http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-burning-the-budget-to-heat-the-home
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I find it hard to believe, but I’m told some people use shopping as a form of therapy. This is ridiculous. If life is chewing at your ankles, you’ve lost your job and your mortgage has been foreclosed, it’s not clear that buying a cartload of designer shoes, on a credit card rapidly going underwater, promises any long-term relief.
Imelda Marcos, the widow of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, had a lot of shoes and, in her case, to be fair, she could afford them (thanks to her pillaging of the Philippine treasury). Imelda, to my knowledge anyway, has never been held up as an example of exquisite mental stability. Yet she had a shoe stable that would have struck a centipede as over the top.
Now, lest anyone wonder whether there’s a hint of sexism in my talk of high heels and excess spending, let me end the suspense: it is definitely there. Some women can go quite off the wharf for shoes, and when fanned by the breezes of romance gone wrong, a bad day at the office or contretemps at the spa, fly out to the upscale malls in a pure fury of acquisitiveness.
Not that men are faultless in this respect. We patriarchs can scorch the old credit card, too. But in the case of men, it’s more for showing off. Some male rappers, for example, weight themselves with more gold than the ancient Spanish galleons stripped out of Peru. Movie stars and decaying tycoons buy yachts the size of Portugal. And there are corporate types who flaunt wrist watches that approach the cost of the Large Hadron Collider.
Neither men, nor women, need these tokens and fetishes, but spendthrifts like to cry with noble Lear: “Oh, reason not the need.” The impulse to spend like a sheik can find a home in the heart of a pauper. And there’s nothing for it except the restraints that reality will place on spending. That reality, actually, reins in more people anyway. Most people are sane. They do not mistake Jimmy Choos as a passport to mental well-being, or feel the need to flash a Tiffany & Co. Philippe Patek at the company barbecue.
For most people, there is no contest between securing what is reasonably necessary for their lives, and what is outlandishly unnecessary and beyond their means. Shelter, heat, food, health and transportation make up the common stock of their needs, and they pay attention to meeting these basic needs first. They budget for what they need. Which brings me to this week’s Ontario budget and its virtuous promises, under the rubric of cap-and-trade, to introduce a tax on gasoline starting next January.
It should be noted that it was not all that long ago, even in political time, when Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was singing a different tune. In March 2013, while trying to avoid the prospect of a spring election (the bad odour of the infamous cancellation of the gas plants was then at its strongest), she was quite explicit when she said: “I just want to be clear, we’re taking those potential revenue tools off the table: increase in HST, increase in gas tax.”
Obviously, with a successful election well behind her, those words are now moot. There will be a gasoline tax, and the rationalization for her reversal is, of course, the fight against climate change. The logic is basic, as far as economics is concerned: raise the price of something and people will buy less of it. And if people buy less, they drive less, and if they drive less, why then Ontario will, by some infinitesimal degree at some utterly indeterminable time, be cooler.
This is pure nonsense, of course, because gasoline is neither a shoe nor a watch. People do not fill up their tanks for show or therapy. They buy only what they need. People drive, almost exclusively, where they need to drive: to school with their children, to work, to run errands, to visit aging relatives. It’s something people in this world of ours need.
But the unfailing wonder of the green philosophy is the ability to coat any spurious position with a varnish of virtue. Saving the planet is an infinitely elastic justification for any change in any policy..
There is never any need to actually provide a link between cause and effect. Indeed, the chain of causality between a rise in the average Ontarian’s gas bill and the temperature of the world 10, 20 or 50 years hence, is not at all clear.
People are going to buy, and burn, just as much gas after this tax goes into effect as they did before. It’s a hit on those who can least afford it. And it is far more a “revenue tool” than a planet saver.
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POOR are the always the LOSERS
.....
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I find it hard to believe, but I’m told some people use shopping as a form of therapy. This is ridiculous. If life is chewing at your ankles, you’ve lost your job and your mortgage has been foreclosed, it’s not clear that buying a cartload of designer shoes, on a credit card rapidly going underwater, promises any long-term relief.
Imelda Marcos, the widow of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, had a lot of shoes and, in her case, to be fair, she could afford them (thanks to her pillaging of the Philippine treasury). Imelda, to my knowledge anyway, has never been held up as an example of exquisite mental stability. Yet she had a shoe stable that would have struck a centipede as over the top.
Now, lest anyone wonder whether there’s a hint of sexism in my talk of high heels and excess spending, let me end the suspense: it is definitely there. Some women can go quite off the wharf for shoes, and when fanned by the breezes of romance gone wrong, a bad day at the office or contretemps at the spa, fly out to the upscale malls in a pure fury of acquisitiveness.
Not that men are faultless in this respect. We patriarchs can scorch the old credit card, too. But in the case of men, it’s more for showing off. Some male rappers, for example, weight themselves with more gold than the ancient Spanish galleons stripped out of Peru. Movie stars and decaying tycoons buy yachts the size of Portugal. And there are corporate types who flaunt wrist watches that approach the cost of the Large Hadron Collider.
Neither men, nor women, need these tokens and fetishes, but spendthrifts like to cry with noble Lear: “Oh, reason not the need.” The impulse to spend like a sheik can find a home in the heart of a pauper. And there’s nothing for it except the restraints that reality will place on spending. That reality, actually, reins in more people anyway. Most people are sane. They do not mistake Jimmy Choos as a passport to mental well-being, or feel the need to flash a Tiffany & Co. Philippe Patek at the company barbecue.
For most people, there is no contest between securing what is reasonably necessary for their lives, and what is outlandishly unnecessary and beyond their means. Shelter, heat, food, health and transportation make up the common stock of their needs, and they pay attention to meeting these basic needs first. They budget for what they need. Which brings me to this week’s Ontario budget and its virtuous promises, under the rubric of cap-and-trade, to introduce a tax on gasoline starting next January.
It should be noted that it was not all that long ago, even in political time, when Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was singing a different tune. In March 2013, while trying to avoid the prospect of a spring election (the bad odour of the infamous cancellation of the gas plants was then at its strongest), she was quite explicit when she said: “I just want to be clear, we’re taking those potential revenue tools off the table: increase in HST, increase in gas tax.”
Obviously, with a successful election well behind her, those words are now moot. There will be a gasoline tax, and the rationalization for her reversal is, of course, the fight against climate change. The logic is basic, as far as economics is concerned: raise the price of something and people will buy less of it. And if people buy less, they drive less, and if they drive less, why then Ontario will, by some infinitesimal degree at some utterly indeterminable time, be cooler.
This is pure nonsense, of course, because gasoline is neither a shoe nor a watch. People do not fill up their tanks for show or therapy. They buy only what they need. People drive, almost exclusively, where they need to drive: to school with their children, to work, to run errands, to visit aging relatives. It’s something people in this world of ours need.
But the unfailing wonder of the green philosophy is the ability to coat any spurious position with a varnish of virtue. Saving the planet is an infinitely elastic justification for any change in any policy..
There is never any need to actually provide a link between cause and effect. Indeed, the chain of causality between a rise in the average Ontarian’s gas bill and the temperature of the world 10, 20 or 50 years hence, is not at all clear.
People are going to buy, and burn, just as much gas after this tax goes into effect as they did before. It’s a hit on those who can least afford it. And it is far more a “revenue tool” than a planet saver.
-------------------------------
POOR are the always the LOSERS
.....
