Moonbox

It's devolving to tribalism, and we're only a few steps behind the Americans on that. I always have. I've considered myself very fiscally conservative, but not so much on social issues. My voting history has been heavily skewed towards conservatives (60-70 % for Federal and 100% provincially). I just don't identify with the conspiracy circus and their antics turn me away (like they did in the last election). and nobody would go to your town hall meetings to demand someone lose their job if they said something ignorant about women or whatever. They'd just note you as an ignorant ass and move on, and/or talk about you behind your back. Certainly, but politics is too often observing which way the wind is blowing and jumping in front of the crowd to "lead" them where they were already going. It always amazed me that liberals or whatever you want to call them couldn't understand how Trump got elected, when I would argue they were indirectly responsible for getting him there in the first place (or at least someone like him). If you don't govern from the centre and for the centre, and if you continue to refuse any compromise, the backlash will be fierce and swift.

I'm not talking about inflation here. I'm talking about government overspending, which Trudeau is guilty of. He was overspending before the pandemic and he's overspending now. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and accept the COVID stimulus and lockdowns, but the way he's expanding the federal public service is just bad fiscal management - full stop. You're absolutely right that "Justinflation" is a circus act that every opposition around the world is using to attack its standing government, but there is at least a grain of truth to it. Running huge and unnecessary deficits makes the problem worse, not better.

You always have Maxime fren. He'll console you.

I don't really know what the solution is though. Even I grew tired of Harper at the end, and I was a strong supporter for most of his time in office. There was a point when it became clear his pragmatism was actually just cynicism and when he tried to up the TFSA contribution limits to $10,000/year, it was clear he wasn't governing for "working families" anymore. I think that political literacy in Canada has probably never been lower and it's only getting worse. It's all part of a broader culture problem though, tied-in to outrage politics and the battle over wokeism etc. I'm consider myself a mostly social progressive but the culture of "offense" that has taken root everywhere doesn't strike me as pragmatism. The response for "This offends me" should usually be some combination of "So what?" and "Sorry you feel that way". There absolutely is a time and place for outrage and consequences for words, but the West is entirely unique in how much time and energy their politics spend managing people's hurt feelings. This sort of anti-pragmatism has had predictable results as well, motivating and to an extent validating the loudest and angriest against among the "deplorables". Guys like Alex Jones became popular in this environment.

People will just get angrier at Trudeau over time. The Emergency Act will be forgotten, but his sublime mismanagement of the economy and the public server (like his father) will turn enough people against him eventually. The federal Liberals will collapse the same way and for the same reasons as the Ontario Liberals. Eventually people will roll the dice on a guy like PP and will ignore he supported the Freedumb Convoy and all of the other dumb stuff he said because they'd rather a wildcard than a sure-bet loser. I suspect/hope that PP will moderate and drop some of his dumber claims/ideas now that he's won the leadership. We'll see.

I'm not a huge fan of hers in general mainly on account of her channeling the boob vote and the hurr durr fake news crowd, but like Poilievre she's smart and I agree with her on a fair bit of stuff. She actually knows what she's talking about in this video though and she's absolutely right here.

The debt to GDP ratio that has been touted over the years is an accounting trick. Canada Pension Plan's holdings are included on the asset side of that calculation which grossly overstates how good these numbers look. Without that included (which shouldn't be) we don't look any better than the countries Trudeau keeps comparing us to. I've talked about how/why the CPP changes from the 1990's changed how this is all accounted for and how Canada is fairly unique in this regard, but you can read about it here: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/caution-required-when-comparing-canadas-debt-to-that-of-other-countries

No, I understand salary plus benefits pretty well. The folks who don't are union employees complaining about their wages whilst ignoring how valuable their benefit packages are. Yes, and the UAW is a model for dysfunction and the primary reason why North American auto manufacturers have struggled since the late 1990's. When I was in business school back in the early 2000's, we studied GM vs Toyota and GM at the time had a $40/hr labor cost disadvantage vs Toyota. Meanwhile, when jobs became available at any Toyota plant, there'd be 100's of qualified applicants for every single position. That's why GM and Chrysler went bankrupt during the financial meltdown.

