hitops

Well, that's a really dumb policy. At least it's something concrete however. So far 1 and 1.

Exactly. If government departments have no strong direction, there is absolutely no incentive to do anything. No, in economic terms the concept is exactly the same. You are getting performance with some kind of targets. In emotional terms, yes they are different. But I the taxpayer, should not be forced to pay to assuage somebody's emotional discomfort. I want performance from my public officials. No it is not. There is no logical reason that would be true nor is there a shred of evidence that it is happening. It is just as, if not more likely, that the targets are underestimating the amount of fraud. But if you don't make targets, you will never have any way to knowing because you cannot quantify how difficult it is to achieve the targets. A reasonable person would opt out of paying tax money for wasteful government programs, if they had the choice. We do have that choice with a home or auto insurer, but not with the government. That's the difference, a difference I don't believe you appreciate. One is a choice, I choose to not go with x home insurance company if I think they are likely to deny my future claim. The other is coercion, the government forces me to pay no matter what.

People still watch TV?

Cops have accountability, they work in pairs or get calls from the dispatcher, or have to respond directly to somebody making a complaints. Fraud workers do not, they work individually pushing paper reviewing files. If they decide to ignore something, nobody else would ever be aware of it. Oh and btw....cops have.....gasp......quotas! I guess according to you, their work is now invalid.

No don't you get it? Things that happened decades ago are Harper's fault too.

You need incentives for people too root out fraud, otherwise the incentive is just to ignore it. It can be very uncomfortable and socially difficult to confront somebody, the human incentive would just be to avoid doing it. Why not? No matter what, they collect the government paycheck, why put themselves through emotional discomfort? This is why incentives need to be present to do the job correctly. A target is not a quota, as much as you need it to be one for your argument. It is not the same. There is no evidence that legitimate claims are being denied, and if there was, we would not hear the end of it from the media. As to your claim about whether we know the exact amount of fraud - well that is a catch 22. We are trying to find out.....with things like going to people's homes, following them etc. Of course this yields all kinds of hollering from the opposition parties. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy - you get outraged responses to attempts to measure fraud, then complaints that we can't accurately measure fraud. There is a gigantic, chasmic difference between a private insurer denying claims and the government doing it. I have a choice to switch to a different insure if I want. I have no choice in whether I want to risk my tax dollars on fraudulent claims.

Who cares?

Re-read that. A summary here is: 'The senate is required to stop Harper and the senate is a problem because of Harper.' There's not reasoning here, just a self-contradicting paragraph hi which every part much be anti-Harper at any cost. And the cost is coherence. And now we should disband Ottawa?

Was listening to Derek Nepinak's comments on power and politics and he said something interesting: "I believe the solutions will be found internally among our own people, as opposed to among the bureaucracies of Ottawa" "we got really comfortable receiving government funding.....we're facing the highest levels of poverty we've ever seen" He also tore up his benefits card - the card that represents the pass to get the most free goodies of any ethnic group on earth. Hmmmmm do they have a leader here with some actual courage? Now usually whenever a native leader gets talking about something, without fail it is always "we deserve more of your money to complain about you better" or some variant of that. Has Nepinak actually woken up a little here and discovered that free money handouts are themselves the problem? Does he really believe natives should take responsibility for themselves instead of a steady strategy of demanding everyone else make them happy? If so that's very encouraging, I wonder if this could be the beginning of natives actually addressing their problems. Any native who decides that he doesn't have a right to my tax dollars and should be responsible for his own life, has my respect. Here's to hoping.

Wow thread revival. I'm still interested in how money is created, anyone wants to make a summary?

I seriously doubt AlienB has an academic POV, academics try to consider complex problems. This POV is that of somebody who has just enough knowledge to think they know something, and a political agenda. Results in simplistic, nonsense pseudo-intellectualism. Real academics understand that when you pull an economic lever, 100 other dials and levers move as well, often counter-acting what you did. This point is missed by AlienB. You are right, protectionist policies are ultimately extremely short-sighted and just do damage in the long run. Exactly as if we had demanded that dishwashers be banned because they were made in other countries and displaced people who wash dishes. The people who want us to have this huge manufacturing sector and force Canadians to buy only Canadian, without fail, simultaneously want a bunch of polices that directly sabotage having a manufacturing sector. For example we should build tons of cars (finished product) and also we should celebrate and support the unions that make it impossible to competitively build and sell cars. We should demand that our corporations create good paying jobs and we should also demand they pay on a taxation scheme that makes it unlikely they would hire high-wage labour. It's a contradictory belief system, but they do not get it. You can't have it both ways.

I liked the promised improvement in results, but my question is are the results measured the same way? In other words, does the new approach also come with a new grading system which is probably designed to validate the new system?

Just listened to that myself, I couldn't quite tell but I think it was the NDP member who decided not to go full attack mode on the issue so I do give him (her?) credit for that. I suppose 100% is the wrong word, but you know what I mean. Nothing the incumbent party ever does is good enough for the opposition parties generally, make no difference the issue, or even if the opposition party who do/did the exact same thing. Politics.

Good point. Wonder if a new one would be much different.

