Saskatchewan at a Crossroads: Fiscal Policy and Social Democratic Politics

Download or read book Saskatchewan at a Crossroads: Fiscal Policy and Social Democratic Politics written by Erin Weir and published by Canadian Centre Policy Alternatives. This book was released on 2004 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The left believes that the absence of state restrictions is not enough because, as former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent puts it, "the vast majority of choices we make to give substance to the abstract notion of freedom require money."3 While the right-wing notion of negative freedom requires that government activity be sharply limited, the left-wing notion of positive freedom requires that the s [...] There is no doubt rich, expanding the sales whatsoever that the benefits of tax also reduced the these reforms increase-both in absolute dollars and as a progressivity of proportion of income-as one Saskatchewan's tax moves up the income scale.6 system. [...] However, the number of jobs created in the petroleum industry by forgoing royalty revenues will be limited by the fact that its operations employ very few people relative to the capital invested, and are largely headquartered outside the province. [...] The annual cost of reduced royalties is similarly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.20 Saskatchewan's half-billion-dollar deficit is thus attributable to tax cuts costing a quarter of a billion dollars and royalty reductions costing at least a quarter of a billion more. [...] In the 1999 and 2003 elections, the NDP warned that the Saskatchewan Party would probably do the same thing if handed the reins of power.