Editor:
Are our politicians clueless of what deficit binge spending is doing to countries around the world? Haven’t they heard about Greece yet?
Canada federal debt stands at $562 billion and climbing by $88 million daily, costing us $84 million a day in interest payments and nothing to show for it. What an absolute dumb waste. And our illustrious leader Stephen Harper is proud of being an economist.
B.C. provincial debt is $48 billion ,projected to be $52.4 billion by April, 2012 then $56 billion in 2013. Presently costing us $6.3 million a day in interest to service the debt. What a waste.
We in B.C. could get a lot of daily goods and services for $6.3 million daily. That’s $2.3 billion per year with interest rates at an all time historic low. When interest rates rise, which they will, the bleeding will really take its toll. That means more money for the bondholders of the debt and less money for health care, education and everything else.
We could build the Evergreen Rapid Transit Line with less than one year's interest payments on our debt.
Our politicians in B.C. are not that dumb and Premier Christy Clark will get us out of this titanic mess, right? She dispatched Transportation Minister Blair Lekstrom to resolve the funding for the new estimated $1.4 billion, 11 km Rapid Transit Evergreen Line in Coquitlam/Port Moody, with the Translink Mayors Council.
The province's share is $400 million plus the $200 million shortfall or $600 million (plus unforeseen overruns). That’s another $600 million deficit spending of borrowed money for us taxpayers to pay, plus interest. Then the Mayors Council wants two cents more on each litre of gas, plus increases in the carbon tax, plus road tolls, plus property tax, plus bridge taxes, plus tax, tax, tax. Lekstrom, within days, was anxious to announce that he had a resolve of the funding stalemate and we could soon embark on another big deficit spending spree. Whoopie, let's go for broke!
So this is Christy Clark’s idea of what must be really good for families before she will approve of it. What a joke. I don’t like Christy Clark’s chances of winning any election.
It’s equivalent to having a huge mortgage that you can't make the payments on and trying to solve it by applying for an additional mortgage to rack up more debt.
I doubt if one per cent of us south of the Fraser will ever in our life use this transit line, so why should we (out of 22 Translink jurisdictions) fund it? We will never live long enough to see rapid transit in Langley, South Surrey/White Rock or Delta, etc. What are these south of Fraser do-gooder mayors smoking, volunteering this bad debt upon us?
I say forget about the Evergreen Line and any other new deficit spending projects until we pay off some of the existing projects as we have more important infrastructure things to worry about, like BC Hydro dams and power distribution upgrades.
Roland Seguin, Langley