A few things: 1) It was already clear that they were reckless spenders, but the scale and the rationale behind it was not. 2) The steady and gradual increase in the spending (rather than, say, an increase to the baseline early on in his government to follow up on election promises or whatever) over 6-7 years clearly demonstrates a breakdown in budgetary constraint and discipline. 3) The structural nature of these deficits is a problem. If it was infrastructure spending on productivity-enhancing projects, I'm generally on board. When a large portion of that spending is instead going towards a growing bureaucracy and entrenched public sector union, you lose me. The federal public service has grown since Trudeau's day by roughly the equivalent of the size of Canada's armed forces (which from what I understand hasn't really grown at all). I am basing my numbers on PBO Kevin Page's report from like 10+ years ago. You would probably agree that this number is unlikely to have improved since then. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/budget-watchdog-finds-average-public-service-job-costs-114k-1.1174021 I don't think anyone here is going to seriously argue that our soldiers are overpaid. The bloat of clerks and pencil pushers, on the other hand, averaging over $110k/year including benefits, is a joke.

Was just reading this article and it sort of scared me a bit. I knew Justin was a spender (still believe his dad was our worst PM ever, at least until him) but the numbers are pretty stark. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-expansion-of-federal-civil-service-lacks-the-proper-measurements-for/ That's a paywall but the gist of it is that the federal public service has grown by an appalling ~25% since 2016 while the population grew around 7%. The average federal servant in Canada already makes over $100,000/year including their benefits and now stands at over a quarter million Canadians. This is not sustainable and we will almost certainly not be getting value out of these additional hires. This is the sort of thing that would make me vote for Pierre Poilievre, despite my strong distaste for the man.

This is true to an extent, but primarily for older Soviet generations. The younger folk have known nothing but supposed democracy and have had a taste of modern and open civilization that the old Russian generations didn't. A Russian's ability to endure shouldn't be underestimated, but that shouldn't be confused with a resilient and diverse economy, which they categorically do not have. China plays both sides. They'll support Russia to the extent they can remain a disruptive force, but not to the point where the Western trading partners they rely on start pulling away from them. Self-deluded dictators have gambled on what they perceived as the softness and decadence of the West. It usually didn't end well for them. The irony and contradiction of most of these anti-democratic forces is that they feel that their freeeedom is being taken away. Whatever foolishness either side gets themselves into, I believe at the core that democratic beliefs are still very strong, despite how ignorant and rabid the far-right and far-left can be.

No I don't think anyone needs to listen to FOX NEWS. Pot meet kettle...again. Your lack of perspective here is hilarious.

and faceplanted majestically. Well done little Vlad. You set your country's economy back to the 1980's. ? With that said, Trump was certainly right here, as he was occasionally with other things as well. I suspect you're not about to tell us about all the times he was wrong though, are you?

No, it was not a good take. He was a misanthropic, and out-of-touch cleric who argued that poor people were like animals and that allowing them to reproduce would doom us all. His theories weren't just categorically wrong (proven false). They were also wrong (shameful). The theory of lebenstraum was based on the same thinking - Hitler argued that increased farming intensity/improved management couldn't keep up with a growing population, thus Germany needed to expand eastward. That's not to say that Malthusianism is bad theory because Hilter believed it. It's bad for the same reason that institutional eugenics are. Going back to our original point, calculating environmental impact costs from an economic sense is very difficult (almost impossible). Aside from explicit cleanup costs or things like that, you are just making wild guesses and basing your numbers on a lot of nebulous assumptions. Sustainable growth is vital for the health of the planet, but the numbers behind it are not always clear. I don't say that as a climate change denier or anything like that, but there are a lot of alarmists who lead us into bad/wasteful decisions because of questionable theory/math/economics (see Dalton McGuinty's Green Energy Plan).

Late reply, but nothing was clear. Not only could James Malthus not calculate what you're referring to, but his economic theories were proto-industrial and have proven demonstrably false. He grossly overestimated population growth, grossly underestimated productivity improvements and humanity's ability to adapt. In short, Malthus' predictions were good for deer but not much else.

Are you joking? Do I even need to answer that? I would take him back in an instant over Trudeau, but let's be real. He was the ultimate pragmatist.

There are economists that try to calculate it, but it's not a very clear science and it ignores the main problem of all the environmental (particularly carbon-based) action plans. Unilateral action without buy-in from your neighbors and competitors is not helpful. Setting aggressive/painful carbon prices for your own industry while importing things from India or China doesn't reduce overall carbon. You are just outsourcing your pollution (along with the associated jobs) to the third-world. If you don't apply carbon-based duties on imports equal to the ones you're imposing on domestic polluters, you're just making yourself poorer for no net benefit. These sorts of policies don't do much other than give downtown yuppies comfy feels and allow goofs like Trudeau to pat themselves on the back.

