Psychological Warfare. Are we the Last to Know? Gang-green Uses it on Us!

Psychological Warfare for Dhimmis

An Islamist religious judge recently sentenced a Christian woman to hang, for being a Christian. Militant Islam has declared war on the entire civilized world, which it calls openly the Dar-el-Harb (House of War). The Harbis, the inhabitants of the Dar-el-Harb, are dhimmis, who have no right to own property, govern their own affairs, or even live.

How can the “dhimmis” respond?  By joining forces to take out the world’s trash. There exists a weapon of war it is legal for anybody, whether civilian or military, to use during peacetime. This weapon is psychological warfare, and its deployment involves three steps.

  1. Identify our objectives. Our goal is to totally discredit and demonize militant “Islam” throughout the Western World, and convince its adherents to self-deport if they won’t assimilate into their surrounding societies.
  2. Identify the Propaganda Men, or the audiences we wish to persuade. These include people in our camp, neutrals, and the enemy rank and file.
  3. Deploy arguments that are simple, visceral, and forceful. Sally Hogshead, an expert on the power of fascination in business relationships, states that a communication has about nine seconds in which to capture the attention of the person to whom it is directed. Germany learned the hard way in World War I that long-winded intellectual arguments from Professor-Doctors don’t work, while pictures of murderous “Huns” with babies on their bayonets do.

Anti-German Propaganda: “For God, Fatherland, and King”

Define the Objective and the Enemy

The goal of our propaganda is to counteract the Islamist campaign to subjugate Jews, Christians, Hindus, and the wrong kinds of Muslims. The enemy strategy begins with calls for “tolerance,” demonizes enemies as Islamophobes, continues with speech-code legislation to criminalize discussion of Islamist violence andmisogyny, with the goal of imposing dhimmitude and Sharia law. Islamist invaders have already created “no-go” zones that are off limits to unarmed Europeans, including police officers.

Our goal is not, however, to protest these outrages, or defend ourselves against them. Propaganda is, like the lance and saber of the horse and musket era, an almost exclusively offensive weapon. As stated by General Patton,

The saber is solely a weapon of offense and is used in conjunction with the other offensive weapon, the horse. In all the training, the idea of speed must be conserved. No direct parries are taught, because at the completion of a parry the enemy is already beyond reach of an attack. The surest parry is a disabled opponent.

Charles M. Province added, “The cavalryman rides at a man to kill him. If he misses, he goes on to another, moving in straight lines with the intent of running his opponent through.” Good propaganda similarly makes little effort to fend off the enemy’s arguments, and seeks instead to discredit him so thoroughly that nothing he does is relevant. If we prove to the Propaganda Man (the individual we wish to persuade) that Islamists are woman-beating misogynists,child rapists, and human traffickers, the Islamists’ propaganda will cease to matter. The surest parry is indeed a disabled opponent.

Identify the Propaganda Man

The Propaganda Men are clearly identifiable as:

  1. People in our camp whom we wish to engage or mobilize. We want to turn everybody on our side into an engaged, enthusiastic, and active participant instead of a passive bystander.
  2. Neutrals, such as the John Doe of public opinion. In Europe, these neutrals often tolerate the Islamist infestation, and are afraid to speak up about it. This does not mean they won’t follow those who set the right example.
  3. The enemy rank and file, whom we want to disengage, desert, or even change sides.

Colonel Paul Linebarger’s Psychological Warfare adds that it is bad policy to define the enemy too widely. Consider, for example, Steve Benson’s cartoons of “NRA members.” The NRA should purchase Benson’s cartoons, and publish them in every issue of The American Rifleman. This would mobilize currently unengaged gun owners to the point where they will vent their fury on anything that vaguely resembles an enemy of the Second Amendment in every election.

