Money grubbing housewife becomes Alberta Premier, predictable results happen

Lunch Lady Premier's budget is horrible.

Hey, remember #MathIsHard? It turns out Prentice was right: like so many housewives with access to huge amounts of money they didn't earn, Rachel Arab is unable to balance a chequebook. This is partly due to her incompetence and the incompetence of her fellow members of government. But it's also partly because she hates taxpayers and thinks the money is just a free gift from above. In short, her government is part stupid, part evil, and all bad for Alberta.

So let's look at some of the highlowlights:

Remember the "mismanagement" of the Alberta PCs? The final year where Redford was turfed, Hancock lazed around, and Jim Dinning came in to save us all was a "operational surplus". It wasn't a real surplus, mind you, a topic we've covered before. Similarly, even in the "good news at the end" scenario the surplus you see won't actually be a surplus, and with the levels of debt being run up it could be 2030 before Alberta's back in the black again. That's a quarter century of progressives mismanaging the province's finances. Try to let that fact sink it a little bit.

a new Job Creation Incentive Program that will provide grants of up to $5,000 for each new full-time equivalent position created by eligible Alberta employers

Calgary Chamber of Commerce already blasted this idea while Calgary Chamber of Volunteer Organizations loved it -- time for a handy reminder that Rachel Arab's finance patsy Joe Ceci took the time to meet with non-profit leeches but refused to consult with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Wildrose, to their credit, pointed out the obvious: that this was basically very specifically targeted corporate welfare, which the NDP claim to be against.


Forget the fact that in the two years since Prentice the Alberta NDP will have raised spending -- already too high -- by a whopping $3.5 billion. Next year the interest servicing costs will hit $919M. That's almost as much as the entire Department of Energy ($990M), and it's literally tax dollars being pissed away with absolutely no benefit to the people of Alberta. Rachel Arab is sending almost a billion dollars to people like the Koch Brothers. Has anybody asked her vehement (and retarded) supporters how they feel about this?

Budget 2015 restores funding for post-secondary education that was cut in the March budget, and provides stable, predictable funding with planned increases in base operating funding of 2% per year. A two-year tuition freeze has been implemented to improve the accessibility and affordability of the post-secondary system.

High tuition is good. As a result, Rachel Arab is wasting the tax dollars provided by the hard work of private sector Albertans in order to fund a bunch of sodomy-loving useless degree holders. This is not good public policy.

Budget 2015 provides long-term stable funding for health care, protecting front-line jobs to serve Alberta’s growing population. Annual operating budget increases of 4% in 2016-17 and 3% in 2017-18 are planned, ensuring stable, predictable funding for health care.

Healthcare spending is out of control. Constant increases are not "sustainable" to use the NDP's favourite buzzword when it comes to private industry. At some point, hollow excuses like "growing population" (which under the NDP may not longer even be true) have to be abandoned. Public expenditure on healthcare at some point has to stop increasing. Ideally, of course, it should fall to zero because we should not have public healthcare. Once that happens, market pressures will cause healthcare to become like any other good: generally going down in real cost but occasionally increasing if specific external influences come into play. Also, let's remember that "front line personnel" are unionized nurses. Rachel Arab's husband is their union rep. This is collusion, and if Lou and Rachel Arab were private businessmen in America with this budget they'd be in jail for a RICO violation.

Budget 2015 provides funding for projected enrollment growth of 1.5% in 2015, and reverses a 3% ($78 million) reduction to school boards included in the March budget.

There's only one group with more clueless women wasting tax dollars than Rachel Arab's cabinet: and that's local public school boards. It's a nice little scam they have going: they beg for more money from the NDP, then they mismanage the money, then they tell the public the NDP didn't give them enough so the NDP gives them more. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Budget 2015 also includes new funding, beginning in 2016-17, to address classroom complexity and support inclusive education, phase-in a targeted school nutrition program and reduce school fees.

Lunch. Lady. Premier.

Lower oil prices and their impact on the provincial economy will continue to affect government revenue. Even with the tax changes approved in June and new revenue initiatives included in this budget, 2015-16 revenue will only be about $400 million higher than anticipated in the March budget.