Farmers around the world have been abusing poor farming practices for years and their crying about fertilizers is based on only wanting to plant the same cash crops over and over rather than rotate their fields properly. I live in an agi community and this isn't near the catastrophe they make it out to be. Canada is actually not even that bad of an offender. The targets are for 2030 and they're still in the consultation phase. I agree here, but their mistakes have mostly been handling the pipeline file and not getting oil to the market. Sure they knew, but there's nothing they can do about it. Raising interest rates doesn't increase chip production in Taiwan, but it might make it harder for US manufacturers to make their own chips to help ease it. There are always winners in even the worst markets. I'm not sure what you think this proves... No, because natural target inflation is between 1.5-3%. Maybe quote the PBO here because I don't really understand what you're talking about. Even the central bank says they didn't act soon enough. Inflation was worse than expected. It happens. They don't always get it right and they never get it perfect. Usually they error on the opposite side, raising rates before they should and shocking the economy into premature and unnecessary recession.

No, that's just something you guys yell about at one another in your reddit chats, because central bankers BAD, conspiracy, WEF, something something. Yellen's is the treasury secretary (the parallel to our Minister of Finance) and is the president's chief advisor on fiscal and economic policy. She is not a monetary policy officer, and if you had any idea what you were talking about then you wouldn't have brought her up.

Yeah and like Harper before him. That's what politicians do and nobody really holds them accountable for that sort of stuff.

I would say that the central bank has very little to do with the amount of food grown in our country. The weather and global commodity prices have much more to do with it. = The stock market didn't know. That's why the S&P 500 and TSX etc plummeted in March 2020 and are heavily down this year. They don't know any better than the central banks do - they generally know less. People have a tendency to just get angry at whoever is currently in charge when things are bad, rather than try to understand what's actually going on. Prices are up everywhere, so yelling at your government about inflation is like screaming into the wind. There are things you can blame our government for (like Canada's piss-poor energy policy since Trudeau took over) or his excessive deficits, but the majority of inflation right now is based on global factors nobody here has any control of. Supply problems aside, we'd probably be looking at 4.5-5% inflation based on COVID spending etc. The rest of it is thanks to Mother Nature, Putin and COVID related supply chain bottlenecks that are still being worked out. There are tools the central banks can employ to soften the blow (and we've seen them doing that), but if they try to counter unrelated/external inflationary pressures with monetary policy, and those pressure resolve on their own, then you've overcorrected and just made things worse down the road.

Trump has a track record of running big deficits during GOOD economic times and it's easy to make the economy look good when you do that. You're just passing the buck down the road because some administration down the road will have to deal with paying back that debt. Did you tick all of your boxes on the BAD THINGS? You forgot to mention the communists and the WEF.

I don't think Justin has any understanding of monetary policy whatsoever, nor does most of his government. Thankfully, guys like Carney, Poloz and Macklem do, and they're the ones making the decisions on these issues. I genuinely don't mean to insult you here, but if you think these are monetary policy issues then you don't know what monetary policy is. Again, not monetary policy. Central banks couldn't anticipate Russia invading Ukraine, or COVID and the supply-chain shortages they delivered. Those impossible-to-predict events are only one side of the challenges they face. Sometimes they CAN see inflationary pressure coming, but can't actually do anything to affect it. Widespread drought for example, have predictable outcomes for food prices, but monetary policy doesn't solve them. It's easy for populists to point at the central banks for a scapegoat though. Most people have literally zero understanding of monetary policy so if you just screech about how bad they are then the ignorant sort of fall in line behind you. DAMN THOSE CENTRAL BANKERS!

Trump doesn't pander to the GOP. He panders to white rich people and white poor people. The former he actually helps, the latter he simply distracts and points angrily towards "big tech" or "hilary clinton" or "china", while making them poorer and dumber as he goes. The GOP panders to him 100%. They're afraid of him because they know he's captured the minds of Joe Plumber and Frank Midwest Farmer, and that standing up to him means these goobers won't vote for them. They'll be happy to see him go away, but in the meantime they have to pretend and keep their heads low. For someone who actually likes Trump, your grasp of what's going on all around him is remarkably poor.

Inflation is a global problem but people everywhere are blaming their specific for governments for it. Trump may end up as president again, but he only pretends to be a good economic steward. It’s easy to look good in the moment when you run huge deficits while everything is already going well as he did, but the problem is that you’re just making everyone more poor down the road.