Advocates of blanket attacks on Islam add that the Koran sanctions violence against infidels, and that all Muslims believe in the Koran. The Old Testament, in which God allegedly tells the Hebrews to commit genocide, is equally bad. Modern Jews do not behave like Old Testament Hebrews. Modern Christians do not conduct Inquisitions or witch trials, or slaughter the wrong kinds of Christians as took place during the Thirty Years War. Civilized Muslims do not imitate Mohammed by engaging in murder, banditry, and child rape, although problem Muslims do.

The problem Muslims are easily identifiable from their actions and statements. Note the noxious expressions of the Islamists who are calling for the bombing of Denmark, along with their threats to take Danish women as war booty.  It would require very little of this to turn Western bystanders into full participants in the war against Jihad.

Deploy Arguments that are Simple, Visceral, and Forceful

War propaganda is simple, persuasive, and easy to understand in seconds. Our goal is to demonize easily identifiable Islamist behaviors the way wartime propaganda once demonized Spaniards, Germans, Imperial Japanese, and Nazis.

Propaganda Posters: Spanish-American and World Wars

The Propaganda Man, or more precisely Propaganda Woman, for the next one is the female American college student who believes in women’s rights, but has some deluded and starry-eyed notions about the true nature of the Muslim Student Association on her campus.

Waste Not, Want Not: Another Off the Shelf Public Domain Image

It is also important to deploy short, simple, and accurate names for the enemy. During the Second World War, Americans were encouraged to “slap a dirty little Jap.” Hitler’s soldiers became Krauts, Huns, and Boche, and here are some phrases to describe today’s enemy:

  • Islamist: the modern counterpart of a Nazi who believes his ideology gives him the right to subjugate, kill, and/or rape outsiders.
  • Jihadi: which identifies bith the ideology and the technique.
  • Green Plague, from green as the color of Islamism.

The Black Plague and the Green Plague

The bottom line is that we are, whether we like it or not, in a war that the enemy has declared on us. We must therefore fight him with weapons of war, which include propaganda during peacetime. Our methods must be limited only by the need for truthfulness, and also the ethical duty to direct them solely against the self-declared enemies of our civilization.

William A. Levinson is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.

Wind Turbines do Nothing to Improve our Air Quality!!! Money Wasted!

Gordon Fulks, Physicist, shows some sense on Wind Turbines

Gordon Fulks PhD Physics, explains the silliness of the Cuisinarts.

This is an OP ED in the Oregonian, the newspaper of record in the state as I understand..

Green Energy – Green Deception
Wealthy corporate giants like Apple and Google now hawk not only their innovations in the virtual world but an ever greater commitment to ‘Green Energy.’ Even Portland General Electric relentlessly hawks their Green Energy. What amazing virtue! What progress! But is it? There are dark clouds on the horizon, as we turn away from objective science and engineering to a look-alike promoted by the politically connected but scientifically challenged.

One of the dark clouds is certainly climate hysteria, which once motivated societies to sacrifice virgins to appease the climate gods, and today seems intent on merely sacrificing industrialization. But that is not my concern here.
I wonder why we are abandoning ‘Efficient Energy’ in favor of ‘Virtual Energy’ and why we are abandoning ‘Efficient Fuels’ in favor of ‘Politically Correct Fuels.’ I wonder why we are sacrificing our last open spaces to post-modern industrialization, why we are burning our food for fuel via ethanol, and
why we are destroying the earth’s last remaining rainforests to grow ‘bio-diesel.’
For someone who has long championed science and the environment, the utter folly I see before me is heartbreaking.

The Sierra Club I once admired is now taking money from the natural gas industry to
drive competing coal out of business and move us into the ‘Brownout Age.’
But how can that be? Surely, the natural gas industry will be driven out of business too, if green wins over fossil fuel. Not so! Technology is more complicated than simplistic good versus evil. The game with green is to ignore the fatal downside and keep subsidizing the corruption and stupidity.
If subsidies end, the nonsense will stop. Free markets quickly determine what makes sense. There would be no need for me to explain complexities to those sold on slogans. Thank god we still have competent engineers fighting to keep the lights on. For all others, let me continue.
Wind is very diffuse, requiring a vast environmental and financial footprint to generate significant power. Even then the power is far inferior to that produced by conventional means, because it is intermittent and comes when least needed. This can be solved by pumped storage, by backup from conventional sources or by tailoring usage to the availability of the wind. All of these are prohibitively
expensive with wind, because wind is already prohibitively expensive.

