Mr. Harper, reputedly a trained economist, has sternly warned us that pension costs cannot be sustained. Yet neither he nor any MP ever refers to the sustained explosion of loan costs following total privatization of government debt funding 36 years ago, which is with us still, at enormous cost.
He never mentioned that interest rates immediately leapt skywards, forcing huge deficits which were borrowed at yet more interest, all paid away instead of largely returning as dividends as they had previously.
Since the change, an estimated $1.3 trillion has been transferred to the private banking sector for federal debt interest alone, producing nothing yet totalling far more than double the current record $580 billion debt.
The last budget showed interest payments of $37.8 billion, again far more than the $36.5 billion Old Age Security cost which causes Mr. Harper’s anguish. Since federal governments set national monetary policy, this shift has crippled all provincial and municipal budgets in the same way, but to what purpose?
Significantly, the purchase of influence through hefty private party donations, to which the finance sector is devoted, offers the most likely reason, soon to be cemented in with the proposed abolition of tax-based per-capita party funding.
Yet according to the Auditor General’s department, borrowed interest constitutes the vast majority of federal debt, not excessive program spending or waste. It is a classically proscribed practice.
Logic and integrity demand all such debts be cancelled as “Odious.” Clearly usurious, they can only grow.
Russ Vinden
Errington
