Far cry form the 450 million they lied about before the election.

As expected, the downturn in forestry has proven to to be the financial nail in the coffin of the province of BC. Too bad Gordo and his goons refused to see it and went ahead with all that olympic spending.

Notice that despite an economic crisis in tax revenues, the Liberals continue their move to reduce progressive taxation (income taxes) and increase regressive taxation (HST and MSP).

Once again BC is one of the last remaining provinces to still have MSP premiums. Most of the other provinces got rid of them long ago and pay for health care from general tax revenues. That way it is more progressive.

That now makes it $640/person versus $1,925 in Alberta, $1,431 in Ontario, $992 in New Brunswick and $763 in Nova Scotia. Thise last two were based on March information.

Saskatchewan is short $1,200,000,000 or so as a reult of overestimating the income from the sale of Potash. That "lie" as some prefer to call the realities which have hit the world will create a deficit of about $1,200/person instead of $0/person as had been budgeted for in the spring.

Olympic spending, which is actually mostly spending on infrastructure building that is typcially used to inject funds into the economy during a recession, could have occurred now and the deficit would have been more of the size of those in Ontario as well as that of Canada which is running a projected deficit of $50.1 Billion or $1,504/person to pump into public works programs.

My complaint is that we are not spending enough. We should not have cut back some or even any of the services. Another half a billion would have kept the province intact and still better off than many others who have primarily a resource/manufacturing economy. We had some $15 billion in debt pay down in the past several years.

What can we learn from this?

1. Wars are an expensive hobby
2. Inflated housing is not how to build equity
3. Dependency on a single market is ill advised
4. Dependency on a single industry is ill advised
5. dependency to feed government and the economy on rising energy cost is folly. If you want to look at a "hidden" tax look at how much government gains when the price increases and how much we lose when the price increases.

My question then becomes, what are the various governments in Canada from feds to province to municiplities doing with respect to those lessons?

MSP .... there is a means test in BC, so not everyone pays directly for MSP. Those same people will have little or no income tax to pay, thus also do not pay it in that fashion.

I agree that sales taxes are regressive. But there are also rebates in play there as well which the lower income group receives but not the higher income group. Thus, a person in a low income bracket will effectively pay less on a total annual purchase of say $10,000 of the same items than someone in a higher income bracket who does not have access to those rebates.

Was it just the other day that the city of Prince George was given $40,000.00? for an Olympic tourch event?
while.....Cutting non profits and seniors groups that are already close to the bone.
I support the sport scene, but not if it takes away our citizens services :(

Its all the unions fault.

Yeah! Those damn unions clouding the good minds of all those economic wizards in the banks and the pure geniuses in the Liberal party. You notice they call it the Liberal"PARTY"? I wonder what they are taking in those parties???