Quote:
Originally Posted by YYC338
The sensible thing to do for the government of the day in 2015 & 16 would be to recognize this and control spending. What did the government of the day due instead? Well they continued to spend like drunken sailors and made a bad problem much worse by their irresponsible fiscal control.
Again, I'll ask the same question I asked earlier in this thread. How long is it reasonable to accept government spending that exceeds their revenue, regardless of the party in power?
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Actually, what you describe would have been the exact opposite of the sensible thing to do. There is a time for deficit spending, and that time is during an economic recession. And that's not me talking, that's the conventional wisdom among mainstream economists. The last thing you want to do during bad economic times is cut spending, since government spending is an economic stimulus, and cuts have the opposite effect.
As for your question, I would answer it with my previous paragraph. It is reasonable to expect a government to spend more than it takes in for as long as it takes to complete an economic recovery, within certain debt-to-gdp ratio limits, and we are well within those. This assumes, of course, that during fat times, a corresponding surplus is run, and, as we can see in flatlandliver's graph, the PC government failed to do this in the years preceding the crash when oil was very high.
The UCP obsession with balancing the budget was never grounded in any sound economic theory. It was always a political play to win votes, and to justify the measures they'll be taking as part of a long-term plan to dismantle government on behalf of corporations.