Pumped storage works well with cheap nuclear power, because it allows power plants to run continuously, storing power at night for use the next day. Who cares if this increases the wholesale cost of power from 2 to 3 cents/kw-hr? But the equivalent 50% increase in the cost of wind power is prohibitive.
Backup of wind power by conventional sources is greatly inefficient. Hydroelectric systems do not like to be constantly turned on and off in response to fickle wind. And migrating salmon suffer nitrogen induced fatalities, if water has to spilled without going through the turbines. Besides, we just end up trading inexpensive hydro for expensive wind.
Backup by nuclear or fossil fuel is extremely inefficient. Large thermal plants can take days to come up to steam, forcing operators to keep them running constantly to backup wind.

Building specialized natural gas-fired power plants that can be switched on quickly is also foolish, because they are inefficient. We would be much better off scraping wind altogether and building super efficient gas-turbine power plants that run continuously. Birds and bats would live longer. Those
concerned about their ‘carbon footprint’ would certainly thank us too.
Unfortunately, too many captains of modern industry live in a virtual world, selling gadgets, services, and even real power while promoting only the virtual.

Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. lives in Corbett, Oregon, and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in
physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research. He does not work for any energy or climate industry.

The Lying Liberals are Slandering the Conservatives. Here’s the Truth!

 

Creating Jobs while Rightsizing the Public Service 

LIES ARE LIES – It’s been said by Liberals that we will be firing a hundred thousand people and this is not true.

– It has been said by Liberals that we will get rid of nurses and doctors and this is not true.


FACTS ARE FACTS – The public service has grown by 300,000 positions since the Liberals came to power, jobs that we have to borrow money to pay for.

– About 50,000 public sector workers retire or quit each year. All we need to do is hire one person for every two who leave so we can reduce 100,000 positions in four years.

– We’re not going to cut anything in public safety.

– We’re going to hire more nurses and more doctors and invest $2 Billion more into healthcare than the Liberals will.

– In fact, we will hire more front-line workers to improve services we all rely on.

– We will treat taxpayers and tax dollars with respect.


THE BOTTOM LINE – A PC government will hire more doctors and nurses.

– We will invest in education, improving math and science programs, keep all-day kindergarten and provide more assistance for students with special needs.

– We will replace one public servant for every two who retire and focus this hiring on front-line services.

– Jobs will be created by attracting businesses through lower taxes, affordable hydro, and a balanced budget.

– This is all good for your pocketbook too!

Please share this page with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter. Let’s all work with Matt for a better Ontario.

Together we can bring change Ontario. 

Proof, for Those that Don’t Believe Agenda 21 is Real, or Being Implemented!

 

The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide

by atomcat

The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide indicators. The results will be included in an Annual Report Card.
The completed Report Card will be presented to the community at its annual Sustainable Community Day, where the citizens of
Hamilton-Wentworth take stock of their progress on the trail to VISION 2020.
Contact
Mark Bekkering
Senior Policy Analyst
Planning and Development Department
Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth
119 King Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8N 3T4
Tel.: + 1 905/546-2195
Fax:+1 905/546-4364
E-mail: markb@hookup.net

