As we near the end of July and the sixth week of the extended session in the Manitoba Legislature the NDP government is becoming more and more desperate to distract from the PST increase which they brought in without a referendum and without the law having passed.
This past week they spent their time trying to scare Manitobans into believing that there was some sort of “fiscal cliff” coming. In short, the NDP were telling Manitobans that the government was going to run out of money soon because they had not been able to manage the Legislature in such a way as to get the budget passed.
It is unfortunate that the NDP government would stoop so low as to try to scare, without justification, Manitobans. There has never been any reason to think that the NDP would not be able to meet payroll as a result of the budget process in the Legislature.
The reality is that the NDP government ran out of money a long, long time ago. For years now the NDP have spent more money than they had as a government. The result of that overspending has been the doubling of the Manitoba debt and record increases in taxes. So when the NDP begins to sound the alarm bell that they are running out of money, Manitobans would be justified in asking the question, “what else is new?” No matter how much the NDP raise taxes or how much money is transferred from the federal government, Greg Selinger will be out of money because he has a spending problem not a revenue problem.
But while the fiscal cliff that the NDP were trying to dream up this week is fiction, there is a real fiscal cliff that looms on the horizon that is very concerning.
As the NDP continue to spending well beyond the means of government, it is Manitoba taxpayers who are left to bail them out. The increase in the PST and the expansion of the PST last year to items like home insurance have moved some Manitobans and businesses closer to a fiscal cliff of their own. As individuals have less and less income to spend they are having to make some tough choices. Many businesses have expressed concern they won’t be able to survive the high tax rates in Manitoba and the impact it will have on cross-border shopping. This is compounded by the fact that inflation in Manitoba is among the highest in the country.
The other fiscal cliff that the NDP are moving Manitoba toward has to do with the escalating debt. Already they have doubled it to more than $20 billion and even the slightest increase in interest rates will have significant consequences to front-line government services.
So while the NDP were trying to make up a fiscal cliff emergency this week, the reality is that over the past 10 years they have been slowly but surely taking Manitobans to a very real fiscal cliff, one that is the result of overspending, high taxes and ballooning debt.
