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Big spenders anxious to add to debt

TransLink has an insatiable appetite for taxpayers' dollars, and the sky is the limit.

Editor: TransLink skulkers are bent on overtaxing citizens.

TransLink’s Mayors Council on Regional Transportation (with Langley City Mayor Peter Fassbender as vice-chair) are relentless in continuing irresponsible deficit spending. They are insistent on big capital projects that require borrowed money and they don’t seem to care where it comes from.

Add on vehicle levies, bridge tolls, increased carbon taxes, increased gas taxes, increased property taxes, and whatever it takes. They don’t care how they wring the money from taxpayers and consumers, because they are drunk with power and have to have it all now, during their term in power.

Well hello there. This is a wake-up call. Have you heard of the financial deficit that our province is in? We are $52 billion in debt. (That’s $52 thousand million). Individually, that’s $13,000 each. This debt is costing us taxpayers more than $2.5 billion per year in interest payments alone, wasted down the rat hole.

Do you know what $2.5 billion could pay for? How about the B.C. Place renovation and roof project, four times over, each year.

Never mind the ederal debt of $582 billion, (our share of that is $17,000 each), or the local municipal government debts. Debt is like a tax that depreciates the dollar.

It is absolutely not necessary to build the $1.4 billion Evergreen Line. This is the SkyTrain expansion of 11 kilometres to Port Moody and Coquitlam in these precarious economic times. But Premier Christy Clark just couldn’t wait to blow another $600 million of borrowed deficit tax dollars (the province’s share). This does not count overruns.

Her decision enabled the project to proceed. But that’s not enough, so TransLink needs more yet. The whole thing should be stopped and cancelled until we can pay down some debt.

TransLink’s so called ‘Moving Forward’ program (including the $1.4 billion Evergreen Line) totals $2.3 billion of deficit spending. Of that, $900 million consists of upgrading, expanding and improving the existing transit infrastructure and SkyTrain stations.

It is also ironic and insulting that SkyTrain’s expansion is occurring North of the Fraser, when the majority of the growth by a big margin has been South of the Fraser. Yet power spenders Mayor Fassbender of Langley City and Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts voted for it.

As for the carbon tax, it was introduced in 2008 as revenue neutral. By law every cent of carbon tax revenue will be returned to the taxpayers in tax cuts.

In reality, this is done by smoke and mirrors shell game accounting, mostly by claiming that reductions in corporate, industrial, small business and personal taxes will offset the $1 billion carbon tax revenue this year.

Just as we suspected, it looks like it only took four years for big spending politicians to try to manipulate the carbon tax for another money grab.

For consumers, it’s not revenue neutral. It’s an unnecessary tax scam that rips us off.

John Cummins of the BC Conservatives has the right idea — scrap the whole Liberal carbon bureaucracy, which would save billions and boost our economy.

Why do these do-gooder ego-puffed politicians keep patting themselves on the backs, when in reality they are ruining a lot of lives by saddling future generations (our children) with impossible debt loads? Never mind all the struggling taxpayers who trying to live our lives now.

Roland Seguin,

Langley