6.5.2 CASE #18
THE GLOBAL ACTION PLAN PROJECT
COMMUNITY FEEDBACK FOR SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES
Program Name
Global Action Plan for the Earth: Household EcoTeam Programs
Background
Global Action Plan for the Earth (GAP) is a US-based, non-profit organization that has worked for a five-year period to design and
test an effective behavior change methodology for households in the advanced industrialized world. This methodology is called the
Household EcoTeam Program. The program ran a campaign called “The North Puts Its House in Order… Household by Household,”
which implemented the EcoTeam methodology in over 8,000 households in 12 countries: the United States, Canada, Ireland, the
United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia.
The Household EcoTeam Program includes a feedback component to support continued involvement and commitment at the
household level. In the United States, the households that have participated in the feedback part of the programs reported that
on average they sent 42 percent less garbage to landfills, used 25 percent less water, reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by 16
percent, used 16 percent less transportation, and gained an average annual cost savings of US$401.00.
Program Description
The Household EcoTeam Program operates by organizing small groups of family members, residents, and co-workers in a
neighborhood or city to work together to make their consumption patterns more sustainable. The program works on the basis that
information is not enough to produce behavior change; in fact, the program recognizes that in many industrial countries there is
an “overload” of information about the environment, which may inhibit action. For this reason, over a period of four months, the
Household EcoTeam Program organizes individuals into “EcoTeams,” which not only provide and distill information about useful
actions, but facilitate the provision of mutual support to put these actions into practice.
A Household Eco Team Workbook is provided to each new EcoTeam to give step-by-step guidance in each action area. The teams
meet once every two weeks with a different member facilitating each meeting, and are supported by a GAP-trained volunteer
“coach.”The coach leads each EcoTeam through a process of taking action in the following areas:
•reducing garbage output;
•improving home water efficiency;
•improving home energy efficiency;
The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide
•improving transportation efficiency;
•being an eco-wise consumer; and
•empowering others at the household, workplace, and community levels.
For each of the first five action areas, participants choose actions from a list of suggestions. The results of the actions taken are measured and communicated back to each Eco Team and to the community at large. Positive feedback is maximized by the coach,
the team members, and local leaders and media to encourage effective actions. Newspapers, radio, television, and bulletin boards
are used to “broadcast” results, and awards are provided from local governments and businesses to recognize success.
In the sixth action area, each Eco Team is helped by the coach to spawn two or more new Eco-Teams by hosting a gathering for
friends and neighbors. At these gatherings, the accomplishments of the Eco Team are reported and guests are informed about how
they can form their own Eco Team.
GAP observes that the Eco Team approach is a far more effective approach than merely providing lists of “things to do,” because
peer support and direct human contact is essential to sustain life-style changes. By regularly showing participants the results
of their actions relative to the other members of their team, other Eco Teams, and the community, a feedback system is provided to
encourage further commitment to positive change.
Based on five years of experience with the Eco Team model, GAP is now employing a system to establish a “critical mass” (50–85
percent participation rate) of Eco Teams in key communities so that the total impact of Eco Team actions can have an aggregated
positive effect for the whole community. For instance, the participants in Santa Cruz, California, USA, have determined that high diffusion of Eco Teams in that municipality would greatly reduce ground water consumption and the need to construct a US$43
million desalinization plant.
This “Community Lifestyle Campaign” builds on the GAP observation that most Eco Teams were established by word-of-mouth
through existing social networks. By supporting each Eco Team’s process to personally invite friends and neighbors to develop two other Eco Teams, a doubling of the number of Eco Teams occurs with minimal effort every six months. (This recruitment method
has been pilot tested with 20 teams, and each was able to form an average of two new teams.) As Eco Teams multiply and mobilize,
their impact has an increasingly significant effect at the community level. This heightened impact, in turn, creates new opportunities for positive feedback through the media and local political leadership.
In summary, the Eco Team methodology uses the simple tool of systematized personal support networks to encourage and increase
positive behavior change. In the course of changing behaviors, participants learn about environmental issues, build confidence that
they can have an impact, and inform and recruit more friends and associates.
Contact
Global Action Plan for the Earth
PO Box 428, Woodstock, New York
12498 USA
Tel.: +1 914/679-4830
Concluding Remarks from the IGLEI Local Agenda 21 Team
As the preceding chapters have described, Local Agenda 21 planning is a collective process for creating community visions and
actions to achieve environmental, social and economic sustainability. Although the Local Agenda 21 mandate was given by the
United Nations to local governments, it is the responsibility of every local organization and resident to ensure that this process is
started in their respective towns, cities or villages. If carried out effectively, these collective local initiatives will have
a perceptible global impact.

