Read excerpts from columns that appeared in July, August and September 2024 in FP Comment. This in the third instalment in a series

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Read excerpts from columns that appeared in July, August and September 2024 in FP Comment. Third in a series.

During their debate Joe Biden and Donald Trump engaged in silly finger-wagging about who had expanded the deficit most. But neither had any sort of plan to deal with mounting deficits and mountainous debt. Consolidated government gross debt has reached 123 per cent of U.S. GDP, heading for 134 per cent in 2030. With rising interest rates, Democrats’ devotion to more spending and Republicans’ to tax cuts means the debt can only rise, and with it the likelihood of financial stress. That incumbent governments are floundering should surprise no one. This week it’s happening in the U.K. and France. This fall and next year it may happen in the U.S. and Canada. You mess up economically and voters punish you. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: “It’s almost always the economy, stupid.” — Jack Mintz, July 5

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Taxpayers need to question whether every new government intervention in the economy generates net benefits to society. Too often what Oscar Wilde once remarked seems to be true: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.” With so many bureaucrats milling about, decisions slow down as files are passed from one to another. Accountability is lost. Departments point fingers at each other, as we have seen in the ArrriveCan debacle. New programs are hatched and more employees hired whether they are needed or not. With work-from-home, less gets done as unsupervised employees walk the dog or do the shopping. — Jack Mintz, July 9

Where is Ottawa’s climate commissar Stephen Guilbeault on cheap Chinese EVs? You’d think Minister World-on-Fire would be delighted to see even conservative enviro-skeptics such as myself being tempted by an attractive but cheap and apparently safe and efficient EV like China’s Seagull. At last, an EV that ordinary middle-class Canadians, not just preening upper-middle class ones, could actually afford. What better way to effect the transition to EVs — deadline less than 11 years from now, remember — than with market incentives? — William Watson, July 11

Conservative Partly leader Pierre Poilievre recently said that if elected he would appoint a task force to examine tax reform. He said the panel would be composed of “entrepreneurs, inventors, farmers and workers” and would be given the mandate of simplifying and lowering taxes. It is notable that Poilievre would avoid a task force of experts or a Royal Commission, such as the 1966 report headed by Kenneth Carter, to examine the tax system. Taxation is too important to be based on a John........

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