Stephen Harper's Exceptionally Bad Math

"My, what deep pockets you have!"

So, Stephen Harper released the Conservative platform this morning and Jesus, do those people think that we're stupid. The only problem is that they're probably right. This thing is a fucking fantasy, but it'll very probably buy them a shit-ton of votes. God, I despise voters.

Okay, let's look at this steaming pie of lies in some detail. If you believe Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (which is something I try to avoid whenever possible) the deficit for this year stands at $30.3 billion. This is because he's somehow managed to spend $700 million since his budget was introduced just three weeks ago. That's pretty impressive when you consider that the government was defeated on a confidence motion three days later.

But if you're retarded enough, Harper and Flaherty want you to believe that they'll balance the budget by 2014-15. More shockingly to anyone with a even passing acquaintance with mathematics, the Tories are saying that there will be a $4.2 billion surplus by 2015-16.

The Conservatives are committing to slash $4-billion from the budgets of federal departments under an austere campaign platform that pledges to balance the books a year earlier than expected.

(...)

The Tories announced plans in the budget to conduct a one-year review of federal program spending to examine the “relevance and effectiveness” of programs. The Conservatives said they hoped to eventually achieve $4-billion in annual savings, but they didn’t book that in the budget, since the savings haven’t been identified yet.

A senior Conservative said the Tories hope to achieve those savings through staff attrition rather than job cuts in the public service. But the Conservative said Canadians might notice an impact on the size of the federal government and the services it provides.

Wow, so they're not actually committed to cutting a goddamned thing, just promising a "review" of program “relevance and effectiveness.” And from this, they will save $4 billion dollars. I guess Tories hope that a big chunk of the federal civil service gets killed in a fire and that they can continue to run the government without replacing any of them. By the way, $4 billion (assuming maximum savings each year, which even they aren't) times three years only equals $12 billion, or slightly more than a third of this year's deficit.

Now let's look at their spending, which is the important part, since they aren't actually going to be "saving" shit.

Even if you assume that $12 billion can magically becomes $30 billion in three years, then you have to factor in the prime minister's desire to dive-bomb the tax code with social engineering credits. No one can be exactly sure what they're going to cost. And assuming that the budget does balance by 2015, he wants to throw in a whole bunch of other crap in to the revenue stream, like income-splitting, that are going to cost a godawful amount of money. But it does nicely tee up the platform for the next election.

The Conservatives are going to give Quebec $2.2 billion for sales tax harmonization, which might save Jean Charet's career and buy Harper some much-needed votes.

They're going ahead to with their plan to buy some spectacularly expensive F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, which Harper and Flaherty are budgeting at $29 billion over thirty years. But that number is wildly misleading because military aircraft never comes in on budget. Ever. And experts predict that the F-35 is going to be much more expensive than most programs. The estimate also assumes that the United States and Europe don't engage in austerity budgeting that affects military spending, which would drive the cost of the F-35 even higher upward.

However, even if you believe in miracles and the plane actually comes in on budget, that's still an average of a billion dollars a year. Unfortunately, military spending doesn't tend to happen on layaway plans. It's usually front-loaded, so we can on the hook for several billion up front.

The Tories are also promising a bunch of new prisons and corporate tax cuts, which they've spent months not releasing the cost of to Parliament. As a matter of fact, the contempt confidence motion that Harper was defeated on was directly related to his not releasing those figures. The Tories were actually ballsy enough to want Parliament to vote on things without knowing what they would cost. Because they're, y'know, responsible and stuff.

Look, I'm naturally inclined to support a government that wants to cut taxes, bomb foreigners and throw everybody in the hoosegow. These are all highly desirable things for misanthropes like me. But I'm really weird in that I demand that these things be paid for. I'm, as you've probably noticed, a real hardass when it comes to deficits and I believe that there only very few excuses to be running them. In my eyes, the only thing worse than taxing and spending is borrowing and spending, which is nothing more than "dine and dash conservatism."

Stephen Harper came to office with a $13 billion budget surplus that he pissed away in a futile attempt to buy himself a majority government. When everything went to shit, he engaged in Bush-Obama style Keynesian economics, despite the fact that our banks were largely untouched by the Great Crisis of Ought Eight. Over the following two and a half years, he got about a hundred and forty billion dollars in a big pile and effectively set it on fire.

However desirable things like cool fighter jets, mega-prisons, corporate tax cuts and social engineering may be, none of them are necessary right now. Furthermore, we can't fucking afford them.  And we're not going to be able to afford them anytime soon. Even if I'm way off on my math - and I don't think that I am - Harper's promises leading into the 2015 campaign are going to throw us right back into deficit.

This guy's platform is a joke. But I expect that it'll do exactly what it's designed to do - trick stupid people into voting for him.