 

Alarmists Claim that CO2 is a Harmful Gas….Because they have their Own Agenda!

May 30, 2014

The regulatory death of energy in America

By Alan Caruba


Before President Obama took office in 2009, the amount of electricity being produced by coal-fired utilities was approximately fifty percent of the total. Today it is approximately forty percent and, when the Environmental Protection Agency regulations take effect as of June 2, more such utilities are likely to close their doors. The basis for the regulations is utterly devoid of any scientific facts.

Environmentalism, as expressed by many of the organizations that advocate it is, in fact, an attack on America, its economic system of capitalism, and its need for energy to maintain and grow its business and industrial base. Electricity, of course, is also the energy we all use daily for a multitude of tasks ranging from heating or cooling our homes to the use of our computers and every other appliance.

The EPA regulations are said to be necessary to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) which the Greens deem to be a “pollutant” in our atmosphere. It is not a pollutant, despite a Supreme Court decision that identifies it as such, but rather a gas vital to all life on Earth, used by all vegetation for its growth. CO2 is to vegetation what oxygen is to all animal life. Humans, all seven billion of us, exhale CO2!

Viv Forbes, the Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, notes that the Earth’s atmosphere “is not a greenhouse” and “does not have a glass roof. It uses convection to redistribute heat very quickly.” The claim for several decades has been that CO2 has an effect on the Earth’s surface temperature, but Forbes points out that “water vapor is a far more effective agent for insulating the Earth and preserving its warmth than carbon dioxide,” adding that “there is no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide is a significant cause of global warming.”

Indeed, even though the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased, Forbes points out that “Close examination of past records shows that temperature tends to rise before carbon dioxide content rises, sometimes centuries earlier.” Significantly, at the same time Greens have been crying out against emissions of CO2 from coal-fired utilities and other sources, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle now verging on eighteen years!

The EPA is lying to Americans regarding carbon dioxide and, worse, its proposed regulations will reduce the number of coal-fired utilities and drive up the cost of electricity for Americans.

One of the many Green organizations, Earthjustice, claims that “Climate change threatens the world as we know it – and the chief culprit is fossil fuel burning. To avert ecological disaster, Earthjustice is pushing for a shift from dirty to clean energy to stabilize our climate and build a thriving sustainable world.”

There is literally nothing that mankind can do to “stabilize” the Earth’s climate. While the Earth has been going through climate change for 4.5 billion years, there is no evidence that anything mankind does has any effect on it. The change the Earth has encountered, as mentioned, is a cooling, a far different scenario than the “global warming” claims of the past three decades or more.

Tom Richard, the editor of ClimageChangeDispatch.com, notes that “Arctic sea ice has rebounded to higher and higher levels each year. Antarctica is actually gaining in size and there has been no increase in droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, ‘extreme weather,’ flooding, et cetera.”

Reducing CO2 would have zero benefits while, at the same time, the EPA regulations would have a dangerous and totally unnecessary effect on CO2 emissions from plants producing electricity. Other nations around the world are actually abandoning “clean energy.” i.e., wind and solar power, in favor of building many more coal-fired plants to meet their need to provide energy for their populations and their economic growth. China and India are just two examples.

To support its claims of the forthcoming EPA regulations, EarthJustice is claiming that climate change “hits people of color the hardest” and that power plants “disproportionately impact Latino communities.” It noted “the moral obligation of faith community to act on climate change and support carbon pollution limits.” This has nothing to do with the actual facts of climate change and CO2 as noted here and is a blatant political campaign to secure support from these groups.

The reality, as noted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a policy research organization founded by former Senate leaders from both parties, was quoted in the May 26 edition of The Wall Street Journal saying “A 25% reduction (of CO2) with a 2015 baseline might make it impossible for some companies to operate,” noting that the cap-and-trade policies of emissions allowances that the EPA is putting in place “amounts to a hidden tax” on a whole range of electrical generation and industrial plants that produce CO2 emissions. The EPA will likely use the term “budget program” to avoid “cap-and-trade,” a proposal that was rejected by Congress.

