That's right if the Canadians can balance their budget and actually run surpluses why in the world can't we? As I was scouring the Internet looking for post ideas I ran across a couple of articles that had me rubbing my eyes when I first read them. One was from Bloomberg.com and carried the title "Obama Raises 2010 Deficit Estimate to $1.5 Trillion". The second was on a site called Kuro5hin.
Kuro had this to say"...the Wall Street Journal shocked Canadians by declaring their country an honorary member of the Third World. ... Canada's debt at the time was 68.4 per cent of its gross domestic product. Thirty-five per cent of federal revenues were drained by interest payments on the debt. The deficit that year was $30 billion. I wondered gee if Canada can come to grips with that kind of situation why do we continuously have budget short falls?
Next I wondered what our current debt is as a percentage of G.D.P I found the answer in the Bloomberg article. Bloomberg said "...The CBO estimates the budget deficit will total $1.6 trillion this year, or 11.2 percent of the GDP, and $1.4 trillion in 2010".
At this point I said well here's my post for today! If the Canadians can take deficits that amounted to almost 70% of their gdp what in the heck is wrong in this country. The article from Kuro5hin said that after being lumped in with the third world by the Wall Street Journal that pressure became intense for politicians to do something and get it done quick. The result was that they cut spending and increased revenue.
That kind of action is never popular liberals decry the inevitable cuts in social programs and conservatives bellyache about raising taxes, but, at the end of the day, they balanced their budgets and ran surpluses for 10 years! Yeah 10 years! People it's time we DEMAND that the jokers in congress get serious about cutting cost and increasing revenue where necessary. Our country simply cannot stand-and I think cannot survive-the present rate of out of control spending!
If the Canadians can have budget surpluses why can't we?
