Scale back taxes, pay bureaucrats, politicians far less
As Vesna Higham so elegantly pointed out last week, we should be deeply concerned with the fact that Premier Alison Redford has surrounded herself with a coterie of “advisors” who earn roughly triple the average Alberta family income.
Let’s just isolate that little fact for a moment and ponder it in this vein: In the private sector, how many people would you have to employ in order to earn $250,000 per year? How many jobs and direct revenue would you have to be responsible for in order to earn $20,000-plus per month? How much would you have to be on the hook for in the way of personal guarantees, etc?
From that perspective, how can it be remotely possible that an advisor to a politician who is herself grossly overpaid, should merit such a stratospheric salary?
These unelected advisors are essentially unaccountable to anyone except party officials. The only risk they bear comes at election time.
Here’s the bottom line. I guarantee you that in Red Deer alone, you could find several very successful businessmen who would willingly act as advisors to the premier. For free. Their advice would be worth multiple times what we can get from a posse of nanny-state proponents. (Simple logic dictates that anyone willing to take that salary for that job is a proponent of the nanny state.)
But let’s take recent revelations about the state of our province’s financial affairs a step further.
In a decade where provincial revenues grew by $11 billion, we saw 95 per cent of that growth get sopped up by the payroll of the province of Alberta.
Some of that revenue came from income tax growth, some from business taxes, and some from resource revenues. Some also came from inflation, but there’s a rarely discussed detail there that’s a horsefly in the ointment. We’ll get to that.
In a province that managed to gain $11 billion in revenue growth in a low-inflation decade, we need to ask why we pay any personal income taxes. The argument that our public employees needed to be rewarded for sacrifices made in the previous decade holds no water.
We could have held the provincial payroll growth to $5 billion over 10 years, and wiped out personal income taxes. The deep question here is why have only public sector employees been given consideration, when a major tax cut would have given public and private employees a substantial raise as well?
You simply can’t escape the fact that this province could wipe out personal income taxes and still be fiscally healthy if only we took the keys to the treasury away from the likes of tax and spend liberals such as Redford.
Increasingly, we taxpayers are being forced to make substantial financial sacrifices solely to fund public sector wage growth. That’s a genuine injustice and increasingly the real class warfare being waged in this and other countries.
Simply put, taxpayers are being seen more and more as revenue sources and less as citizens.
Governments often use inflation as an excuse to raise taxes. The big problem here is that government uses up virtually half of any family’s earnings. Government is the single largest burden of any Canadian family, and any tax increase is by default inflationary by nature.
Thus, when governments raise taxes as a reaction to inflation, they’re reacting to their own inputs. They’re the dog chasing the tail. Governments can exert more control over inflation simply by controlling their own expenditures than all the other efforts in this area combined.
Increasingly, governments and their agencies impose new financial burdens and sacrifices upon the citizenry, while at the same time refusing to make or impose similar sacrifices upon themselves.
In every province including Alberta, a greater percentage of government employees earns over $100,000 per year than the private sector. In several provinces, the ratio is double. Both average and median wages of public employees is greater than private sector employees. In New Brunswick, the average government job pays 50 per cent more than the average private sector job.
The solution lies in leadership. As the Occupy movement has pointed out, you only have to earn $170,000 annually to be a One Percenter in Canada.
No individual in any role, in any level of any government, should earn more than that.
If you want to earn more than that, stay out of government, because serving in government should be a sacrifice, and sometimes sacrifice is its own reward.
I propose that Allison Redford and her staff lead the way.
Bill Greenwood is a local freelance columnist.
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