Writing in Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin, said that the new regulations on carbon emissions “will have a potentially devastating impact on America’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants” noting that “the move was made possible by Supreme Court decisions that ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had the right to regulate (CO2) emissions, giving the President virtual carte blanche to remake this sector of our economy without requiring congressional consent.”

In July, the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, will hold its ninth international conference on climate change. Previous conferences have brought together some of the world’s leading authorities on meteorology and climatology to debunk the decades of lies Greens have told about climate change and global warming.

The President has put “climate change” high on his list of priorities and it is an attack on the nation’s ability to affordably and extensively provide the energy needed to meet current needs for electricity and reducing our capacity to meet future needs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on record saying that the President’s bogus “climate change” policy could cost the U.S. economy $50 billion a year and force more than a third of coal-fired plants to close by 2030. The Heritage Foundation says “The plan will drive up energy prices for American families and businesses without making a dent in global temperatures.”

This is a form of regulatory death for the nation and comes straight out of the Oval Office of the White House.

© Alan Caruba

Liberals Desperate to Deflect Blame!  

EXPOSING LIBERAL HALF-TRUTHS —

THE HARRIS HOSPITAL CLOSURE MYTH

Burlington Post — September 2009

The Ontario Liberals have quietly pushed their tall tales, saying the PC government under Mike Harris gutted Ontario’s health-care system.

Their tales go beyond spin and enter the realm of self-serving lie. It is most telling that the Liberals never bring this lie into public debate, they merely use it as part of a whisper campaign, repeating it until it begins to take hold among the general populace.

For example, references to hospital closures that I’ve found suggest that in total the Liberals claim that the PC government closed 39 hospitals in Ontario. They arrive at this number in two ways. Several places in Ontario, including Thunder Bay, Cobourg, Peterborough and Sault Ste. Marie, had two aging hospital facilities. The PCs closed these old, outdated hospitals and built new ones.

The Liberals have lied by omission, in failing to account for the new hospitals that were built in Ontario, some to replace aging buildings and several entirely new hospitals to serve growing populations. By my count we closed 12 hospitals in this manner and opened 17 new ones.

In addition, several hospitals located in close proximity were amalgamated to save on administrative costs. For example, Oakville Trafalgar, Milton District and Georgetown hospitals were amalgamated into Halton Healthcare Services. Liberal Party math says we closed three hospitals. The truth is we simply streamlined the costs — the facilities never closed. We repeated this in major urban centres across Ontario.

The truth is we streamlined costs, opened new facilities to replace aging buildings, significantly grew health-care facilities and increased services in Ontario.

The Liberals conveniently forget the PC government opened new facilities across the province to house 20,000 long-term care patients, people who were taking spaces in acute-care hospitals. In addition, we upgraded existing long-term care facilities for 16,000 Ontarians.

This isn’t only about hospitals. If the PCs gutted health care, how do they explain the expansion of nursing positions? How do they explain our creation of home-care services? How do they explain our substantially-increased funding for cardiac and cancer care and expanded cancer care centres across Ontario? How do they explain 52 new MRIs the PCs brought to Ontario where only 12 existed and the addition of 55 CT scanners? At what point does partisan political spin damage our society? At what point do lies like this get punished by voters?

Ted Chudleigh is the Conservative MPP for Halton.

To read a detailed listing of the exact names and locations of the hospitals, see our previous post here…..

HosptialPage-2

Ontario Pension Plan….another cash cow for Liberals?

Philip Cross: Ontario’s proposed pension

plan is riddled with faulty assumptions!

Philip Cross, Special to Financial Post | May 27, 2014 | Last Updated:May 28 8:16 AM ET

Simply asking people if they’d like to save more does not, by itself, demonstrate insufficient savings.

