Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ubc-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!acton From: acton@ubc-cs.UUCP (Donald Acton) Newsgroups: can.politics Subject: Re: But who pays? Message-ID: <1233@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: Fri, 23-Aug-85 03:04:12 EDT Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.1233 Posted: Fri Aug 23 03:04:12 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 23-Aug-85 06:09:06 EDT References: <1341@utcsri.UUCP> Reply-To: acton@ubc-cs.UUCP (Donald Acton) Distribution: can Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 41 Summary: In article <1341@utcsri.UUCP> hogg@utcsri.UUCP (John &) writes: >Now, for the key question: where's the money going to come from? ..... >..... This leaves only cuts in existing expenditure. I have a few very good candidates for cutting: 1) The CBC which costs us >$800,0000,000 (1983-84) However, I will knock this down to 720,000,000/year after the alleged cuts made last fall. 2) The Post Office >$300,000,000 / year. I realize that the Post Office is suppose to become self sufficient so this represents money that is being freed up for other purposes. 3) VIA rail according to the March 9th (1985) edition of the Globe and Wail receives an average subsidy of $87 per passenger and carried seven million passengers last year. This works out to $609,000,000. (If you can't trust the figures provided by Canada's self proclaimed national newspaper who can you trust?) This works out to 1.629 billion dollars of frivolous expenditures. As far as spending on national defence is concerned the only figures I have are for 1983 in which we spent $8 billion. The projected figure for 1985 was $10 billion. If we cut out the above programs we could increase defence spending by 16% which would be a non-trivial amount. > I defy anybody to make a concrete, feasible proposal that >even a majority of net posters will be happy with. >-- > Whether or not a majority of net people would support these proposals is questionable as everyone seems to have their own little pet government subsisdized service that they couldn't see touched. However, even if we only cut these by 50% we could still give our military quite a shot in the arm given the current size of its budget. Nothing says the money has to come from one place and I am sure someone could find a pet government project of mine to cut. If the government worked at it a little it should be able to find other areas to cut, after all I have already provided them with three areas. Donald Acton