It’s a new year and you’ve finally decided to get your stuff together.
You’ve got a new job making $70,000 a year, and things are looking up.
You get your first pay stub and realise about 27 per cent of your money is gone before you’ve even seen it. It’s been sucked into the vortex of federal and provincial income taxes.
So, you head out the door to spend some of the pay you’ve got left. But first you’ve got to fill up your car and pay provincial and federal gas taxes that make up 30 per cent of the bill, or about $30 if you have a regular family sedan.
At the store you’ve got pay 11 per cent PST and GST on almost everything you buy.
Then you go to the bar to celebrate getting this new job, where half the price of your drink is also taxes.
After that outing, you check the mail, and what did you get? Oh, it’s a property tax bill.
Every year the average Saskatchewan family pays about 47 per cent of their income in taxes. That means from January to June, you aren’t working for yourself. Instead, you’re only toiling to pad the coffers of three layers of government.
And what do our rulers do with all that money?
Well, there are the downright silly things.
Like the City of Saskatoon wasting almost $100,000 to hang a bunch of colourful lights with the sole purpose to illuminate a back alley filled with dumpsters. Or the same city spending about $119,000 on a report to cook up new taxes to take even more from your wallet.
Then there’s the provincial government potentially handing over up to $3.7 million in a revenue guarantee for an airline to operate only two routes. So far, the cost to taxpayers has been $130,000.
Not to mention the $8,000 that Finance Minister Donna Harpauer thought it was worth spending on a flight from Regina to North Battleford.
The feds take wasting money to an Olympic level. It spent $12,500 on a traveling stage show for senior citizens to share their sex stories in front of live audiences. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blew $6,000 per night on a hotel room in London.
But aren’t those silly items a distraction from the important things governments do? Like keeping our streets safe, providing health care and steering the economy?
How are politicians doing on those important fronts?
Saskatoon has the fourth highest crime rate out of any major city in Canada and homicides almost doubled from 2021 to 2022. The city reported four stabbings over New Year’s weekend alone.
On health care, more than 400 people died last year in the province while waiting for surgery. Some of the patients who died were on the waiting list for almost a decade. Since the Fraser Institute started tracking provincial wait times in 1994, the median wait time for a patient to get treatment in Saskatchewan has almost tripled.
And how’s the economy doing?
After inflation hit a 40-year high in 2022, Canadian GDP per capita, an important measure of how much the economy produces per person, has been decreasing for almost a year and a half.
All the while, the federal government has been hiking its spending every year, causing deficit after deficit and skyrocketing government debt.
If someone handed you a resume with that list of achievements, would you hire them?
Instead, the federal government is being run by a prime minister who somehow believes he “always exercised fiscal restraint.”.
You are forking over almost half of your income to institutions that can’t even be called mediocre, so, do they deserve it?
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