Taxing The Stupid

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The figure of $1.4 million, for the amount of the taxpayers' money that will be spent on saving each job at General Motors and Chrysler, has now appeared in the media. I have no idea whether it is accurate; more fundamentally, no idea how anyone could arrive at a plausible final reckoning, at the bottom of a sheet of wildly expensive variables. What began as a $4-billion bailout, and was defended at that level by a prime minister who wrote and reasoned so eloquently against corporate bailouts when he was running the National Citizens Coalition, has blossomed within weeks into a $13.5-billion bailout. One of the proofs that Canadians are indeed rather stupid, is that we will stand for this sort of thing: that people who themselves face penury in old age, will agree to have their pockets picked to cover $70-an-hour auto-workers. And then actually vote at the next election for the politicians who robbed them. (For not all Canadians are basically conservative.)