Dear Editor:
Re: Selective facts in letter, Letters, The Record, May 10.
Now look who's using selective facts? Alan McNulty talks about the Great Recession and the decrease in natural resource royalties clobbering government revenues from 2008 to 2012.
Why doesn't he mention the tax cuts clobbering B.C. government revenue to the tune of nearly $4 billion dollars per year every year since the year 2000? Or that these tax cuts mainly went to the rich and big corporations? Or that studies show that these corporate tax cuts have not resulted in increased job creation or the infamous trickle-down?
And why did we have that Great Recession in 2008? Because the rich were (and still are) using the money they should be paying in taxes to play stock market poker and to build the pyramid schemes that partly crashed down, instead of paying their fair share of taxes and contributing back to the society that allowed them to amass such huge amounts of wealth.
It was a political decision to cut taxes again and again, resulting in this loss of government revenue, money needed to pay for the public infrastructure and services we value and depend on our government to fund with our tax dollars.
Mr. McNulty writes that health care and education take up "71 per cent" of total spending and will take up "90 per cent of spending by 2023."
Well, the government knows healthcare and education are extremely popular public programs.
They know there would be a huge public outcry if they openly cut these well-loved services.
They have already purposefully cut their own revenue, and now they have an excuse to chop away at anything they can get away with.
This makes it look like health care and education spending is growing when it is actually the spending on everything else that is shrinking.
Look at it this way. A meatball takes up more space on a small plate than it does on a big plate, even though the meatball stays the same size. And more and more of that plate, and the healthy parts of the meal that fit on it, are being systematically sliced away and given to those who already have more than enough to eat.
Well, I want the full-meal deal, not half the facts.
Rachel Tutte, New Westminster
