LETTER: Buying votes or paying down the debt

At age 71, closer to my 72nd birthday now that I am pretty much fully retired, I think back to my working days and what my wife and I would do with any "surplus" that happened to arise in our household income. Surplus funds such as a bonus for working hard to ensure that the company where I was employed was successful and profitable.

This was generally rewarded with an annual "Christmas" bonus.

So what should we do with the extra funds available? We would look at the household needs such as maintenance and repair, the children's education, the state of the family vehicle or maybe even a short vacation if funds were sufficient. Inevitably , the conversation would come back to servicing our major long-term debt load, which was the mortgage on our family home. We would always endeavour to pay some extra towards the mortgage in an effort to reduce and/or eliminate the debt and any interest charges. As an aside we have always paid our credit card bills on time so as not to incur the drastically high interest rates the card companies charge.

The Prime Minister and his Liberal's recent suspension of the GST and HST in some cases, along with the $250 cheques to be distributed early next year, is estimated to cost the taxpayers over $6 billion dollars. This seems to indicate that the federal treasury is experiencing a "surplus" of taxpayers cash that they feel that they need to dispense back to us, the taxpayers. We also know how the government projected cost estimates always end up costing much more than the original estimate.

So here we have the PM and his Liberals desperately trying to win back their dwindling support using the old political practice of "buying votes" by giving back the money that they already have taken from us. I guess that the PM feels that they can spin this "bonus" of giving us back our own money and turn our cash into votes for the PM and his Liberals.

If there is that much "extra" cash just lying around Ottawa then why would the PM not consider paying something towards the country's current debt load of $1.4 trillion with an annual debt servicing cost of $54 billion? 

Oh, excuse me, but I forgot that the PM doesn't think about fiscal policy and believes that budgets balance themselves.

Think about that for a minute and is it really any wonder that our country's finances are in the state that we are in these days? 

Perhaps the PM should have paid more attention to the lessons about basic economics 101.