{"id":19519,"date":"2013-03-20T10:26:31","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19519"},"modified":"2013-03-20T10:26:31","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:26:31","slug":"paul-wells-says-harper-and-flaherty-have-learned-a-lot-about-budgeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/20\/paul-wells-says-harper-and-flaherty-have-learned-a-lot-about-budgeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Wells says Harper and Flaherty have learned a lot about budgeting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Of course, this <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2013\/03\/20\/a-few-billion-off-the-top-of-the-federal-budget\/\" target=\"_blank\">isn&#8217;t necessarily a good thing<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One thing Stephen Harper learned soon after he became Prime Minister was that Canadians have little intuitive grasp of decimal places. A government does not get 1,000 times more credit for spending $1 billion on something than it does for spending $1 million. In fact, it does not get twice as much credit. As long as the government notices a problem and nods at it, it wins approval from voters who care about that problem. So not long after his man Jim Flaherty started delivering budgets, a Harper era of small and essentially symbolic investment began.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, the ability to tell the difference between a little belt-tightening and a wholesale cut to a government service or department is not a widespread skill. So as long as the government offers only the vaguest information about its spending cuts, few Canadians will go searching for details.<\/p>\n<p>This general numerical dyslexia will come in handy this year more than most, as Jim Flaherty tries to meet a zero-deficit target that is suddenly rather close \u2014 2015, give or take \u2014 while dealing with a lousy economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of course, this isn&#8217;t necessarily a good thing: One thing Stephen Harper learned soon after he became Prime Minister was that Canadians have little intuitive grasp of decimal places. A government does not get 1,000 times more credit for spending $1 billion on something than it does for spending $1 million. In fact, it does [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,84],"tags":[697,290,258],"class_list":["post-19519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-government","tag-budget","tag-statistics","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-54P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19519"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19520,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19519\/revisions\/19520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}