Dear Editor,
I was a little confused last week to hear Finance Minister Iris Evans saying the current global economic meltdown came out of the blue and now the government needs to look at cutting unnecessary costs or face dipping into Alberta’s savings.
Huh?
This meltdown has been forecast for years. Economists have been telling us the debt load carried by Americans was simply unsustainable. Our greatest market is America. Don’t hardly take no brains to figure the bust was coming... from somewhere... sometime... soon. Maybe we should have planned for it.
Maybe we should have been more like Norway (similar population... similar economy), salting away more than $600 billion of energy profit. Maybe we should have diversified our economy... like we have been saying we should for 35 years. Maybe we should have had... you know... a plan!
Don’t we pay Mrs. Evans to know those things? Aren’t we paying her colleagues to lead us into the future on a solid footing? But she, and her predecessors squandered our wealth, even trying to buy our love with $400 per person (of our own money) a couple years back. Now there was fiscal prudence. There was a plan for the future. That’s expertise I think we can do without!
Don’t we pay her and her colleagues really well? Wasn’t it just eight months ago they gave themselves a 34 percent raise, claiming we needed experts in government and we had to pay the financial price? In light of Mrs. Evan claim that this event caught her off guard, I would suggest we aren’t getting much bang for our bucks.
Does anyone else out there think that 34 percent raise was unnecessary? Does anyone else think that is the first place to start trimming?
Join me. Write your MLA and ask them to cut back the 34 percent raise as a show of contrition for their lack of foresight. If they didn’t see this coming, they sure ain’t worth the money we are paying them. Time to make them feel our frustration with their poor planning.
William Munsey
New Sarepta, Alta.