Category: Cronies

Tax Me Harder!

The last thing any municipal ratepayer in this country needs is for their city to gain the ability to get their hands on your income. Income taxes are outrageously high as it is and adding another predatory level of government into the mix will only make that worse. But that doesn’t stop socialist think tanks from proposing such nonsense, which is then uncritically regurgitated by the leftist corporate media.

Macdonald believes the City of Vancouver alone could net a further $100 million annually if it could collect a one per cent tax on annual incomes over $56,000.

Stop Picking Winners and Losers

Just lower taxes across the board.

Fraser Institute- The Cost of Business Subsidies in Canada: Updated Edition

Business subsidies delivered through government spending since 1961 came with significant costs to Canadian taxpayers.

In 2019, provincial business subsidies reached $27.0 billion ($2022). This represents the single largest year of provincial subsidies in Canadian history prior to COVID.

Federal business subsidies increased significantly as a result of COVID-related programs, reaching $88.5 billion in 2020 and $47.0 billion in 2021.

Although federal business subsidies declined in 2022, the new total ($11.2 billion) is nearly double the amount the federal government spent in the final pre-COVID year ($6.5 billion in 2019).

“The most degenerate will set the tone of sexual politics because they’re the slim minority that cares the most…”

Public Choice Theory and How This Ends

Concentrated minority interests will ALWAYS defeat dispersed collective majority interests in any system of government/institution that doesn’t terminate in an individual owner.

This is basic public choice theory. […]

The most degenerate will set the tone of sexual politics because they’re the slim minority that cares the most and has the most to gain, whereas normal people have 10k other concerns and can’t dedicated their lives to defending normality. Same with farm policy, it will always be set by the narrow concentrated interest of corporate food producers and recipients of subsidized government food stuff: This is what’s happened to America’s food supply, it’s what happened to Rome’s before the fall. Down the list of every policy.

Every individual item will be controlled not by the public good or even majority will, but by the narrowest interest that can make it their life’s work and either get rich, or lead a life of sloth by controlling it.

Mercantilist Pensions

Rather than tackle the pressing question as to why pension funds have decreased the their investments in Canada from 28% in 2000 to 3% today, a gaggle of milquetoast business leaders is demanding that Ottawa force those pension funds to invest within Canada despite lower returns. It’s as if these Wesley Mouch types believe that a depressed business climate is an unalterable fact of nature.

Government has the right, responsibility and obligation to regulate how this savings regime operates,” says the letter signed by dozens including BlackBerry Ltd founder Jim Balsillie, Metro Inc. chief executive Eric La Flèche, the CEOs of telecommunications companies Telus Corp., Rogers Communications Inc. and Quebecor Inc., and former Bank of Nova Scotia and Air Canada CEOs Brian Porter and Calin Rovinescu.

“We think the government does have some right to have an influence over the regime” in which these large funds operate, he said. “But we’re not suggesting the government tells these pension funds exactly where to invest.”

Compliance Costs

If I were a Minnesotan, supposedly I would sleep at lot easier at night knowing that the state was ready to protect me from all those unscrupulous house painters out there.

The legislation, which was posted online February 15, would restrict the “sale of certain solvent-based paint materials to licensees; [establish] a paint contractor board; [and require] licensing for paint contractors and journeyworker painters.”

So regardless of their motivations, Minnesota lawmakers are at best offering an immoral “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist. At worst, they are weaponizing the law to benefit special interests.

A Tidy Profit

Lawyer math.

A former University of Manitoba law dean has been given “the ultimate penalty” of disbarment in Manitoba after he misspent over half a million dollars in school funds, including racking up charges that amount to fraud, the provincial law society says.

Jonathan Black-Branch has been disbarred and his name has been removed from the Law Society of Manitoba’s rolls of barristers and solicitors, according to a Feb. 14 decision from a law society disciplinary committee.

He also was fined $36,000.

Tantrum Time

Faced with the news that his media water-carriers are in financial trouble, Maximum Leader publicly berates them for failing to conjure up non-existent customers. Not at all shocking for a man who sees no need for boundaries between the state and the economy.

A fired-up Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unleashed on Bell on Friday, calling its move to layoff thousands of employees — including hundreds of journalists — a “garbage decision.”

“I’m pretty pissed off about what’s just happened,” Trudeau said during a press conference in Toronto.

“This is the erosion not just of journalism, of quality local journalism at a time where people need it more than ever, given misinformation and disinformation…. It’s eroding our very democracy, our abilities to tell stories to each other.”

