RNG

There is a significant groundswell for a new type of taxation growing in America. It is Fair Tax. Essentially it is our GST, but only GST. No other taxes. Some fairly high-powered economists in the US figure that putting the Fair Tax at 27% would be revenue neutral. And that includes sending everyone a "prebate" cheque of whatever the poverty line amount is at the start of the year. Your thoughts?

I fought the Trudeau caused recession of 1980 and around there. It was terrible in Alberta. But there were jobs even through the worst of it. The biggest problem was the Joe Dork, who was making x$ per hour before wouldn't settle for x-1$ per hour. Well, tough titties for him. My son just got into the labour market then, fresh out of school, and had a great time. Took a job at a lesser rate and progressed way up really fast past all the bitch and moan types.

Response to wyly: You are a statics type while the world deals with kinetics. Your estimate that the water all goes back down as rain is correct in the long run, but in the short term, the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere stays high, and absorbs all kinds of IR. That is the way of the world. Deal with it. I'm not saying I'm right, but I am saying that the CO2 crybabies are a long way from proving a fact. We do need to cut down on CO2. The oceans are becoming acidified to an alarming extent. No question there. But there is no way I believe CO2 is causing the warming. I really believe it is water vapour. Coda: Why, if this is a Canadian message board, does the spell checker reject vapour and accept vapor?

It is illegal for a very good reason. Some dork is on a rooftop wanting to jump. If suicide wasn't illegal, the cops couldn't jump his bones and stop it. Since they made it illegal they can. You can expand the concept to cover other situations, I assume.

Trudeau was in difficult times? Mostly of his own making. Harper is having to ride out one of the world's worst recessions. Trudeau screwed me, he screwed my wife and worst of all ,he screwed my kids. Harper has totally pissed me off lately. But Trudeau is just evil IMO.

Yes. But the prison costs would drop more than the treatment costs according to many studies and actual data from Portugal and Holland. Plus, I believe that if you want to kill yourself with an OD, that is your right. Save us all a bunch.

This is not conspiracy theory. He has, through his bullshit movie, established himself as a broker for carbon credit trading. Thus far it is mostly Europe involved. But he gets a cut of the carbon credit buying and trading. And there is way more buying than trading. I googled Al Gore carbon credits and this is one of a bunch of hits. http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover031307.htm

