Dear editor,
Regarding letter from Terry Nielsen who supports the coal mine to pay down debt. The reasons Terry outlined as a counter-argument to the majority of “unproductive wishful thinkers” is that to NOT open a coal mine would be economically “unsustainable.”
The reality sorely missed here, is that the “majority” of people, are the ones who do not understand the very nature of our debt, and this would be best quoted as the “disenchanted educated.” Note that I do not mean in terms of Terry being a biologist, since I too hold a B.Sc. from McGill and was not educated either.
If I thought the mine would suddenly provide substantial full-time living wages I would actually make considerations especially since the last annual data from the Comox Valley Job Shop stated they served over 7,000 individual clients. Even then I would have to consider the legacy cost to taxpayers for clean-up and other health-related issues.
Yet the problem is lack of understanding of debt. Debt is the blunt stick used to push industry problems down our throats, and government is doing the pushing since they are only lobbied on this one “debt” solution.
Currently our federal budget is about only 8% spending and actually around 92% debt repayment. Not much spending “bloating” there. No industry at this stage is going to reverse that reality. For four decades our debt remained stable at $18 billion, when Canada exercised its right to issue roughly 25% of its own currency, compound interest free!
This came in handy for tale-end hurricanes in the Maritimes, or ice storms in central Canada, floods in the Prairies or forest fires in the Rockies. Since 1974, we started to rely on banks at compound interest to issue ALL currency, and that debt is now well over $500 billion, of which we attempt to pay roughly $34 billion annually.
Yes, “massive spending cuts” in order to feed the beast of debt.
Canada needs currency as Units of Exchange NOT as units of debt, and so we sell off our resources to “industry” against all our better judgments. The solution is disguised as vastly complicated, with inflation and NAFTA and stock market derivatives.
But the real solution is not actually that difficult, especially if you understand the real problem. Our government needs to stop paying compound interest to banks, in order to take responsibility for our primary constitutional responsibility of providing available currency to our citizens. Then stop subsidizing industry so heavily. But that, my dear Terry, is a lesson for another day.
Caroline Alexander
Courtenay
