Fog of deficit overtaking Liberals’ ‘sunny ways’

We’ve known for a while that the feds were going to spend a lot more of our money than they took in this year.

Back at budgeting time, the guess was a loss of some $28.5 billion.

That guess was off for a number of reasons, including the fact the economy is doing better than expected.

As it looks now we’re only going to go in the hole some $19.9 billion on the year — an improvement of $8.6 billion.

Obviously that’s good news, even considering the original estimate was just that — an estimate.

However, the improvement surely isn’t the wonderful news that the people who stalk the corridors of power in Ottawa seem to think it is.

They don’t grasp the risks of overspending the same way taxpayers struggling to make their way in the world, understand it.

Yet it’s the simplest of concepts. If you spend more than you earn for long enough you end up in serious trouble.

An awakening to the fact that digging a $20-billion hole is serious stuff doesn’t appear to be in the cards.

To the pointy heads in and near Parliament Hill, the fact we’re losing less than we thought we would, is reason to start spending more.

Apparently we can expect a lot more spending going forward since these financial geniuses tell us the losses are going to be less than predicted for some time now.

If these guesses are any more accurate than the ones in the last budget, the deficit is expected to be a mere $12 billion by 2022-23.

This is all being engineered by the Justin Trudeau government that promised during the 2015 election to limit annual deficits to $10 billion until 2019, after which the books would be balanced.

In one TV interview, Finance Minister Bill Morneau explained the broken promise this way.

“What we were talking about at that time was a demonstration of fiscal responsibility. We think we’ve found a way to really show that,” he said.

Hey, Bill, if this is fiscal responsibility, we’re not all that interested.

Losses need to be dealt with in our homes and businesses immediately or we’ll all be out of business and you won’t have our billions to throw around so carelessly.

This deficit financing speaks to the close relationship between the governments in Queen’s Park and Ottawa.

The ties between the federal and Ontario Grits seem never clearer than when talking about deficits and debt.

Neither government seems to care a whit about losing our money by the tractor-trailer load. For example, the interest payments on the Ontario debt are in the neighbourhood of $11 billion a year, or as social media noted this week, almost $1 billion a month.

The province’s total debt — all those deficits added together — comes in at about $312 billion. That represents a mind-numbing increase of 125 per cent from the $138 billion the Liberals inherited from the Conservatives when they won the first election in their current streak 14 years ago.

To put it another way, that amounts to an increase of $12 billion a year for anyone who’s counting.

These big spenders will try to justify this kind of basic mathematical nonsense with mumbo jumbo about the debt as a percentage of GDP, and the like.

Canadians and Ontarians soon have to stop buying those excuses and hold our governments to account or the so-called sunny ways are going to end in a wall of debt fog. jimmerriam@hotmail.com