Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
Socialism is hitting a glass ceiling all across the Western world.
The core problems of the 2020s will be to decarbonize and retool the economy in a world where geopolitics is uncertain and more of those new industries need to be on-shored. We need a government that can put its head down, get a lot of things built and let that economic transition take place. All countries are racing against the clock here.
Printing money to spend on healthcare for their elderly or to transfer cash to voters' pockets should be really far down the list of priorities in a high interest rate, inflationary environment with record low unemployment and a dire shortage of skilled workers in precisely those sectors that we need to transition our economy. This is especially true in Quebec, which already has a pretty generous list of social programs and really needs to get its infrastructure and industrial base in shape.
I think that the QS' policy of 'free transit' is very illustrative of the inability to read the real world. For starters, that sort of thing only really plays in central Montreal. Secondly, Montreal doesn't need free transit, its existing transit is bursting at the seams! It needs shovels in the ground.
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Agreed.
The last point speaks to a broader political problem, which is that too many otherwise smart folks on the left think the solution to insufficient supply is to subsidize demand. Whether its housing, transit, food, energy, etc.