Conservatives love to laud the goal of balanced budgets. But the thing is that conservatives aren’t actually interested in balanced budgets; that’s just a smoke screen.
If they were interested in balanced budgets, they’d be fine with increasing revenue (through taxation, resource royalties, crown corporation profits, etc). But they’re not. They want lower taxes, lower royalty rates, and fewer publicly-owned corporations.
They want to reduce revenue as a solution to balancing budgets, which makes no sense. They claim that “finding efficiencies” and “cutting fat” is the key to balancing budgets, but that doesn’t work.
Let’s look at a household budget as an example. Let’s say a household spends more than it earns. They could eliminate eating out, entertainment, the second car, family trips, and so on. And maybe they’d balance the budget.
But that works only in the short term. Where does one cut when the price of groceries starts to rise? Or if the price of fuel goes up? Or a child needs braces and they have no health insurance? Or if home insurance goes up? Or the landlord raises your rent?
Finding efficiencies in a household budget is not a long-term solution because inflation leads to price increases. Eventually, you either run out of fat to cut, or you have to start cutting necessities. The child can’t get the braces. The family buys less food. The family sells their remaining vehicle. The family moves into a lower quality house.
But if this same household can increase revenue (through salary increases that match inflation, through a side business, through two incomes, etc), then no one has to make drastic cuts that affect quality of life for those in the household.
Same goes for running a government. Eventually you run out of efficiencies to find, and you have to start cutting essential services and quality of life for the citizens of your jurisdiction suffers.
Finding efficiencies is a good practice, but it can’t be the only solution. It must be paired with revenue increases.
