Jeff Jedras (National Post blog): Harper's austerity is for other people

[tuvor]

Austerity was the message they wanted to send. There was empty symbolism like promising to freeze MP and Senator salaries. There was a freezing of operating budgets. Promises to find efficiencies and cut waste they've apparently been tolerating for nearly four years. And there was a pretty chart of reducing deficits. Read the fine print and you'd see it's all pretty much a sham, with no real plan for deficit reduction to back their rosy projections.

Still, some of the more gullible members of the media swallowed the message uncritically. The most glaring example of this was John Ibbitson. In a Globe column that made me regret actually dropping $1.50 for a print newspaper for the first time in two years, Ibbitson called this the "the most austere, hell-and-high-water, deficit-fighting document since Paul Martin set out to balance his budget in the nineties." And I'm the King of Siam.

The austerity message was patently absurd from the start, as a look inside government operations clearly shows.

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http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/08/jeff-jedras-harper-s-austerity-is-for-other-people.aspx

[edwinmathews]

1. With a projected 60 billion debt

by the end of the year this budget is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic .

[HeresyLives]

2. That's just the deficit.

The debt is far more.