No doubt laden with austerity cuts even though continuing with tax cuts for Corporations. All the although running a Deficit for a sixth year in spite of promising “balanced budgets and fiscal duty.” The revenues are coming in reduce below their poor stewardship of the Economy beneath a majority government even though Evil Corporations sit on many hundred billion dollars of cash…and politician’s wasteful spending on Advertisements telling how wonderful things are when we know that living through it is not so
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will deliver a federal budget on March 21, the same day the parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page, is due in court in an attempt to clarify his mandate and get federal departments to hand over more financial information.
Flaherty announced the budget date Thursday in Ottawa after meeting with a group of students from a national charitable organization, who provided their own input on what they want in the spending plan. The Harper government is expected to further tighten purse strings and avoid significant new spending in the budget.
The minister has indicated the budget will project modest growth in the short term, close tax loopholes and look to secure better results for the government’s billions of dollars in job-training funding.
Many of the private sector economists Flaherty regularly consults in setting the government’s economic forecasts are predicting sluggish economic growth in 2013 of between 1.5% and 1.8%.
For many fiscal conservatives, a better label for these annual events would be Economic Inaction Plans. Budgets, after all, are not the fuel of growth. They are the government’s plans to take money out of the economy via taxes and spend it on a million different things. And as the United States has learned, government spending does not necessarily create growth, but the tax increases extracted to finance that spending can certainly undermine growth.
The Harper Government re-branded its budgets as “action plans” in the heat of the 2008 financial meltdown. It began with the 2009 budget, a document that came with a label on the cover in large type — “Canada’s Economic Action Plan”— and dramatic descriptions of a global economy in the grip of “the most synchronized recession in the post-war period fuelled in part by the worst financial market crisis since the 1930s.” The action plan would “boost confidence and economic growth and support Canadians and their families during this period of economic weakness.”
It was a multi-faceted effort, a “stimulus plan” that would spread money all over the country to help Canada emerge from recession “stronger, with a modernized, greener infrastructure, a renewed science and research base, a more skilled labour force, lower taxes and a more competitive economy.”
This “stimulus phase” of the plan supposedly ended last year. In a “final report” on the plan last year, Ottawa claimed it had “steered the economy through the deepest global recession since the 1930s” and has positioned Canada to succeed in the new global economic order.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/03/14/terence-corcoran-tory-action-plans-sow-seeds-of-economic-inaction/