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Originally Posted by JamesB
You seem to be very invested in big government. There are very few things that only government can provide, and nothing they provide is done more efficiently than the private sector. If you can provide an example I would be glad to argue the point further, but really this is nonsense.
WRT education, I would rather have a lower tax burden and be able to choose an expensive private school. The NDP provided a perfect example of exactly what is wrong with public education. This province spent addition billions on the issue and managed to reduce class sizes by 1! If class size is an important metric why can it not be reduced? Yet the bureaucracy that deals with Education continues to grow at an astounding rate, use up resources that should be directed towards students and generates bureaucratic inertia that maintains the status quo. Why is it that private schools manage to have smaller class sizes?
I also want access to high quality health care, but much of what I have been forced to deal with has not been particularly good quality at all. Furthermore I am never given the option to seek alternate opinions or treatments. It is always take it or leave it. Again I would much rather have lower taxes and pick and choose my medical service provider.
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As GENINC has touched upon, for an example of the comparative efficiency of the private and public sectors, one needs look no further than our own healthcare system compared to the American one. They spend around 10k per capita per year on healthcare, while our system costs around half that much, and ours covers everyone, whereas theirs leaves tens of millions of people without insurance, and tens of millions more which coverage that is so limited that it's only good for catastrophic events.
As for your preference to choose a private school while having a lower tax burden, unless you are a wealthy person, I really don't understand this thinking. Take a look at this income tax calculator:
https://simpletax.ca/calculator
If you make 100,000 dollars per year in Alberta, which is well above the median income, your entire provincial tax burden is $7702. Private school can easily cost two or three times that per kid. How could you possibly think you're better off paying up front for schooling?? How do private schools manage to provide smaller class sizes? It's because the parents of the kids are paying HUGE money to cover the costs directly, out of pocket (and also because, for some reason, the government subsidizes those schools). People like to talk about 'efficiency,' but what is overlooked is the VALUE of what an average working person gets from their tax dollars. No, I wouldn't exactly say that I am 'invested in big government.' It's just that I recognize the extremely high value I'm getting from the services the government provides. And yes, in order for us regular people to get that value, the corporations and the wealthy have to subsidize our services through much higher tax rates. They don't like that, and neither does their boy Kenney, and that's why we're having this discussion about cuts.