$69 BILLION to create 74,000 jobs? The astounding inefficiency of the Liberal budget

Someone could joke about how Canada’s future is getting screwed over, and how f***ed this will leave the country as our debt continues to surge.

But those "69" jokes are so immature and unnecessary. So I won’t make those jokes here. Nope. Not gonna do it.

Instead, I’ll draw attention to the mind-boggling inefficiency of the budget, as revealed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer:

“Based on our projection of the Government’s fiscal guardrails, almost all of the ground lost in the labour market due to the pandemic will be made up by the end of 2021-22. We maintain our judgement that stimulus spending in Budget 2021 could be mis-calibrated if the focus is solely on returning to pre-pandemic benchmarks.

Budget 2021 estimates overstate the impact of stimulus spending over the next 3 years. Given the $69.2 billion in stimulus spending in Budget 2021, we estimate that the level of real GDP would be 1.0 % higher in 2022-23 and 2023-24. The level of employment would increase by 74,000 jobs in 2022-23 and by 94,000 in 2023-24.

The Government has decided to effectively stabilize the federal debt ratio at a higher level, potentially exhausting its fiscal room over the medium- and long-term. This means that any substantial new permanent spending would either lead to a higher debt-to-GDP ratio or have to be financed through higher revenues and/or spending reductions in other areas.”

Read that second paragraph again. $69.2 billion, to create 74,000 jobs in the upcoming year.

That’s over $930,000 PER JOB.

You could generate more economic activity by just dumping the money out of helicopters.

To spend that much money – in a budget supposedly conceived by the "wisest minds" in government – and to spend close to $1 million per job created is an absolute nightmare.

It sounds like it has to be a joke, and in a way it is hilarious, if not for the fact that the punchline of the joke is the future of our country.

Narrowing down on the per-job cost of the ‘stimulus’ is a way to identify how truly wasteful the budget is, with the PBO noting the long-term costs to the Liberals insisting on spending all this money.

The reality is that the economic downturn was artificial, in that it took place because politicians imposed – and continue to impose – restrictions that limited economic activity.

When those restrictions end, the artificial suppression of activity will end.

But the Liberals don’t think they’ll get credit for that, so they "must" be seen to be "doing something," which to Trudeau & Freeland always seems to mean spending a ton of money.

It’s no wonder that they’ve exaggerated the impact of the stimulus, because to admit how much they are spending to create so few jobs would shock most Canadians.

The Liberals are hoping the next election has come and gone by the time we really start paying the price for this rampant deficit binge, a price that will be paid in the devaluation of our currency, surging inflation, and a crippling debt burden.

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