TOM OSBORNE and LANA PAYNE on Different Pages

In a Telegram story by James McLeod, Saturday April 6, 2013, “MHA says deep budget cuts could have been avoided”, based upon an interview with Tom Osborne, the Member could not have better revealed the origins of the current Budget mess: 

“Sitting around the caucus table in 2008 and 2009, we were talking as a caucus that there was going to be a decrease in oil production, and a decrease in oil revenues, and the Atlantic Accord transfers were going to run out.  Yet the Budget continued to grow.  That’s the point that I’m making”, he said. “With the proper management, we could have been in the position where we had a slightly smaller budget without having to make the cuts today”.

There are those who think Government money is different than what you and I spend; that it has a pedigree that makes it special.  They want to join the legion of Governments for whom only the bondholders possess an ability to apply the fiscal brakes.