{"id":1747,"date":"2008-04-22T20:04:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T00:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1747"},"modified":"2008-04-22T20:04:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T00:04:00","slug":"second-budget-same-as-the-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1747","title":{"rendered":"Second Budget, Same as the First"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honour of earth day, it was a very environmentally friendly budget by Ed Stelmach’s<\/span><\/span> Conserva…<\/span>ha ha. No, of course not. Now that the joke is out of the way, here’s a serious rundown:<\/p>\n

-Would someone care to remind me again how the Alberta Liberals got portrayed as “tax and spend Liberals” during the last campaign? Stelmach<\/span><\/span> followed up one of the largest spending increases<\/a> in Canadian history last year with a budget that increased spending by another 12%<\/a>.<\/p>\n

-Once again, there was no real focus or forward planning…this was mostly about playing catch up on infrastructure after years of neglect from Klein.<\/p>\n

-I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the increased subsidies for horse racing and bingo weren’t in Lyle Oberg’s<\/span><\/span> pre<\/span><\/span>-election<\/em> budget.<\/p>\n

-Cutting health premiums completely by January 1st is a pleasant surprise given Stelmach’s pre-election announcement planned to phase them out over three years.<\/p>\n

-At first glance, there does not appear to be much for post-secondary education in this budget, which is disappointing<\/span> given the massive spending everywhere else.<\/p>\n

–Stelmach<\/span><\/span> and Iris Evans will be criticized by the Alberta Liberals for, once again, ignoring the Heritage Fund and long term savings. However, with a low balled estimate of $78 a barrel oil, I’d expect a multi-billion dollar “unexpected” surplus, a third of which will be injected into the Heritage Fund.<\/p>\n

I’ll update this once other bloggers<\/span> closer to the scene have a chance to weigh in. I’d also be curious to see some analysis about which election promises were included or ignored in this budget.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: <\/em><\/strong>Daveberta has a good run-down<\/a>, including this great synopsis:<\/p>\n

Overall, the 2008 Alberta PC budget looked and sounded like a confused 37-year old: still paying for the mistakes of its youth, not quite ready to settle down, almost ready to hit that mid-life crisis point (hello, Ferrari!), and not quite ready to save for the future. It felt like it could have been something out of the 10th season of Friends.<\/em><\/p>\n

Also, check out ES<\/a> and get rich<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honour of earth day, it was a very environmentally friendly budget by Ed Stelmach’s Conserva…ha ha. No, of course not. Now that the joke is out of the way, here’s a serious rundown: -Would someone care to remind me again how the Alberta Liberals got portrayed as “tax and spend Liberals” during the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alberta-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}