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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