That was my belief forever. But look at the facts. Especially the US war on drugs. What a travesty. The money spent on incarceration could be spent on treatment. Look at the literature. Criminologist after criminologist has proven this. It don't work. The best would be to decriminalize all drug use. Legalize it, tax it, regulate it and offer help to the addicts. And if they choose to OD and kill themselves, cool, I'm a Darwin fan. Arguments that prohibitive drug laws are ineffective Stephen Rolles, writing in the British Medical Journal, argues: Consensus is growing within the drugs field and beyond that the prohibition on production, supply, and use of certain drugs has not only failed to deliver its intended goals but has been counterproductive. Evidence is mounting that this policy has not only exacerbated many public health problems, such as adulterated drugs and the spread of HIV and hepatitis B and C infection among injecting drug users, but has created a much larger set of secondary harms associated with the criminal market. These now include vast networks of organised crime, endemic violence related to the drug market, corruption of law enforcement and governments. These conclusions have been reached by a succession of committees and reports including, in the United Kingdom alone, the Police Foundation, the Home Affairs Select Committee, The prime minister’s Strategy Unit, the Royal Society of Arts, and the UK Drug Policy Consortium. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has also acknowledged the many "unintended negative consequences" of drug enforcement.[15] The editor of the British Medical Journal, Dr Fiona Godlee, gave her personal support to Rolles' call for decriminalisation, and the arguments drew particular support from Sir Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, who said we should be treating drugs "as a health issue rather than criminalising people" and "this could drastically reduce crime and improve health". Danny Kushlik, head of external affairs at Transform, said the intervention of senior medical professionals was significant. "Sir Ian's statement is yet another nail in prohibition's coffin," he said. "The Hippocratic oath says: 'First, do no harm'. Physicians are duty bound to speak out if the outcomes show that prohibition causes more harm than it reduces." Nicholas Green, chairman of the Bar Council, made comments in a report in the profession's magazine, in which he said that drug-related crime costs the UK economy about £13bn a year and that there was growing evidence that decriminalisation could free up police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health.[16] A report sponsored by the New York County Lawyers' Association, one of the largest local bar associations in the United States, argues on the subject of US drug policy: Notwithstanding the vast public resources expended on the enforcement of penal statutes against users and distributors of controlled substances, contemporary drug policy appears to have failed, even on its own terms, in a number of notable respects. These include: minimal reduction in the consumption of controlled substances; failure to reduce violent crime; failure to markedly reduce drug importation, distribution and street-level drug sales; failure to reduce the widespread availability of drugs to potential users; failure to deter individuals from becoming involved in the drug trade; failure to impact upon the huge profits and financial opportunity available to individual "entrepreneurs" and organized underworld organizations through engaging in the illicit drug trade; the expenditure of great amounts of increasingly limited public resources in pursuit of a cost-intensive "penal" or "law-enforcement" based policy; failure to provide meaningful treatment and other assistance to substance abusers and their families; and failure to provide meaningful alternative economic opportunities to those attracted to the drug trade for lack of other available avenues for financial advancement.[17] Moreover, a growing body of evidence and opinion suggests that contemporary drug policy, as pursued in recent decades, may be counterproductive and even harmful to the society whose public safety it seeks to protect. This conclusion becomes more readily apparent when one distinguishes the harms suffered by society and its members directly attributable to the pharmacological effects of drug use upon human behavior, from those harms resulting from policies attempting to eradicate drug use.[18] With aid of these distinctions, we see that present drug policy appears to contribute to the increase of violence in our communities. It does so by permitting and indeed, causing the drug trade to remain a lucrative source of economic opportunity for street dealers, drug kingpins and all those willing to engage in the often violent, illicit, black market trade. Meanwhile, the effect of present policy serves to stigmatize and marginalize drug users, thereby inhibiting and undermining the efforts of many such individuals to remain or become productive, gainfully employed members of society. Furthermore, current policy has not only failed to provide adequate access to treatment for substance abuse, it has, in many ways, rendered the obtaining of such treatment, and of other medical services, more difficult and even dangerous to pursue.[19] In response to claims that prohibition can work, as claimed by Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, drawing attention to the drug policy of Sweden Henrik Tham has written that sometimes it's domestically important to stress drug policy as successful, as the case of Sweden where this notion is important, serving "the function of strengthening a threatened national identity in a situation where the traditional ‘Swedish model’ has come under increasingly hard attack from both inside and outside the country." Tham questions the success of the Swedish model - "The shift in Swedish drug policy since around 1980 [nb 1] towards a more strict model has according to the official point of view been successful by comparison with the earlier, more lenient drug policy. However, available systematic indicators show that the prevalence of drug use has increased since around 1980, that the decrease in drug incidence was particularly marked during the 1970s and that some indicators point towards an increase during the 1990s."[20] Leif Lenke and Börje Olsson from Stockholm University have conducted research that showed how drug use have followed the youth unemployment in close correlation. They noted that unlike most of Europe, Sweden did not have widespread and lingering youth unemployment until the early 1990s financial crisis, suggesting that unattractive future prospects may contribute to the increase in drug use among the young.[21] CAN, the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs, 2009 report stated that the increase in drug use have continued since the 1990s with a slight dip in the mid-2000.[22] The professor emeritus in criminology at the University of Oslo, Nils Christie, pointed out Sweden as the hawk of international drug policy, being a welfare alibi and giving legitimacy to the US drug war. Adding that the two countries have an extraordinary influence on UNODC as the biggest donor countries.[23] An editorial in The Economist argued: fear [of legalisation] is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates.[24] Antonio Maria Costa's conviction that "countries have the drug problem they deserve" if they fail to follow the 'Swedish Model' in drug control has also been criticised in Peter Cohen's work - Looking at the UN, smelling a rat.[25] [edit] Deterrence [edit] Arguments that prohibition discourages drug use A 2001 Australian study of 18-29 year olds by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research suggests that prohibition deters illicit drug use.[26] 29% of those who had never used cannabis cited the illegality of the substance as their reason for never using the drug, while 19% of those who had ceased use of cannabis cited its illegality as their reason. A mechanism by which illicit drug use is controlled is the price of drugs. Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the US ONDCP argues, Controls and prohibitions help to keep prices higher, and higher prices help keep use rates relatively low, since drug use, especially among young people, is known to be sensitive to price. The relationship between pricing and rates of youth substance use is well-established with respect to alcohol and cigarette taxes. There is literature showing that increases in the price of cigarettes triggers declines in use.”[27] The DEA argues "Legalization has been tried before—and failed miserably. Alaska’s experiment with legalization in the 1970s led to the state’s teens using marijuana at more than twice the rate of other youths nationally. This led Alaska’s residents to vote to re-criminalize marijuana in 1990."[28] Drug Free Australia has cited the Netherlands as an example of drug policy failure because it is soft in approach.[1] They argue that the Dutch idea of going soft on cannabis dealers, thereby creating a ‘separation of markets’ from hard drug dealers has failed to stem the initiation to drugs such as heroin, cocaine and amphetamines. In 1998 the Netherlands had the third highest cannabis and cocaine use in Europe.[1] According to Barry McCaffrey of US Office of Drug Control Policy, Dutch tolerance has allowed the Netherlands to become a criminal epicentre for illicit synthetic drug manufacture, particularly ecstasy, as well as the home for production and worldwide export of strains of cannabis with THC reportedly 10 times higher than normal.[29] Gil Kerlikowske has attested that, where there were once thousands of cannabis cafés there are now only several hundred.[30] Levels of cannabis use, in 2005 only marginally higher than in 1998, while other European countries have accelerated past them, are more likely, Drug Free Australia argues, the result of a growing intolerance of cannabis in the Netherlands rather than a growing tolerance.[1] Drug Free Australia has also argued that British reductions in cannabis use after softer legislation may be moreso the result of heavy UK media exposure of the stronger evidence of links between cannabis. Portugal has basically legalized all drugs and crime rates have apparently plummeted.