(From Kate) Drama Queen: the PM had at least 16 weeks statutory notice from Bell about layoffs of this magnitude so “garbage decision” & “pretty pissed off” were hardly “from the heart”.

Missing And Misappropriated Aboriginal Money?

If your reserve was sitting on substantial oil and gas deposits you’d have to have pretty lousy management to lose track of $120 million, but accountability is probably an outdated artifact of the colonial mindset anyway.

Public financial reports for Frog Lake First Nation show the band is short $120 million in net assets over a five-year time period between 2013 and 2018.

The records show the band-owned business called Frog Lake Energy Resources has been losing millions of dollars since 2015.

APTN reached out the current Chief Greg Desjarlais and initially agreed to an interview but later cancelled.

In a virtual meeting with community members he says that an audit is unnecessary.

Great Reset, Interrupted

WSJ Editor-in-Chief brings bad news;

Emma Tucker told a crowd at the World Economic Forum, “I think there’s a very specific challenge for the legacy brands, like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal.”

She continued, “If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”

“If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact,” Tucker further stated, adding “Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”

Doomscrolling (Rumble): The Civil War in the WEF (1hr, 20min)

Update: @PierrePoilievre I will ban all my ministers from any involvement in the World Economic Forum.

Another Zero Percent Interest Miracle!

Despite the official pronouncements, the main concern of central banks is not inflation or unemployment, but rather the solvency of the banks within their purview. When a bank runs into balance sheet trouble, the go-to solution is to quietly extend more credit on easier terms. The public will be the last to know which bank received the bailout just so depositors don’t get spooked.

Y2Kyoto: Money To Burn

Robert Lyman (Financial Post);

The International Energy Agency, in its reports on energy financing, breaks down global energy investment into investment in fossil fuels, on the one hand, and in “clean energy,” on the other. In 2023, estimated investment in “clean energy” will be close to $2.2 trillion (in C$). That is an almost unimaginable amount of money, made only slightly less daunting when portrayed as $6 billion per day. […]

What has been the result of these gargantuan expenditures? The effects of current investments in electrical energy infrastructure won’t be fully apparent for some time, but we should be able to see the effects of spending that has been rising for more than 20 years. To find out, I consulted the authoritative Statistical Review of World Energy 2023, published by the Energy Institute, the successor to British Petroleum as the producer of the Statistical Review. It works closely with KPMG to produce the report.

The share of the world’s primary energy consumption produced by renewable energy has essentially doubled since 2015, from about 3.5 to seven per cent of the world total. Yet, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal), which accounted for 85 per cent of primary energy consumption in 2015, still accounted for 82 per cent in 2022. At that rate of reduction — three percentage points every seven years — we will not get to full decarbonization (i.e., zero use of fossil fuels) until well into the next century.

As usual, the news is buried in the opinion pages.

Related: Whoppers and moer whoppers in the WSJ

What’s The Opposite Of Diversity?

Imagine the following:

You’re a man who serves as Chairman of the Board of a large University who led the search for the recently hired president.

Your wife runs a non-profit in the DEI space. She is the only full-time employee of the organization, serving as Founder, CEO, and CFO. You serve as Treasurer. The non-profit ostensibly sells two principal products in the DEI space:

1. “Evidence-based ‘how-to-guides’ and
2. “The most comprehensive intersectional analytics platform of its kind…”

but the non-profit has no revenues. It relies entirely on contributions to fund its operations, which principally consist of your wife’s salary and some other ancillary overhead.

There have been only two contributors to the non-profit, the University whose board you chair, which has contributed:

2018 $100,000
2019 $300,000
2020 $150,000
2021 $600,000
2022 $789,000

More.

Khrushchev Would Be So Proud!

During Krushchev’s reign in the Soviet Union, the state embarked on a massive residential building spree which was so ineptly carried out that Russians referred to the buildings as khrushchebys, which is a play on the Russian word for slum. Fast forward to 2023, and the Trudeau government has unveiled its own version of centrally planned housing development.

It’s not that the federal government is going to give you a house, but they will provide you with an architect at taxpayer expense to create pre-approved blueprints which they are certain you will love.

“The catalogue of pre-approved designs, is going to be tied to existing building codes — the National Building Code, which we will seek to make changes to in the future — but will also be designed to mirror the requirements of provincial building codes that are implemented across the country,” he said.

“We’re going to ensure that the pre-approved designs meet the standards to access CMHC programs so we can reduce the administrative barriers on applicants who are seeking to go through the process.”

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