Their Deficit, Our Perspective (Globe & Mail, CANADA)

Close your eyes. Assume that, in just over two weeks, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's budget warns that the country faces deficits of around $100-billion "for years to come."

It would be a nightmare scenario for Canada. Deficits at that level would eclipse by far what Canada experienced at its worst deficit years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would mean deficits much higher as a share of national income than in those years.

We all should remember or learn what those deficits that stretched from the mid-1970s and ended only in 1995 brought or contributed to Canada: higher taxes, lower government spending, huge interest payments, lower private and public sector investment, stagnating productivity.

Year after year, until the Liberals stopped the deficits in the mid-1990s, governments pledged to dig Canada out of the fiscal hole, only to dig an even deeper hole. Every budget during those years, Liberal and Conservative governments pledged to restrain, reduce and eventually eliminate deficits. They never did.

The $100-billion figure would be the very rough Canadian equivalent to what president-elect Barack Obama is proposing for the United States. Mr. Obama warned Americans this week to get ready for "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come."

What a long way Mr. Obama has come in such a short time.

FULL ARTICLE