Given the tone of his reply, I suspect that attempting to offer logic may be a losing proposition.

I live in BC. We have a carbon tax, and even heavier in the Greater Vancouver area. That hurts the BC economy relative to, for example, Alberta. Al Gore is making millions on cap and trade. It is happening now. You have reason to fear.

As I said, I would love to be a Conservative, but Harper has pissed me off way too much. And one of the major ways is that he has really made it a "my way or the hiway" party. Admittedly, he is just following the successful style of the Liberals, but that don't make it right. A US dominated message board I have subscribed to for about 3 years has a recurring theme expressed by both lefty Democrats and righty Republicans, all seats have a one term limit. They claim that might make people work towards and vote for things what would actually help the country rather than work towards getting themselves re-elected. I'm not sure it would work, but we do need a significant change.

I'm very new to this board but have been a member of a board for 3 years that has discussed climate change often. So you guys may have covered this. But they are mostly American and very ideological. The question I still have, and my formal education was in chemisty, is that of CO2, methane and water vapour, water vapour is way more efficient in absorbing infrared radiation, but to the best of my knowledge none of the models being used to calculate these things includes water vapour. With all the irrigation being done in the world today, and with the huge numbers of people breathing out water vapour and peeing, and the number of domesticated animals breathing and peeing, the steady state concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere must be much higher than it was 50 years ago. I'm not saying that limiting CO2 output is bad. But should we risk seriously harming our economy on what may not be the real evil here?

When we were "just a rural dust bowl" we had to buy inferior Ontario built tractors at a rediculous price because the Ontario dominated parliament put punitive duties on US tractors, and we had to sell our grain to Ontario at government mandated prices. Sort of like what Trudeau did to oil. So check your facts.

I was a hang-em high type of guy and then a terrible thing happened to me. Facts hit me in the face. The US has more than 1% of it's population behind bars. The war on drugs. The three strikes rule. And is it working? I'm very "right wing" economically. A term not used in Canada so much, but I consider myself a Libertarian. But Harper has lost it IMO. This "more hard time-hard on crime" stuff is ideology and vote buying. And it is a stupid expense for Canada. The NDP suck, and as a good ex-Alberta oilpatch worker I can't vote Liberal. Hope there's a decent independent in my riding. Reason for edit: Punctuation.

The significant difference being that in Alberta, rather than saying "we want more", we say "we want less of ours to be stolen".

Let me guess, either a Torontonian or Quebecois NDP'er. Harper just lost my vote a little while ago, but Trudeau sucks brontasaurus.

Oh yes. The feds sort of handicap it. A while ago when the oilpatch was booming, you had to have approximately a gazzillion hours if you were in Alberta, but about 5 hours was enough in NL. Obviously I'm using hyperbole but the concept is correct.

The concept of cameras or no cameras is really intriguing. I wish I knew which way to go. Right now it is mostly playing for the cameras but we don't want drunken replicas of the S. Korean or Ukrainian parliaments. A neutral and really mean speaker who has some teeth, like the ability to fine big time, or limit advertising for transgressors might work, but it is the same lottery as dictatorship. A dictatorship with a "good" dictator is the best, most efficient form of government, but...............