NoLasagna Blog

 There has been a nice little debate in Alberta regarding the pay of doctors , in particular between the left NDP and the UCP conservatives. For the non-Canadians out there, Canada has single payer healthcare, which means there is a single payer of healthcare - the government. Of all the schemes out there, single payer is the most immoral universal health care, but that is a topic for another day. The conservatives are contending that doctors are way overpaid and must take a pay cut for the sake of helping with the massive budget deficit that Alberta is suffering from. They do have a point. Alberta pays much more than comparable provinces . Alberta also has much lower taxes and much lower real estate costs, so I've seen it argued by the partisans that they're not going to leave because they simply won't be better off. The NDP contend, when it comes to any government cut, that it is necessary to pay these prices to have the highest quality doctors. Wow, a far left party that...

 As a fun little exercise I thought I’d sit down and calculate government spending per person. The only difference is that I wanted to get everything. Often politicians talk about operating budgets and the deficits on that, but that isn’t the whole picture. There are capital budgets too. Government is paid for by the taxpayers, so everything on the table. I did this for a person living in the City of Calgary, in the province of Alberta and obviously living in Canada. These numbers absolutely shocked me beyond recognition. It illustrates a spending problem that is far beyond our control. People act like raising taxes a little more will solve these issues, they won’t. These numbers are presented informally. I’m not going to source each budgetary page, as I wanted to get the broad numbers. Some of these numbers are the estimated costs rather than the actual costs for the fiscal period of 2019. You can look up these values yourself and they may vary slightly, but don’t take away from t...