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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:What is the NDP platform anyways? I mean what more did they want besides what the Liberals gave them? Seemed like a pretty good budget and the NDP is just being retarded and having an election. ... and why is it such an NDP-heavy budget? Because right now the Liberals really don't want an election; the gas plant scandal is still really visible and they've been losing byelections all over the place. And Hudak is a terrible politician who scares votes away every time he opens his mouth. If Horwath hadn't forced the election, that would give Wynne another year to distance herself from McGuinty and push through high-visibility voter-friendly policies. So strategically I think it's a sound decision. That's assuming you actually want the NDP to win, which most NDPers do. If you just want the NDP to sit in 3rd place and keep the Liberals scared then yeah, I guess you'll be disappointed.
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May 4, 2014 14:28
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Badger of Basra posted:Has this ever happened anywhere? Trick question, there's never been a Canadian government that D&D would recognize as "left wing." Except of course for the Wynne government, who were totally going to give us all great pensions and loads of voter-friendly investment until that meanie Andrea Horwath defeated the budget. Why yes, I'm a tad bitter that the Liberals have apparently succeeded in convincing otherwise-intelligent D&D posters that they're more leftwing than the NDP, despite having governed from the right for an entire decade. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 15:44 on May 18, 2014 |
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May 18, 2014 15:40
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Jimbozig posted:This is right on. A budget is not an election promise. A budget is law. The Liberals weren't just promising a pension plan if they could find magic money, they were delivering. And the NDP vote against it and tell me I could save money on my car insurance? gently caress that - I'd prefer that pension plan, thanks. The pension plan wasn't in the budget. Their pension plan was released and discussed in some budget-related documents, but it appeared nowhere in the actual legislation. For some reason, the OLP has downplayed this little fact. The auto-insurance rate reduction was passed into law, and is now delayed until 2020 (so, forever). The Financial Accountability Office was also passed into law, and has also failed to launch. Budgets need to be followed through with to be worth anything. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 13:30 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 13:26
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Thomase posted:Did it even have the amazing 15% auto insurance reduction? C'mon man... It didn't, because that was already passed into law in the last budget as a concession to the NDP. Then Kathleen Wynne delayed its implementation until 2020. It's similar to how the Financial Accountability Office was created as a concession, but then the Liberals just didn't appoint any of the people they were supposed to appoint and now it's completely empty. I do get why the everyday voter has a tough time caring about these things but this is exactly why the election had to be called. There's no trust whatsoever left between the NDP and the Liberals. And they made no effort to rebuild that trust when they proposed their "NDP budget." They just promised zillions in extra spending, much of it over the course of 10+ years, and who knows how much of that they'll actually implement? less than three posted:Even if the Liberals don't implement a single thing from that progressive budget, it's still far better than the knee-jerk right wing poo poo Horwath has been pushing. ... like what? I get that our messaging has swung right, but the platform itself is very much centre-left. Corporate tax rate increases, minimum wage increased and tied to inflation, social assistance increased, what part of it is right wing at all?
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Jun 6, 2014 13:11
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sliderule posted:The gravy train minister pops to mind. The NDP propose $600 million in unspecified cuts, the Liberals propose $300 million. Even if you disagree that there's waste to be cut from the public sector, e.g. in the form of salaries for university presidents, in what world is the $300 million difference worth voting for the party who blew $1.1 billion on cheap vote-grabbing without a second thought? I totally get progressives's disenchantment with the NDP, I just don't get why they're threatening to vote Liberal. Vote communist or spoil your ballot or something, but don't pretend Kathleen Wynne is a progressive alternative when she's clearly nothing of the sort.
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Jun 6, 2014 13:41
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Helsing posted:Today my house got a robocall from Kathleen Wynne endorsing the local liberal candidate. Wynne said she her two top priorities were keeping hydro fees down and reducing auto insurance rates. It's incredibly blatant and seems designed just to confuse ABC voters. I've been working on a campaign in one of those swing ridings. For a week or two now we've been using a flyer that says "Only <local candidate> can stop Tim Hudak" accompanied by a simple graph showing the local results from the last election, when the Liberals came in a distant third. Just recently we started seeing Liberal flyers saying "Only Kathleen Wynne can stop Tim Hudak" accompanied by a very similar graph, except showing province-wide projections from threehundredeight. So they don't have enough confidence in their local candidate to even mention her name (fair enough, she's got no name recognition and she's terribly uninspiring). And they're using province-wide results as if they matter on a local level. It'll be incredibly depressing if the Liberals win here, or (more likely) if they steal enough of the vote from us that the PCs squeak into the seat. I guess this is probably how they feel about the NDP all the time.
