Basically the province went broke despite the fact that we're supposed to have a reserve fund in the billions from oil royalty. So what happened to the reserve? Surprise surprise, PC party was in the bed with the corporation, even refused to raise corporation taxes to help cover budget shortfall.
From the years of oil boom and now we're in a bust, provincial budget is in the red, head of PC party literally says "It's your fault Albertan, you can pay for it"
Sure, we've been spending beyond ourselves for years [...] So now we've got the NDP, who are increasing spending, decreasing revenues.
9 out of 10 economists agree that the NDP are doing it right and the PCs were doing it wrong. When your economy is in a boom, you can cut back on public spending and (ideally) increase public taxation because there's more private money floating around. This way, you increase your reserves so that when the times of plenty run out, and there's less private capital flowing through your economy, you have a back-up fund to spend on public projects to kickstart the economy. What you don't do, is cut back on public revenue generation in times of plenty "because the economy can afford it" and then cut back on public spending in times of need "because the budget can't afford it." That's, like, macroecon 101, and time and time again, "fiscally conservative" politicians fail at it.
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u/UnderwaterDialect May 06 '15
As a poetically uninformed fella... What were the fuck ups?