McParland: A headline in one of the weekend papers asked the question: How Will We Pay For All These Government Programs?
Tsk, tsk. Silly boy. The answer is, we won’t. A government that runs a deficit of $343 billion, then signals it’s keen to contest an election on a platform of ramped-up long-term spending, has no intention of paying for anything.
When the time comes to assess these things, the most telling moment of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s years in office may be the time someone explained to him that, thanks to negligible interest rates, borrowing could go through the roof while the cost of servicing the debt actually dropped. By extending debts far into the future, they could be carried indefinitely with little or no pain, as long as the economy eventually returned to normal and nothing unexpected — like, say, a pandemic — ever happened again.
One can picture the prime minister’s eyes widening. “You mean, I can spend as much as I want, on anything I want, and everyone will still love me?”
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