I cannot retain that many zeros at one sitting
Throughout the day, I listened to those around me. After all, we’ve been waiting for the last couple of months for the “big news” out of the national capital. All the king’s horses, etc. have been busily concocting the perfect homeopathic medicine to treat a case of sudden onset of depression. A little drop of this, and a few drops of that. Homebrew pharmaceuticals, by the best spin-doctors in the business. And without exception, there’s not a believer left in town.
The current government, held together with sealing wax and string, has put together a budget of dreams. Take money that doesn’t exist, anywhere, and spend it as if there was no tomorrow. I can’t count to a billion (does it mean a thousand million, or a million million?), but the sight of proposed spending like we had outlined yesterday leaves me short of breath and dizzy. So many zeros.
Let’s go beyond common sense; if I decided, tomorrow (pay day on the domestic calendar) to not only spend every single penny, but to then take any available line of credit and spend as much again, someone else would protest that I’d lost my sense of economic direction. In government terms, the same action is seen as giving a “push to a stalled economy”. Even if other monetary institutions warn that we’re in for a long, cold winter with next to no growth, our wizards in Bytown have decided to throw one big, sloppy party.
When I was young, there was a famous election campaign that had as a motto “Pave it or pension it”. We’re now beyond such ideas. Henceforth, if you are at the end of your limits, fiscally, the government is going to make it even easier to borrow. You, too, can be a profligate, just like the big boys. Life isn’t supposed to be like a comic book story.
