"Kick Me Like You Did Before, I Can't Even Feel The Pain No More"

"As a conservative, I will cut your taxes and grow the government bigger
than Paul Martin did.  And that's conservatism we can all believe in!
Would a guy in a blue sweater vest lie to you?"

I'm having just the best time of my life debating my friend, Maikeru, in the comments of this post. It really is turning out to be one of the great joys of my life.

You see, on Friday the Conservative Harper Government (which I think I'm legally required to call them) was defeated on a confidence motion and Canada was thrown into the fourth election in seven years that no one wants.

Actually, I take that back. Tory partisans very much want this election because they're delusional enough to think that they can win their long lusted-after majority. They mostly base this belief on a shitload of polls that were conducted before the writ was dropped and reflected nothing except that we really don't want an election at all.

But I've been to this dance before. No fewer than three times, I've seen Harper enjoy almost majestic polling leads - some as high as ten points, easily majority territory - only to piss them away by allowing his candidates to say awesomely dumb shit about abortion and gay marriage, which exactly no one cares about. In 2008, he threatened to cut off the funding to Quebec's art fags and somehow expected to be rewarded for that in la belle province. I can't explain their almost spectacular stupidity, but that hardly prevents me from enjoying it.

At this point, I should explain my recent voting history. I wanted to vote for Harper in 2004 and 2006, but I didn't because I wasn't sure that he could keep the Team Jesus populist wing of his coalition in line.

In all honesty, Team Jesus annoys me every bit as much as liberals do, threatened as they are by the things that don't matter and willing to battle them at the expense of things that do, like money and foreign policy. I've spent twenty years trying to do business with those people, and I've had it. Not only do they endlessly bitch about my extensive pornography collection, they create waves of fucking debt for my trouble.

Look, I've reconciled myself to the fact that I'll never get what I want, which is a small government that does only the very few things that the private sector can't and otherwise minds it's own goddamned business. But what I can - and do - demand is that whatever goodies the shithead voters and lying cocksucker politicians agree is worth wasting money on is at least paid for.

If nothing else, if we decide that we're going to vote ourselves a tidal wave of free shit, then we should at least raise the revenue to pay for it. My problem with supply-side economics is that it ultimately winds up stiffing the next generation with the bill, and they're already mostly illiterate and almost certain to get buggered by the global economy. If you think that your 12 year old drooling retard of a Lady Gaga enthusiast is going to seriously compete with a similarly aged kid from the Punjab who already has an MBA, you're delusional.

Besides, I'm already pissed that the money has run out just in time for us to finance the endless retirement and lingering deaths of the wholly selfish and boundlessly stupid fucking Boomers. There's nothing conservative about doing to our kids what our parents, with their Great Societies and Reagan Revolutions, did to us. They're going to have it bad enough as it is.

And you know what Harper did when he finally managed to get himself elected? He got all the money in a giant pile and set it on fucking fire is what!

First, he cut the GST (Canada's consumption tax) by two percent, which every expert on Earth agrees is  the least productive kind of tax cut known to man because it stimulates absolutely no economic activity among the vast majority of the middle class, which is what tax cuts are supposed to fucking do.

Then he went on a spending spree, hoping that he could somehow buy himself his elusive majority. A $13 billion dollar surplus that was left by the Liberals of all people has been magically transformed into annual $55 billion deficits in less than five years. My (admittedly, very quick and rough) math shows that they've pissed away over $200 billion, and they have absolutely nothing to show for it.

If you factor in the differing sizes of our economies, Harper has spent nearly the same amount of money that Presidents Bush and Obama did during the same period. Only he didn't produce anything cool, like yauchts for the motherfucking bankers' second homes in the goddamned Bahamas, with it. It just went into the mist.

By the way, I'd love to have the debate with Tory partisans that Harper's Keynseian stimulus spending worked and Obama's didn't. Please engage me on that because that what you're effectively arguing. By the way, Obama's stimulus was about 1/3rd  tax cuts. Harper's? Virtually zero. If anything, you can make a pretty good case that Obama's "secular, socialist machine" is comfortably to the right of Canada's Conservative government.

