Starve the Beast
In a recent letter from the Ontario office of CCPA I learned a new term for, what to me, is an old idea. Starve the beast is a term used to describe how conservative governments reduce spending on social services by first cutting taxes. The idea is to starve the public purse so that less money is available for spending. Randy Robinson from CCPA figures that tax cuts, fee reductions and poorly done tax credits have reduced the Ontario purse by some $7.5 billion in 2022 alone. It's what Conservatives do. They create a crisis and then ram through their solution - privatization. We can see the desired outcome start to bloom in the healthcare sector where the "innovation" is to privatize healthcare options. Of course, the math doesn't add up. If $100 buys me $100 of socialized healthcare and I give that $100 to a private enterprise then, of course, the shareholders are going to take their $10 or $15 and leave me with $85 of healthcare. They say that private companies ca...