Be bold! Be oblivious!

One of the key villains in the horrid regime that Mike Harris cursed Ontario with is a windbag from the far eastern stretches of what some call the GTA: Whitby. Like that’s got anything to do with Toronto. But, since he’s the closest elected Tory to our urban home, Stephen Harper’s government appointed him the man in charge of kiboshing Toronto’s hopes, wishes and dreams.

Like the reactionary ideologue he is, Jim Flaherty knows that spending cuts are what will cure our ills. Just the way they messed up Ontario and ground Toronto into the dust beneath their heels when he and Mike were a couple.

So he’s got a plan, being the chief financial official in the country. It’s so simple: trickle-down prosperity. Hike income taxes on the poorest, as he recently did—there are so many more of them that even if each only pays a few more bucks it should be a bonanza for the federal treasury.

Then he’ll slash the national debt. Of course much of that isn’t in his hands because he counts the debts of provinces in that contrived tally he calls the “net debt.” No matter, neo-con Tories take the impossible in stride.

With the increased tax money from, among others, Canada’s poorest people, he’ll give back tax money to the wealthy. They’ll rush out and buy more goods and services with the windfall, the recipients of this increased purchasing will rush out and buy more fast-food meals, cigarettes and beer, and the good folks on the bottom will enjoy a trickle of relative prosperity from all this increased economic activity lifting all boats, as they say.

Of course if the wealthy folks decide to gamble the windfall money in casinos like the stock market or the one at Niagara Falls, or park it in interest-bearing accounts, that might stall the trickle.

The theory does have a few unknowns. Like, what if the provinces don’t balance their budgets as prescribed in Flaherty’s grand scheme? What if they decide to borrow, or just increase spending, to fix their dangerous bridges, upgrade their water supplies, improve their schools? Blowhard Flaherty’s bold plan collapses.

Taxes are the price of civilization. Neo-conmen want less government accountability, not more, because they want less government and thus less need for accountability. Flaherty’s pompous piety in claiming to save the next generation from a legacy of debt for needed improvements ignores the legacy for posterity of crumbling infrastructure and declining vital services that his plan fosters.