent justification is they need to “attract and retain talent” but I would think the pension plan and job security would be enough of an incentive for most employees.
Mac, those are good questions. The only things that should be done by governments are “essential services”. If they aren’t essential they should be outsourced/privatized. If they are essential, then by definition they should not be allowed to go on strike.
Do we ever see a list of acceptable applications to want ad ratios? They should be published. Whenever I ask people who might know that, I get a smirk indicating there are many more applying than we are led to believe by the unions. Therefore if outsourced, a business would drop salaries and benefits and save the taxpayer money.
The brightest thing Paul Martin ever said was that governments should not be doing things that could be found in the Yellow Pages due to productivity gaps between public and private. Unions prevent OUR government employees from carrying both a hammer and a screw driver at the same time.
Teachers already have comparative salaries between independent schools in the market and public schools. Nurses should be added. Let’s have more Shouldice Clinics to compare them to.
Police forces and Fire Fighters should be public. But they could be compared with other North American cities and take into account the cost of living, of housing etc. Already firms like Mercer do these studies for large companies with employees all over North America. Therefore do the same for public services and show the taxpayer the data.
Pension plans are simply part of compensation and the private/public gap is math. However, I’m not so sure governments can still be relied upon to offer “job security” as incentive to work there. I don’t think job security exists for anyone. We all take risks. Therefore we might as well get the productivity of the entrepreneurial sector to deliver a lot more government services.
Big Paulie Martin might have said that but he certainly didn’t live by his own advice.
Privatization can be a good thing but left unchecked and unregulated can be just as bad or worse than governments running (ruin) things.
Sure UV, regulate what you privatize.
But regulation doesn’t save you either when Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are the regulators.
In short only utopians think they can eliminate risk. The universe is unstable.. period. All we can do is adapt. The best way to adapt is with lots of competitive ideas; not a central plan nor a government monopoly on certain services.
Here’s some data from the CFIB.
http://www.cfib-fcei.ca/cfib-documents/rr3077.pdf
Look at the last 7 or 8 pages of the PDF.
You will notice the enormous advantages the public sector gets when benefits are added to salaries. It is way way out of whack with the rest of us peasants.
We need Dalton Days and Day Days and Miller Days pronto.
Pension plans are a “conflict of interest” for government. With government policies structured to influence the economy through policy or interest rates (green issues are a BIG one, as a for instance), who is buying corporate shares or government bonds and recieving the dividends, interest and capital gains on those transaction?
Public and private pension plans, who do not pay taxes. Only the pensioner does when paid out, as far as I know. So, when I read up on how say for instance Transalta and ATCO sold off their transmission systems to a newly formed Limited partnershipa few years back called Altalink (not a publicly traded company, so no oversite) consisting of publicly traded companies such as SNC Lavalin, Maquarrie International (an Australian investmant bank) and Trans-Elect Development (a US power distribution company), all funded by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, who is making money? You?
If you own Maquarrie shares, SNC Lavalin or Trans_Elect, but would you buy them without knowing the above? OTPP lent the money for the transaction, so they are and where would they get the info from to loan pensioner’s money to set this up? Government. The OTPP also manages a couple of Alberta public sector pensions to boot.
These same companies are in line to receive some 14 BILLION Alberta taxpayer and ratepayer’s money to expand power transmission in Alberta under the flawed Bill-50 process, currently a done deal. Taxpayers & ratepayers will see their power bills skyrocket in Alberta to pay for Big Business in bed with Big Government to build electric transmission lines that for all intents and purposes will be used to ship power to the Pacific Northwest and down into California, rather than used here in Alberta.
Another issue is the $600 million federal/provincial price tag to taxpayers in Alberta and the ROC to “bury” CO2, another Big Business Big Government boondoggle. Buy Transalta shares because that’s the only way you will benefit and get some return on your “investment”. I’ll bet most government employees and pension plans are doing so, they have the “inside track” on deals like this.
When you hear investment people talking about “institutional investors” they are talking about big pension plans, in large part financed by taxpayers, because who pays public sector employees which fund these monster funds?
You do, through your taxes.