Economy
Canada’s federal government disregards its own fiscal rules—unlike Sweden

From the Fraser Institute
By Grady Munro and Jake Fuss
During the 1970s and 1980s, Canada and Sweden both saw a deterioration in government finances. However, hard times in the early 1990s transformed the approach to fiscal policy by governments in both countries, including reducing spending and borrowing, and ultimately returning to balanced budgets. While Swedes have carried on the legacy of fiscal responsibility in subsequent decades, Canadians seem to have forgotten the hard lessons of recent history and have fallen back on the fiscal approach that got us into trouble in the first place.
In his recent book, Swedish economist Johan Norberg explains that for most of its modern history Sweden has been a testament to the success of the free market, rather than a model socialist economy. The country only experimented with socialism for a short period, with disastrous results.
Sweden’s socialist experiment during the 1970s and 1980s saw substantial income redistribution and the introduction of a large welfare state. As a result, the size of government doubled as a share of the economy (measured by GDP). Yet despite increases in taxes, particularly targeting corporations and the wealthy, the government could not raise the funds to pay for such a sizable expansion of the welfare state. Instead, Sweden ran deficits in every year from 1970 to 1987, government debt rose from less than 18 per cent of the economy (GDP) in 1970 to over 70 per cent in 1985, and the private sector completely stagnated.
This approach brought about a financial crisis in the early 1990s that saw interest rates briefly rise as high as 500 per cent. In the wake of this crisis, the Swedish government declared the socialist experiment a failure, and the country saw substantial reform that emphasized balanced budgets, lower taxes, and an open business environment. Rules were set in place to ensure fiscal discipline, and as a result the country has enjoyed consistent surpluses and government debt has fallen from 83.2 per cent of the economy in 1998 to 58.8 per cent in 2021, despite still maintaining a large welfare state.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Canada also experienced a deterioration in government finances. Canada’s issues stemmed from a substantial expansion in the size and role of government in conjunction with rising interest rates. The federal government ran uninterrupted budget deficits from 1970 through to the mid-1990s. Federal government debt rose to over 70 per cent of GDP during this period and debt interest costs were consuming more than one-third of federal government revenues.
By the early 1990s federal finances were in shambles and the economy was stagnant. A new federal government was elected, led by Jean Chrétien, which implemented significant fiscal reform in 1995 based on spending restraint, balanced budgets and lower taxes. The provinces enacted similar reforms, and from the late 1990s through the 2000s, Canadians enjoyed consistent surpluses, debt reduction, and strong economic growth.
While there are clear parallels between the countries, unlike Sweden, Canadians has since reverted back to the risky fiscal approach of the 1970s and 1980s. Since 2015, Canada has seen historically high federal spending, and a string of federal and provincial budget deficits. Consequently, government debt and its associated costs have grown substantially.
Since the 1990s, both Canada and Sweden have had fiscal rules in place to help ensure the health of government finances. But while the Swedish government has largely stuck to its surplus goal by being disciplined with finances, Canada’s current federal government has consistently disregarded its own commitments. Indeed, it has violated its own fiscal anchors several times since 2015, and rather than adopt the discipline necessary to get back on track, the government simply moves the goalposts.
Simply put, Swedes have learned their lesson from their experience in the 1970s to 1990s, whereas Canadians appear to have forgotten. This raises the question—do Swedes have better memories?
Authors:
Business
‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.
“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”
“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.
Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.
“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.
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With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.
“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.
“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.
The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.
“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
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