Is it easier to sit on the edge of a fiscal cliff when your annual earnings are $1,000,000 and change or when you are searching your pockets for spare change?
The answer shouldn't be dependent on ideology.
Nevertheless in Canada as in the U.S. neoconservatives – not to be mistaken for conservatives – still believe that cutting taxes for the benefit of billion dollar corporations and the richest few while crumbs trickle down to the rest of us, smaller government, fewer services, less attention to social responsibility, less investment in the future and deregulation is the answer to all the woes of our world.
Even as wealth is redistributed upward from the middle to the upper classes of income earners who are more than willing to pass the burden of good government down to others while depressing wages, the neoconservative mantra is chanted mindlessly by their political class and certain media fellow-travellers.
It is time for the wealthiest few to pay their fair share as their fathers would have done rather than to preach austerity for others through their political and media voices in the face of want they have created.
Brian Marlatt
White Rock