The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an organization that has never heard of a spending program it didn’t like [unless it's a military program], has suggested that Ottawa one-up last years spending orgy increase of 14.1% over 2008. The $56 billion deficit forecast for this year is pretty bad, but the CCPA proposes an even larger one for next year, up to $65 billion deficit, in order to sustain “stimulus” and jobs creation.

Just to put things in perspective for you, the CCPA is calling for a 12.6% increase to the total public debt for a single year in order to ensure everybody has stimulus money for 2010. Currently, every man, woman, and small child who crawls along the carpet owes $15,606 because of our public debt. The CCPA believes that spending $65 billion, and increasing that per capita burden by $1,970, would be better than cutting taxes, or simply tightening the belt.

Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume I have $1,500 of credit card debt. Under the circumstances of a bad economy, the best I can do is make the minimum payment, which is barely more than the interest amount. Over the span of a year, I could make the minimum payment on my $1,500 debt without ever really denting the principle amount. I’ve done nothing to stave off my liability, and everything to maintain a cyclic debt payment that becomes a part of my overall expenditures.

Adding a per capita burden of $1,970 is even worse, since the tax base isn’t made up of the population of 33 million people. It’s a much smaller amount, and when you consider the progressive tax system, that amount is even smaller, since the middle and upper classes pay the most money. But wait, it gets even worse.

The population that is over 65 years of age, the boomer generation, will continue to rise for the next 50 years as the tax base shrinks. The only means of sustaining the current government spending and programs is by incurring more debt, or by importing more workers. And even immigration won’t be able to solve all of the problems created by debt.

There’s no reason to believe that borrowing $65 billion in order to distribute stimulus money into the economy will provide a per capita benefit approaching anything close to $1,970. Beyond that, just as it does with your credit card, Canada increases its overall interest payments exponentially. In 1995-96 before the Paul Martin cuts that brought the deficit under control, interest payments peaked at $49.4 billion when the debt bottomed out at around $560 billion. That’s practically the amount of debt accrued just in “stimulus” spending this year.

The CCPA budget calls for things like $10 billion in Employment Insurance giveaways, environmental stimulus, and a federal carbon tax [if you can believe it]. To offset those costs, it advises cutting the military for $6 billion over five years, which would probably restore Defence back to the levels of 1.1% of GDP from the Liberal era.

There’s nothing to be gained by accruing more debt and gouging the military just after the federal government has restored levels to the point where we can actually sustain comprehensive long-term missions and emergency foreign aid for natural disasters like the Haitian Earthquake.

The first rule of holes is stop digging. We need to tighten the belt, weather the last of the economic storm, and then restore the budget to balance. If we don’t do that, we’re only setting ourselves up for a much worse crash in the future.