{"id":4704,"date":"2013-01-30T19:46:41","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T00:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=4704"},"modified":"2013-01-30T19:46:41","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T00:46:41","slug":"you-be-the-finance-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=4704","title":{"rendered":"You Be The Finance Minister"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"If<\/a>
If Doug Horner can’t get Alberta’s finances under control, he can always look forward to a long career as a Ricky Gervais impersonator.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alberta is facing a bit of a budget crisis, with a deficit which, on a per capita basis, could be as big as Ontario’s. This has forced Alison Redford into making some tough choices…or, in the more likely event, building up debt.<\/p>\n

To help with these decisions, Redford has launched a Your Choice<\/a> website, letting average Albertans consider the same trade-offs government is facing. It’s actually a really neat form of citizen engagement, and is the ultimate “let’s see you do better” response to critics.<\/p>\n

Since I expect to be one of the many critics on budget day, I figured I’d give the tool a shot, and spent 20 minutes painstakingly deciding where to make cuts – is $60 million on Carbon Capture a wise investment, or are a few more potholes a price worth paying to take $10 million out of the provincial highway fund? By the time I’d cut my way through 18 departments, I still found myself in debt. Maybe I could afford to go a bit easier on the Redford government.<\/p>\n

Then I got to the revenue side of the ledger. A 1% increase in the corporate tax rate would bring in half a billion. A tax on anyone making over $250,000 a year would bring in another half a billion. A measly 2% income tax would nearly erase the entire deficit. <\/p>\n

Alberta finds itself in a situation where they could fix their fiscal framework and still have, far and away, the lowest taxes in the entire country. I don’t expect Redford to go down that route, but after looking at the numbers being released by her own government, that appears to be the easiest way out of this hole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alberta is facing a bit of a budget crisis, with a deficit which, on a per capita basis, could be as big as Ontario’s. This has forced Alison Redford into making some tough choices…or, in the more likely event, building up debt. To help with these decisions, Redford has launched a Your Choice website, letting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[49,46],"tags":[1335,981,1106],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704"}],"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=4704"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4708,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions\/4708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}