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Jun 11, 2014 12:45
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Heavy neutrino posted:In an actual democratically-minded society, this would be front-page news, and there would be utter outrage that the wealthy, the financiers and the capital owners are attempting to exercise a veto on even the most milquetoast left-wing initiatives. Unrestrained capital rights are just fundamentally incompatible with democratic governance, and although no one in the press will ever say it outright, they'll report case after case of capital attempting to veto government policy without any comment. Charging us a higher rate to borrow their money is somehow "antidemocratic" now? The government isn't entitled to borrow money at whatever price it wants. This isn't even like the case of a factory shutting down and the jobs moving to China, where we can justifiably claim that the owners owe something to the local people for all the indirect subsidies they've received over the years. It's just a business transaction with international investors, and we're getting a slightly worse deal now. You might as well be morally outraged by the price of bread going up. S&P's sovereign credit ratings are full of poo poo though, they seem to be based entirely on gut feelings and value judgments. It would be darkly hilarious if they penalized us for re-electing the same government we've had for 10 years now.
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Jun 14, 2014 14:44
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Heavy neutrino posted:You're obfuscating the issue by refusing to delve any deeper than the shallow observation of "charging us a higher rate to borrow their money." It begs the question: why are they doing so? The article answers the question -- it's pure speculation based on a belief that Standard & Poor's might downgrade the province's credit rating in response to the election of the OLP, which would be pure ideological blowback aiming to punish the province for voting in a platform that financiers don't like. S&P ratings aren't strictly based on economic reality, as you might remember from their attribution of triple-A ratings to CDOs that almost sank the world economy, so there really isn't much of a conclusion to make out of this other than the financial system is attempting to veto an electoral platform that it doesn't like. The beliefs of international investors are economic reality. Put that way it sounds pretty hosed up, but that's the way market capitalism works. If everyone believes bread should cost $2 then it does, if everyone believes prices will go up then they do, if everyone believes the government will go bankrupt then it will, if everyone believes the dollar is worthless then it is... the brutally unfair part is that everyone's opinion is weighted by how much money they wield. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm quite sure it isn't a starry-eyed assertion of the right of a government to borrow money at whatever rate it wants just because it won an election.
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Jun 14, 2014 15:48
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Heavy neutrino posted:That's a pretty sweet strawman you made up there, and the solution actually isn't very complicated -- a good start would be to slow down the mobility of capital by imposing a small tax on all financial transactions; the belief being that putting a small price tag on speculation would bring it closer to economic reality. It's actually such an obvious move that even the loving Pope suggested it. Yeah in hindsight that was a douchey way to phrase that. But you took a spike in our borrowing costs and turned it into a "veto on government policies" when at most it's just a bit more money they'll have to pay. We're borrowing billions of dollars a year, and you're shocked that it has some strings attached? I'm not saying it's right, it's just not something I would get worked up over. We need their money and we can't take it by force, so we're gonna have to play by their rules. They'll gently caress us over when they get the chance and maybe someday we'll get to gently caress them over. Do we have to start using language that makes it sound like a conspiracy? I also don't think a Tobin tax is relevant to this discussion, but we're getting SUPER off-topic here.
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Jun 15, 2014 14:55
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vyelkin posted:You know how we kept talking about the NDP not actually taking a look at why they lost the election, and instead blaming everyone else? These conversations are definitely happening but I'm not sure why you would expect to read about them on the CBC? If you just want to see Andrea flagellating herself in public then you're doomed to disappointment, the election didn't go that badly for her. In other news, the Liberals have appointed Deb Matthews (who you may remember from such wise spending decisions as eHealth and ORNGE) as
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Jun 26, 2014 15:38
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vyelkin posted:"This is a Trojan horse budget, it's not really progressive, there are hidden cuts in there that voters aren't aware of." - Andrea Horwath, on day one of the election campaign instead of the week after it ended, if the NDP had any brains. They were pushing that message for the whole campaign, but it's a little difficult to get heard when the Star is printing "most progressive budget in Ontario's history" on the front page every single day.
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Jul 7, 2014 16:21
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