Retour des déficits à Ottawa

[JCC-Fromthere]

The only reason the liberals paid down the debt more is because they were in power longer. The debt interest had fallen to 20% of revenues under them (from 33%) but there weren't any tax breaks. Now there have been some tax relief under the conservatives and the debt interest ratio has fallen to 13.5%.

 

The only reasons the conservatives paid down the debt is that they were left with a great balance sheet from the Liberals. They were indeed tons of tax breaks during the Liberal tenure, mostly on the corporate side I grant you.

 

The last Martin budget proposed tax breaks for individuakls, which have been reverted by the Harper governement and replaced for the GST tax cut, to after by re-instated (maybe someone clued in that income tax breaks are better than consumption tax breaks...)

[GDS]

They were not just reinstated, they were coupled. Big difference. Yes, they inherited a huge surplus from the liberals because the liberals did everything except govern. They didn't really spend on anything (gun registry excluded) nor did they reduce gov'nt taxation. So as the country grew, so did the surplus.

 

The best way to look at it is to examine the federal effective tax rate (ratio between total amount of taxes paid to the total amount of income assessed). During the entire liberal tenure the effective tax rate dropped from 17.9% to 16.5%. During the short Conservative part, it has fallen by a similar amount.