Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Gaudet vs Kenney

One of the good things about Twitter is you get to eavesdrop on conversations.

For instance, last week I noticed an interesting exchange between the current head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Kevin Gaudet, and Jason Kenney, a former president of the CTF who today serves as the Conservative Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.

It began when Kenney “tweeted” about the federal government’s stimulus package thusly: “The Libs say our infrastructure projects are only going to CPC ridings. Really? I've announced 2 projects in opposition ridings in 2 days.”

This led Gaudet to reply: “@MinJK You wouldn't have bragged of this when you were a fiscal conservative.”

To which Kenney countered “@KevinGaudet I'm proud to belong to a conservative government that has cut taxes by $190 billion, to their lowest level in 4 decades.”

In other words, Kenney was essentially saying, “don’t worry we are still fiscal conservatives because we are cutting taxes.”

The problem with that argument is the Conservatives are actually raising taxes not cutting them.

It’s just that their tax hikes have been put off into the future.

After all, the Tories have burdened the country with a $56 billion deficit. Sooner or later that will have to be paid, either through massive spending cuts or through tax increases or both.

I just hope they don’t put a tax on tweets!

Crossposted at the Libertas Post.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kenny is another one of the great conservative disappointments. He's sold his soul to be an MP.

Bill Elder said...

It's not about cutting taxes Jason, it's about cutting government. Its size, intrusion and mission creep as our nanny. Once trimming this back to rational levels the tax savings are self evident as we keep more of our productivity in our jeans pocket that was previously stolen for the greater glory of bloated government hegemony.

Kenny is a good MP and plain spoken most days but we see he isn't beyond apologizing for government bloat.

Anonymous said...

Borrowing money to give tax cuts is just dumb public policy and not in the least conservative.

Ted Betts said...

What deferral to the future?

Say Anything Steve raised our income taxes in his first month in office. Then he taxed income trusts. Then he brought in a carbon "charge" (read: tax). Now he's planning to hike unemployment insurance premiums by $15.5 billion which was called a tax when Chretien/Martin did it and Harper/Kenney were conservatives. And now Say Anything is also going to raise taxes in BC and Ontario through the HST.

All this, as we learn that Say Anything's record breaking spending actually did put us into deficit in 2008. And he won't release the numbers to Kevin Page so we have no idea if his predictions about the budget now, unlike his last 6 major budget predictions, are anywhere close to reality.

To put Anonymous 12:33's comments a bit differently, being a "tax and spend" liberal is bad enough, but being a "borrow and tax and spend" conservative is worse.

Blame Crash said...

And the alternative would be what Gerry?

Would a coalition of crooks, socialists and separatists be more to your liking?

Would they run this country closer to your ideals?

Didn’t think so! Or am I wrong?

The Conservative Party is the government and must take into consideration all Canadians opinions, whether they voted for them or not. That’s why they act like they do. They are as good as it gets for the time being.

But you can cheer up Gerry, the way things are going, the Conservatives will get a strong majority and besides that, the Conservatives are doing an excellent job, all things considered.

Anonymous said...

I blame mindless eunuchs like "Blame Crash" for what's happened to the US conservative movement and what's happening to the Canadian conservative movement. They neither care about actual small-government policy nor, in all likelihood, know what a 'eunuch'is. Worse yet, they flog the troika horse anytime they need to so as to avoid thinking.