Canadian Taxpayer Federation: Trickle on this

 

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about ignorantly or intentionally using statistics to support a false conclusion. It was mathy, apologies, but it was a billion dollars a year of wrongness.

An article in the Chronicle Herald today, courtesy of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, with the typical CTF headline drama: "Kill sick days, track employees". According to the CTF, paid government employee sick days are destroying Nova Scotia's economy and they've got the cherry picked data to prove it. Except that they don't prove it. The whole article is just a selection of convenient data points from the public sector with exactly one piece of corresponding data from private sector.

It's written solely for the purpose of generating anger towards public servants. Implementing their plan would fix absolutely nothing. Even if every public servant had perfect attendance, we'd still be buried under our massive provincial debt. We'd still have declining and aging population. And until September at the earliest, we'd still be viewed by the federal government as an unfortunate and embarrassing poor relation from whom we can expect a few drips and drabs of federal money in Conservative ridings and a healthy side of contempt.

The CTF sounds good in theory, no one likes paying taxes, but that's not what the CTF is about. The CTF is comprised of folks so far to the right Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are on the Christmas card list. Deep statistical analysis from CTF about Canadian economics and society is rereading Atlas Shrugged while audio recordings of Thatcher and Regan play in the background.

It's not about taxes, it's about ideology. It's Reaganomics, it's trickle-down theory, it's horse and sparrow theory. It's the theory of I've got mine, you get yours.

It's bullshit.

It's certainly not about saving Canadians from taxes they shouldn't have to pay. In response to the National Post on the 86 per cent increase in incarceration costs in Canada as a direct result of changes to sentencing laws in the preceding five years, Canadian Taxpayers Federation director Gregory Thomas said he had no issue with the costs of prisons increasing, as long as it keeps criminals away from Canadians and their property.

The CTF is just fine with the federal government blowing a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money to lock more people up, even though everybody told the government they were wrong. But they're not okay with paying people to stay home when they're sick.

Well, that's just sick.