Day: October 2, 2008

Harper = Bush Lite?

Harper's economic strategy, if it can be called that, is looking more and more like George Bush's: tax cuts and military spending. While gutting our revenue by $60 billion over five years, Harper laid out a plan to spend $490 billion in addition to the annual defence budget over 20 years to build up the Canadian military. This economic policy is well on its way to bankrupting the U.S. and could do the same to Canada.

We could instead bring together unions, capital, universities and provincial governments and make Canada a leader in green technologies, potentially providing hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs and literally thousands of profitable companies. But under Stephen Harper, Canada's economic ship of state just drifts.

Our economy is completely on its own, pulled this way and that, and ultimately down, by faltering corporate globalization and the catastrophic collapse of American casino capitalism.

Six Ways Harper Is Wrecking the Economy :: Views :: thetyee.ca.

The Tyee makes a compelling argument, not in the sense that Harper is a bumbling incompetent know nothing like Bush, but that the ideology of continuous tax cuts + deficit spending + cutting government programs will eventually lead us to where the U.S is at this point in time, and I don’t think too many Canadians want to be Americans at any time, especially the present.

That and his impotent and irresponsible approach to climate change make him a dangerous choice. Canada is where the US was in 2004, at the cusp of choosing a leader whose optics are better than his performance.