Spoiler Alert: it won't even be that much higher. As a small example, and by small I mean not small, Cenovus has slashed jobs. Devon Energy cut 200 jobs, and Shell cancelled the Carmon Creek oilsands project. Part of this is low oil prices, but most of it is companies getting the fuck out of dodge with the extremist anti-corporation morons of Rachel Arab's government being in charge. When the option of paying extra taxes to meet Lunch Lady Premier's horrible spending spree or cutting ties to Alberta and running away, "the rich" whom the NDP and their retarded supporters hate so much pick the latter option every single time. So keep your eyes peeled.

Liquor mark-ups increase 5%, effective October 28, and the mark-up structure is being refined to promote made-in-Alberta products.

Besides the fact that Rachel Arab's government is hiking her government's cut of something that they shouldn't have any role in whatsoever (Alberta still owns the warehousing side of liquor sales, which is how they can always increase prices within 24 hours of making these announcements), the fact that there's some anti-free-trade protectionism included in the move shows exactly how the Alberta NDP act and think just like third rate banana republics.

The government is committed to maintaining a prudent level of debt even as the budget is used as a "shock absorber" for the provincial economy

The "shock" the economy is being forced to absorb is Rachel Arab's disgustingly extremist NDP government and the huge levels of public sector debt they are racking up as they funnel more and more money into their corrupt public union friends.

The Capital Plan is designed to put people to work, get Alberta’s economy moving and upgrade or expand existing infrastructure. Following on the advice of former Bank of Canada governor and leading economist David Dodge, the government is taking a counter cyclical approach to capital spending, creating jobs and promoting long-term economic growth by investing in infrastructure when it is needed most.

Neo-Keynesian claptrap. Which, by the way, not only doesn't work but curiously never is followed through in the good times when Keynesian economics says to slash government spending.

Aboriginal Relations. Consolidated expense is budgeted at $197 million in 2015-16 (excluding flood recovery initiatives). This budget includes $128 million for the First Nations Development Fund and $43 million for First Nations and Métis Relations. There is $1 million (increasing to $3 million per year beginning in 2016-17) to help build a new relationship with Indigenous
peoples and support initiatives in response to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Red Indians claim to be independent nations, so why do Albertans need to fund their cultural delusions?

Municipal Affairs. Consolidated expense is budgeted at $1.4 billion in 2015-16 (excluding flood recovery initiatives).

The next time cowardly asshole Don Iveson tries claiming municipalities are given the short-stick from the province, quote this piece of information at him.

Total public sector compensation costs of about $25 billion are budgeted in 2015-16, or one-half of total consolidated expense. Total compensation costs are expected to grow by about 2.5% per year over the following two years.

And then stop, right? ALL PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS PROVIDE NEGATIVE ECONOMIC VALUE, so the faster they get paid less, the better off all Albertans are.


The NDP are going to learn the lesson tax-and-spend extremist liberals have never really truly learned: the way to raise tax revenue is make everybody's taxes lower. But the facts don't match their far-left ideology, so they'll bankrupt the province pretending their lurid fantasies are the truth.

At the end of the day, Budget 2015 is a complete disaster. The Alberta NDP are completely clueless. For being huge fans of big government, they show a remarkable lack of intellectual rigour when it comes to such important topics like how it actually works: how it raises money, what happens when it spends money, and how it can poorly incentivize a populace. They are blowing public dollars on a wide variety of dubious or flat-out wrong initiatives (including $178M for money on the homeless, which won't help the existing homeless who are mostly going to just take the dole and ruin their lives even further, and bring more of their unwanted lot into our cities) because they have a completely flawed view of what their role in the economy and society truly is.

We see now how accurate I was in February when I said that Prentice had a rare chance to shrink government. He didn't, the NDP accused him of shrinking it (because they are leftists, remember, they're always liars) and were able to point to all the problems caused by him growing government as emblematic of his vicious cost-cutting. His failure has caused the NDP to ruin everything that made Alberta great to begin with.

It's time to fight back. The Alberta NDP have to be stopped. Nothing is too extreme. From the Premier who should be making sandwiches in the kitchen to the retarded Mongoloid who is Marie Renaud, they all deserve it.

Give it to them.