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Originally Posted by CDSmith
Interesting that you mentiion conservatives here. It just so happens that at the time of the big Winnipeg casinos and gaming rooms coming into effect the conservatives were in power here in Manitoba. I took to calling them "the Filmon regime", and under the leadership of heir Filmon they did exactly what you're describing. They got a $200 million dollar per year boost yet seemed to have very little to show for it.
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To be fair, conservatives aren't the ONLY ones with opaque spending practices. Any power base that's been entrenched too long will have it's system gamers, as evidenced by the cretien liberals and the whole Gomery debacle. It just seems that, in my recollection of political history, that the parties which heavily advocate 'personal responsibility' seem to not have much of it themselves. Perhaps it's just that the sense of hypocrisy is greater when the con's do it... like catching a Hell-Fire evangelical preacher in an orgy with 3 hookers and a sri lankan boy.
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Conservative parties, when headed up with good leadership, can be a great thing for a state or province, but when led by the proverbial fat-cat with rich friends, well, the mystery of where the money went becomes no mystery at all. As much as I'd like to believe that that money was absorbed into the machine and spread out across a zillion social programs and infrastructure projects of benefit to society, I choose to not try to kid myself.
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I've always been more of a "social liberal, fiscal conservative" type of voter, which meant that my votes often split between the libs and the PC (although I couldn't stomach it after mulrooney fucked us over with the GST and NAFTA). The problem with the original PC agenda is that it, ironically, shared a nasty trait with Communism. It SEEMS like a good idea, at the time, but when put into practical use corruption and graft fuck the whole thing up. It leaves us in a situation where the public is only served at the 'entrenching' phase of government entry or by throwing people a bone in an attempt to stay in power.
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It just strikes me as amusing that up until 15 years ago there was no extra $200 million per year gambling revenue to the government. It is likely the same in several other provinces and US states as well. Yet you still hear governments crying about not having enough to go around.
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Apparently the people of nova scotia, at one point before I arrived, voted in a tax on utilities in order to raise the money to clean up halifax harbour, which is kinda nasty. Decades later, there SHOULD be hundreds of millions in that fund... but it's all been spent, because the 'fund' never happened. They just poured that cash into general revenue and spent it on whatever they spent it on. I believe Hamm claimed that it (at least in part) went to 'salting and then repairing the roads in winter'.