My friend Maikeru, bless his heart, is still asserting that Prime Minister Harper "inherited a nation drunk on government largess, and he's guided it though the DT's nicely. "

I actually clubbed myself in the face with a Johnny Walker Black bottle when I read that, because I thought that I had finally lost my fucking mind. There's no way that anyone could actually write that in public, where everybody could read it, is there? How could anyone ignore not just the facts, but the basic fucking math, like that?

So I did a Google search, hoping to learn that Maikeru was right and that I myself had gone into the DT's. The search term I used, if you want to check for yourself, was "growth of government under Harper."


This is the first article that came up. It was published about five weeks ago in The National Post, one of Canada's more right-leaning newspapers.

Even without the spending burst of the economic stimulus program, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has substantially boosted federal government expenditures during his five years in office, and added thousands of bodies to the federal public service.

(...)

Overall, the federal public service -- which includes civilian employees at National Defence and the RCMP, but not the military members and police officers already counted -- swelled by 33,023 people, slightly more than 13% over five years.

Relative to the growth in Canadian population under the Harper government, the federal public service grew by 7.8%.

Some departments grew even faster than the Prime Minister's priorities. For example:

- Human Resources and Skills Development Canada increased its FTEs by more than 8,000, a growth of 47%;

- Canada Border Service Agency took on nearly 2,662 FTEs (22% growth);

- Indian Affairs got 1,280 (32% growth);

- Citizenship and Immigration added 969 (28% growth).

(...)

Hiring, however, is only one measure of government growth.

Federal program spending during Mr. Martin's final year in power -- 2005-2006 -- stood at $175 billion. By 2009-2010, under Harper, it had climbed to $245 billion.

Economic analysts cautioned that such figures should be gauged against overall growth in the Canadian economy. The question they ask is: as the economy grows, does the size of government grow at the same rate, more quickly, or more slowly? Both the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the right-leaning Fraser Institute recommended using this method to gauge government growth.

Postmedia's analysis found that even relative to growth of the Canadian economy, program expenses -- which include departmental program spending as well as major transfers of money to individuals and other levels of government -- increased more than 25% over five years.

Allow me, for just a moment, to continue Maikeru's DT analogy, if only because it's the cutest goddamned thing that I've ever heard. But it's something that I want to explore.

Under Chretien-Martin, "By 1995, the annual deficit had reached extreme levels, totaling $37.5 billion" ...."In 1994-95, the cost of maintaining this debt load was $42 billion, accounting for approximately 26 percent of the annual federal budget."

They eliminated the deficit and actually paid down about $62 billion of the debt. Those are pretty solid numbers and very difficult to talk your way around.

Harper, on the other hand, is running deficits nearly $20 billion higher than the Trudeau-Clark-Mulroney budgets. And he's doing it after inheriting a $13 billion budget surplus. There was no debt crisis before Stephen Harper came to office. Now there is.

But the Tories, at least according to Maikeru, have found the best way to guide you through the DT's. It involves drinking more. Lots and lots more! The thinking goes, as far as I can tell, if you can drink about 45% more than you did at the very worst part of your alcoholism, you can actually drink yourself sober!

And you know what, it's worked out great for me, but I doubt that the entire country has a liver with the stamina of mine. It might be the perfect rehab program ... if you're Charlie Sheen.

Look, I get that there's a significant  percentage of the country that wants to vote for the Conservatives so badly that they're replacing their own last name with "Harper" in a girlish scrawl in their school notebooks. I get that. And I know that I'm not going to change the minds of anyone who feels that way. Schoolgirl crushes are the worst kind to get over, and far be it from me to suggest that you're not going to be Mrs. Whoever the Twilight Guy Is.

There are lots of so-called conservatives out there that a have a relationship with the Conservatives that isn't unlike that of a battered wife. "He's going to change," they declare. "I just need to know how to love him enough to make him want to." But what they fail to recognize is that there are some guys that just like kicking your ass, and will continue to do so as long as you stick around.

You know what? I might be the world's foremost expert on idiotic, codependent relationships. I know precisely how they work. And sitting around and waiting for Mr. Right to start molesting the kids probably won't end as well as you expect it to.


But please don't tell me that adding zillions of dollars of debt through ward-heeling policies is somehow conservative. I have my intelligence insulted enough as it is.




Update: Now lovingly cross-posted at the Volunteer, thanks to the good offices of the lovely and talented Mike Brock