Politics: government priorities and possibilities, part 2

Self-tutoring about what’s possible from government: the tutor continues from last post.

The following is according to my understanding.

I hint, in my post from April 10, 2026, that there seems only one way the BC government can effectively reduce the cost of living: by reducing taxes and/or regulations. In particular, it seems, the government cannot truly reduce the average cost of living by means of program spending. Let’s see why this might be.

For rough figures, the government’s spending breakdown is as follows: it seems nearly 60 percent of its budget is spent on wages, salaries, benefits, and/or other forms of employee compensation. Let’s imagine, just to be conservative, that it’s only 50 percent. Then, one might opine that, on average, two dollars need to be received by the government for every one dollar of benefit it can provide to the general public.

By that reasoning, if the government wants to reduce overall cost of living by 500 per month per person, via some new program, one’s best guess might be that its necessary funding will be 1000 per month in new taxes. It seems hard to find savings, in that scenario, for the taxpayer.

Someone might say, “Well they just need to tax the rich, then make life more affordable for the poor.” Well-meaning as such a sentiment might be, things seldom seem to work that way. Rather, from what I’ve witnessed, it seems that the more wealth redistribution a government does, the more insulated the rich become. How that ironic trend seems to work is likely a topic for one or several future posts.

Perhaps a useful idea to remember is that a provincial government doesn’t create money. (No government does, really.) Therefore, for the provincial government to spend money, it has to collect it from someone. Then, before paying out that money to someone else, it seems to consume a significant portion internally. Hence, redistribution programs might have doubtful effect.

By contrast, if the government reduces tax by one dollar, the taxpayer’s cost of living should decrease in a fairly transparent way, yes? Reducing regulations can likely also result in cost savings the ordinary taxpayer will notice.

Source:

cfib-fcei.ca

gov.bc.ca