Archive for March 11, 2008

Unsustainable growth

The Canadian health care system is in peril, according to this Frasier Institute report. Summary:

  • Health spending has been growing at an unsustainable pace in 9 of 10 provinces.
  • Government health spending in 6 of 10 provinces is on pace to consume more than half of total revenue from all sources by 2035.
  • Averaged nationally across all provinces, health spending has risen by 7.3 percent over a 10-year period, while the national average growth rate of total available provincial revenue has only been 5.9 percent.
  • Moreover, health spending has grown faster than provincial gross domestic product (GDP), which average only a 5.6 percent growth annual across provinces in the same period.

Kissing off Canada

This IBD article begins:

Canada has an estimated 1.6 trillion barrels of oil on its territory, much of it locked in tough-to-excavate tar sands in the province of Alberta. By comparison, oil-rich Saudi Arabia has an estimated 270 billion barrels left. It isn’t even close.

Yet, according to the Financial Times of London, Canada’s government recently sent U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates a letter of warning that it might not be able to sell the U.S. any of its oil, which the Pentagon desperately needs for national defense.

For that, you can thank the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, passed with great gusto and self-righteousness by the Democratic Congress.

Under Section 526 of that law, tar sands are considered to be an alternative fuel. But the law requires oil sold to the U.S. government and produced from alternative sources to emit fewer greenhouse gases than oil produced from conventional crude sources.

Teachers’ unions

teachersunions.jpg

This Web site contains a wealth of information on teachers unions. Above is an ad for the site.

Money to quit

A group is:

inviting nominations for a contest to determine the nation’s worst unionized teachers. The “winners” will be offered $10,000 each if they permanently resign or retire from any career in education — if they sign a release agreeing to have their name and the reasons for their selection published by the group.

Spitzer

Don Boudreaux on Eliot Spitzer. There is justice in this world, after all.

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