Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Wednesday that the upcoming federal budget would focus on both austerity and investments, adding that current government spending was unsustainable.
Canada has been dealing with economic uncertainty since the start of the year, so the primary focus of the budget will be to cut operational spending and trigger investments into major projects, Carney told reporters in Toronto.
“It’s a budget of austerity and investment at the same time and that’s possible if you have discipline,” he said
Losing $5 and losing $100 are both bad but I know which one I’d pick. They are not equal and insisting they are is what led us here today.
The better solution is not to lose any money at all, and in the long term that’s the goal. But in the mean time I’ll pick $5 every time.
It doesn’t matter if it’s $100 and $99, or $100 and $0.01, my point is there are more than those two options. There are in fact a nearly infinite variety of options. You just have to decide that you want a third option. Stop picking between two bad options if you don’t want bad options.
Realistically those are the only two options. Voting for Bernie Sanders or the NDP would not have changed a single thing and wishing won’t make it so. And if enough people don’t vote for the lesser evil you risk the worse one winning. That’s how the world ended up with Trump.
Think longer term. How did the stage get set for this outcome? How could someone like Trump get elected in a healthy and properly functioning democracy? This is a consequence that was decades in the making, at least. Maybe being “realistic” about what we think we can achieve is what got us into this mess. Maybe we need to start questioning this “reality”, because it doesn’t seem to be working out very well for us. Maybe wishing for something better is our only hope. Or maybe it’s the first step to something actually better.