Scotty

Which is why gas prices rise and fall at all companies at the same time, right?

Are you under the strange illusion a bunch of clerks in a mail-room decided to use the legislation provided for by parliament to put a rival out of business? I mean, REALLY???! It was a bunch of highly paid three piece suits sitting in a board room who made that decisions. And for this you call the striking workers "pieces of crap". Are you for real??

I don't think you're all that familiar with the term.

Mailmen are making less than half what the cops are. And it wouldn't surprise me if they had more injuries on the job from carrying those heavy bags around. Point is, they're both blue collar jobs. You and others complain about high public service salaries. Only executives in the public service make $100k a year. And that after a couple of dozen years climbing the ranks, and usually with at least a degree, if not two, along with a good deal of internal training and hard work. $91,000 is the basic salary of a full time constable - a guy who never got promoted at all! That's their entry level job!

Police remuneration has gotten way out of hand. These are basically blue collar jobs which require a couple of months of training. Dangerous? Yes, but not as dangerous as taxi drivers. Mining, fishing, trapping, logging, construction, all have higher workplace injuries and fatalities. Yet police are making in the $80,000 range in basic salaries. When you add in the overtime they get for such things as testifying at trials or work like the G20, many police officers are into six figure salaries. These are not geniuses here. The crime solution rate in Canada is not particularly impressive, and because of the huge salaries we pay to cops we can't afford a lot of them. We have way less police per capita than many other nations, including the US, UK, France and Germany. I think if I remember right, France has something like three times as many cops as us per capita. Last year over 1300 cops in toronto alone took home more than $100,000, and they just got a big bump in salary which will bring their basic, full time rate to $91,000 per year - not including overtime. It's ridiculous, and all because of how Hollywood has romanticized the job. If you actually did a true-to-life movie about a cop you'd find that he spent most of his time doing paperwork, filling out forms, or hanging around courts waiting to testify while playing cards with his buddies. And God knows there's precious little evidence these high salaries are drawing the best people into the job. The standard of behavior of the Toronto cops during the G20 summit was atrocious, and showed nothing but a lack of training, a lack of discipline, and a lack of understand that the law is supposed to apply to them too.

I have royalty cheques due too, but I support the workers in this one.

Other than general ignorance, what gives you the idea people get promoted in the public service due to seniority?

Saipan is clearly correct here. Look at the well-deserved rewards of all those big bank and stock broker CEOs. They did a bang-up job in investing in things none of them actually understood, right?

But Obama tried to raise them for those earning over 300,000. The Republicans said no.

And profitable! Given what a crappy job most our cash strapped cities do of clearing snow off the sidewalks we'd have all kinds of old people keeling over dead every day. Just think of the savings!

You don't cut taxes with a massive deficit. You do cut spending, but you also often need to raise taxes as well. People talk about cutting budgets with little real idea of what money is spent on, and how much of it simply cannot be cut because it's for pensions, for debt servicing, for medicare etc. And I have yet to see anyone calling for cuts to entitlements they personally like or benefit from. Few Republicans will touch the $20 billion annual subsidies for agriculture, for example, even though they'e not really needed. And you won't get them asking for a reduction in the $100 billion worth of subsidies to business. As for taxing the rich -- We can't do that! That would be unfair!

Canada Post workers have been bracing for a likely strike for some time now. Almost two years ago, Canada Post attacked one of their smaller unions, made up largely of young clerical staff, and after a month long strike managed to wrest away their sick leave package, replacing it with a private sector insurance scheme not nearly as generous and certain. Now they're demanding the same from Canada Posts' biggest union CUPW. And doing it with a certain heavy handed obviousness to things which indicate Canada Post doesn't really mind a strike. In addition to removing sick leave they want to drop wages for new hires by a 25%, expand temporary workers, increase worker contributions to benefits, and dramatically increase contributions for retired workers, and unilaterally change the safety regulations for letter carriers. All in the same contract. So anyone who thinks this is going to be a short strike had best think again. Canada Post, which, incidentally, has been profitable for the last 16 years, is clearly setting out with a chip on its shoulder, and the only thing likely to end a strike is back to work laws passed by parliament. If that's done with arbitration Canada Post is most unlikely to get is way. If it's done without arbitration it will likely cause violence, but I'm not sure if the Conservatives necessarily mind that.

