Conservative leadership hopeful Tony Clement
and his 'Jump Star 250'

   
Nipawin - Friday, March 8, 2002 - by: Mario deSantis
 
 

social
contracts

Governments have become businesses. We are all forgetting that a government is really a social contract on behalf of the common good of people, and this perception that the government is a business as any other is sustained as the concentrated business media brainwashes the public about the social and ethical values of smaller governments and tax cuts. Governments are not businesses, they are social contracts with the people they represent.

 

 

religion

What is bothering me about the Free Market is the realization that this Free Market is not just a facet of our experiences in our daily living. I now understand that the Free Market is all pervasive in every facet of our own experiences, and this Free Market is not the free market envisioned by Adam Smith, this Free Market has become a form of religion which I could call Free-Marketism, that is a religion with its dogmas, its rituals, its own language, and its bigotry.

 

 

obsessed

In Canada, for example, the priesthood of Free Marketeers have becoming obsessed with the terms 'tax cuts" and 'brain drain' and they are forgetting what it means to be entrepreneurial, what it means to know our history, what it means to remember our memories, what it means to balance the common good with our private good.

 

 

trash
mouthed

Let me go on with these two terms 'tax cuts' and 'brain drain' peddled by the business politicians and let me refer to the latest trash mouthed by Ontario Minister of Health Tony Clement. Tony Clement is aspiring to take over the leadership of the Ontario Conservative party and as a consequence he is building the political renewal of his conservative healthy platform.
 

$250,000
tax free

Priestly Tony Clement has recently delivered his version of Free Market with his numbered sermon titled 'Jump Start 250' and proposes a plan to exempt young people from paying provincial income tax on the first $250,000 they earn in their careers. Referring to the economic benchmark/model of Alberta and the United States, Tony Clement has stated
"How is our next generation going to find their way in life -- as tuition fees climb, the price of a new home seems never to come down and the lure of other provinces and countries grows stronger every year."
   

lower
tuition

I have a message for Tony Clement, why not providing lower tuition fees for our students and forget about this brain drain, which, if true, has been caused by the same decadent leadership Clement represents.

 

 
References:
  Let first $250,000 earned be tax-free, Clement says Robert Benzie, National Post,March 8, 2002 http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020308/273691.html