Tuesday, June 29, 2004
you can’t ignore where the rest of the 67% went
Mustafa and Mandos debate Frum’s piece about the Liberal economic record at Points of Information.
Mustafa writes,
But the core of Frum’s argument holds. The economy grew by 67%. The value of what was in Canada grew by 67%. People saw their revenues increase by 31%. At the same time though, the government’s revenue rose by 45%. So the government acquired more of the benefits of economic growth than did the people. (Where’d the rest go? I don’t know the Canadian economy well enough to know this. Some was lost in trade deficits for sure. I’ll defer to someone else to give a proper accounting of this.)
I don’t know what’s going on here or who’s right, but ‘where the rest went’ seems to me to be a question you’d NEED to answer before assessing what happened in the 90’s.