I would think the lack of a 'how' would explain the lack of a 'why'...

How far do you go with this? Do you hire one public servant to constantly check up on another public servant? Then who checks up on the first guy? This is why taxes are so high. I understand the need to monitor the private sector, but this is government monitoring government. The fault, so far as i can see, lies with the Walkerton government which appointed unqualified clowns and then failed to keep an eye on them. I just don't buy that it's the province's responsibility to keep checking up on what municipal workers are doing.

If I were thinking tactically, and only cared about votes, I would dump Israel and support the Arabs wholeheartedly. Who are evangelicals going to vote for? Jack Layton? Meanwhile, there are twice as many Muslims than Jews in Canada, and their community is growing rapidly. Further, they are a much more natural fit with a social conservative mindset which would certainly agree with the Tories' feelings on a whole host of social issues, whereas the Jewish community tends to be more naturally liberal. Harper's support of Israel is thus not done for tactical but principled reasons.

Who is going to do the punishing? Who wants to punish Russia for their recent invasion of Georgia?

Well, I am not a sidelines kind of guy normally, and I think we have some time before the excrement hits the rotary blades. I'm buying into staples, like food products, ie, High Liner, for example, and Premium Brands. People gotta eat, no matter what.

The Tea Party is all about less government, but without any specific idea how to bring that about. But it's also about less taxes. Anyone ever hear ANYONE in the tea party movement suggest raising taxes to combat the deficit?

So when all this hits the fan is the bottom going to drop out of the market? What should investors be doing to protect themselves? Bonds could be problematic with the likelihood of interest rate heights...

I don't think the US government as presently constituted is up to facing their impending budgetary crisis. The Republicans are too in hock to the big special interest groups and corporations which profit so much (the agricultural corporations, the mining corporations, the pharmaceutical and health care corporations, etc.) and frantically pushing away at hot button issues of no real importance, like abortion, gun control and gay marriage. Oh, and of course, promising to cut taxes(!?). The American people are bitching and moaning about gas prices which are half what everyone else pays, and extremely unlikely to support anyone who proposes raising taxes by, for example, slapping a tax on gasoline. The Democrats won't allow cuts in personal entitlements and the Republicans won't consider cuts in corporate entitlements and subsidies. And with an election every sixteen seconds, it seems, nobody has the balls to tell the American people bad news. If a guy like Winston Churchill showed up today and said "I have nothing to promise you but sweat, blood and toil" the voters would rush over to the guy singing and dancing and promising them tax cuts.

I don't see it that way. Prior to 1970 the US and Europe did not run these huge, consistent deficits. The deficit spending started in the seventies, really (ignoring the brief spikes of the two world wars). In what way are we so much better off economically now than we were in 1970? Where did all that money go? From what I understand, the only people who have been raking in the cash over the past quarter century are the super rich -- not the rich, not even the wealthy, but mostly, the super rich, less than 1% of the population.

I could cite any number of commentators of late, but Black is a knowledgeable writer whose prose is acerbic and to the point. Basically, there seems little likelihood the US or Europeans are going to reign in their spending any time soon. Europe lacks the political will while the US political will is too fractured. Half of Americans still think they deserve another big tax cut, so big tax increases are unlikely to be proposed in the near future. None of this is going to be good for Canada, because regardless of what we do with our own deficit if European nations start defaulting like dominoes and the Americans follow suit we're probably headed for something akin to a great depression. Someone assure me I'm wrong. Unless the United States has the most spectacular cognitive awakening since Brunhilda, if not Lazarus, the laws of arithmetic are going to assert themselves in Zeus-like terms. Meanwhile, the European Union is a water-logged vessel in a tempest, frantically bailing Conrad Black

No, they're not, but do we really want cities which have nothing in the way of galleries, live theater, ballet, orchestras, or whatever, just because we want to pinch pennies? I mean, it really doesn't amount to all that much in the scheme of things. Even the CBC, which is more expensive, does perform a useful function, not so much in the big cities, but in the more rural areas nobody else will serve.

World leading? Hardly. And those Canadian music artists popular elsewhere mostly do it without government help.

The cost of the jets is over more than two decades. It's not all paid up front. You want to wait another two decades before buying them? That's past the lifetime of the current jets.