Yes of course it does, if you can buy it for 1/2 of what you can make it for. That frees up other local capital for other things. That's like insisting that your kid in medical school spend 4 hours per week cleaning his car. It makes no sense, he should just spend 10 min and $20 at the carwash for them to do it for him, because the rest of that time is more usefully directing his labor into learning medicine/studying. Your picture of the world economy is a bunch of equal villages. It is nothing like that, nations do very different things, and continue to change what they do as time moves on. You should also move on. That paragraph has no meaning. Every country is dependent on others for trade, welcome to the 20th century. Once you get there, you can join the 21st eventually as well. There are no people being sold. People benefit when we sell things to others, because they help in mining or making them. If Verizon buys into our telecom market, that means cheaper prices, which means more money left over for people, which means they buy other things or hire more people, which means other new economic activity. You economic perspective is utterly myopic. When some jobs leave, others come. When we try to protect some, we destroy others. Trying to shape the economy from the government, is just moving around the deck chairs, it's not actually creating anything. It's unfortunate that you and so many others can't see this. The economy you understand is the monopoly board version. It's way more complicated than that.

Jacee, can you give me advice on how to con the government into thinking I'm native or metis? This would be greatly advantageous to me. And this is the difference between natives and people groups who are actually suffering or persecuted. I would never want to be a black in South Africa pre-apartheid, or a Jew in Nazi Germany or a Christian in Syria or Iraq. But getting native status in Canada would be like winning a small lottery. For my kids too. The cost impact of putting them through university alone.....

It's actually a disgrace to Mandela and what his people went through to put them in the same ballpark as our natives. Way to cheapen their struggle, how grotesque. In the eyes of most, if the polls surrounding the Teresa Spence episode are any indication. You can both see their plight with sympathy and not agree with hijacking a truck at the same time. Strong opinions polarize people in both directions. If we see poor people with white/black/yellow/brown skin differently than poor people with 'red' skin and agree to treat them differently based only on the skin, that would be the definition of racism.

From Canadians being risk averse. We can't embrace shifts in the workforce because God forbid somebody loses a job.

Glass a day is fine. Smoking any amount a day is not, that produces lots of costs, as does drinking several glasses a day. You said 'casual' use, which involves binge drinking for lots of people. The point, which is not disputed, is that alcohol and smoking on the whole produce enormous social and economic costs. Whether the tax on those behaviors off-sets that cost, I don't know but I doubt it. You pay lots of money for that lady who smoked 1/2 pack for 40 years and now has to be treated for lung cancer.

If you require transportation of any kind, or if you require food or any type of goods be brought to a location close enough that you can obtain it, or you require that your job continue to exist (business be able to transport things to themselves to be able to continue to function), or you require that a hospital near you be able to transport materials and workers to their centre to treat you when you're sick, or you require workers to be able to get to job sites so you have phone service/plumbing/electricity/internet/then, or you require medicine be available at a pharmacy you can access, or you require clean water to be pumped to a place you can access, or you would like law enforcement to be able to move around and deter somebody from stealing your things or assaulting you, or you would like personal to be able to put out a fire at your house or rescue you if needed, then I would say it's safe enough. If you don't need any of that, then ya you could say it's not safe 'enough'.

No they can't, you're not seeing the big picture. The many that use it in moderation are exactly the people who get all kinds of health problems including many cancers after 30 years of it. I see this every single day, in the most literal sense.

The primary reason people don't like unions is because people perceive that unions allow for poor workers to stay employed, do poor work and collect good pay and benefits while doing it. This is inherently distasteful to most people. Say I'm your average Canadian. Unions in theory shouldn't bother me, it's perfectly fine for people in a company to\ form a union. But that's not what happens in reality. In reality, that union benefits other people at the expense of myself. Why? Because of government unions and government bailouts. Government workers should never have unions, it makes no sense, they are already hired by the government who can input any protections or wages they want. But they all do - and it costs all of us. Government employment is not required to be profitable, with the most obvious example being healthcare. If workers demand more money, that means government budgets need to increase, which means my tax dollars will increase. This is not fair because I have no choice in it. Those unions wages and benefits are now coming partly from my pocket, and protecting them likewise. The second example would be a company like a car company. When it's worker costs are too high and it fails, it gets a government bailout which is at the expense of you and me. That's why people hate unions, because they suck up money from everyone against their will, not just their own workers, but they benefit only their own workers. If unions were limited to private companies, and we let those companies fail once the unions kill them, I think people would be much more accepting of them.

This manifesto is like so many others.....just sticking your head in the sand pretending it's still 1950. It's not, the world has changed, and trying to 'protect' your own industries is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. These are two ways to do this, both are just increasing costs for Canadian consumers. The first way is you can subsidize them, which means increasing taxes and using that money to lower prices for consumers. This is basically the same as if I stole your wallet then bought you lunch and wanted you to thank me for it. The second way is simply preventing the trade, which means Canadians will pay more for the locally produced goods. Both ways increase costs, which produces economic drag. We already pay way more for food than Americans because of this nonsense. You can't keep the same economy forever, if you try it will just stagnate. A healthy economy is one where some jobs are lost while others are gained. The cheaper cost of goods means lower costs, which means more money left over to buy other things or hire other people. It's not actually a loss, it's shifting money around and because it's much more nimble and requires less administration, it's more efficient and there is less loss to waste. But hey every single Canadian job is important RIGHT NOW and should be preserved IN IT'S PRESENT FOR FOR ALL ETERNITY. So therefore we should also go back and forbid dishwashers in restaurants, because it will create lots of dishwashing jobs right? Hey maybe we should just ban cherries and oranges while we are at it, force everyone to eat only Canadian food right? Great so we should ban telephones because American companies make them, and cause job losses for hard working Canadians in the telegraph business.

It's not secret if you know about it. The huffington post will always post articles critical of free trade, whether it is good or bad.

I don't think that's accurate. Women rack up more credit card and personal debt. I'm not sure if there is a better metric to answer that question.