FotoliaSimply asking people if they’d like to save more does not, by itself, demonstrate insufficient saving

Traditionally Ontarians have one of the highest personal saving rates in the country

The Ontario government’s proposal to supplement the CPP with its own compulsory pension plan is based on a series of faulty assumptions.

A fundamental but unproven assumption is that people are not saving enough for their retirement. Another faulty assumption is that workers can’t make the link between insufficient saving and retirement, and unwittingly retire without enough to secure their retirement – people behave as if they’re richer than they really are, a self-delusion that only exists in economic models. A third assumption is that governments can mandate higher household saving, when the evidence is that other savings fall when government raises mandatory public pension taxes.

The government assumes that large pension plans always generate higher returns and minimize risk, although Quebec’s public pension plan demonstrates just the opposite. It is also assumed that investment is currently constrained by a lack of saving, and any increase in saving will boost investment. Finally, there is an assumption that higher investment automatically boosts productivity. All of these assumptions are questionable if not downright incorrect.

It is ironic that Ontario stresses that people are not saving enough when traditionally Ontarians have one of the highest personal saving rates in the country. From 1990 to 2008, Ontario’s personal saving rate was always higher than the rest of Canada. After the 2008 recession, Ontario more than doubled its saving rate to 6.8%, much higher than the 4.4% rate elsewhere in Canada.

The household saving rate in Ontario uncharacteristically has returned to the national average, reflecting the pressure on households to stretch every dollar to sustain their living standard. This squeeze on household finances exists despite lower interest rates, which saved about 2% of income from servicing debt. However, income growth has been so weak in Ontario that people had to lower saving to maintain consumption.

It isn’t that Ontarians lack sufficient income to save after making their everyday expenses, the government believes. Rather, Ontarians don’t save more due to the same lack of discipline in managing finances that the government displays. To support its case, the budget cites polls of people wishing they could save more. Of course, the vast majority of people, if asked, would also say they would like better homes and cars, more travel and entertainement and so on. Simply asking people if they’d like to save more does not, by itself, demonstrate insufficient savings.

The underlying problem in Ontario is that real per capita incomes fell over the last two years, their first such declines since the early 1990s. The squeeze on household incomes means saving more would require cutting back on spending, a logic that households in Ontario seem to understand better than their government. In such an environment, raising mandatory saving will not boost household saving, as people will reduce other forms of saving (like RRSPs) to maintain their standard of living. This is what happened in the late 1990s, the last time mandatory pension taxes were increased.

The ideal scenario is stronger income and job growth, which would allow both spending and saving to increase. Instead, the higher taxes required for the Ontario pension plan will depress household income and spending. The Ontario Budget glosses over the implication of employees paying 3.8 percentage points more on nearly twice as much income as the current CPP. It will cost individuals up to $3,420 a year, or nearly $7,000 for a working couple. About three million Ontario workers will be affected.

The government believes that more saving would benefit the economy by increasing investment, despite no evidence that investment is currently limited by a lack of saving. In fact, firms have increased their saving substantially over the past two decades. Given the high internal saving of firms, how would more household saving increase business investment? A lack of profitable opportunities has discouraged business investment, not a lack of funds. It is noteworthy that investment has floundered the most in Ontario and Quebec, where a hostile environment to business has prevailed. Large government deficits also inhibit investment, since they promise unknown but inevitable tax hikes and spending cuts in the future.

There are also several flaws in the design of the management of the Ontario pension plan’s assets. Because the fund will be very large, its investments necessarily will be concentrated in fewer areas than individual investors would make on their own. This exposes the fund to the risk of a spectacularly poor investment decision, as happened to the Quebec Pension Plan in 2007, potentially offsetting whatever efficiences are gained from lower management costs.

The fundamental problem behind the Ontario government’s thinking about all economic problems – whether a perceived lack of saving, low business investment or changing the distribution of income – is that it has forgotten how rapid economic growth addresses all these problems without pitting one group against another over the table scraps left from meagre economic growth. Higher growth also would reduce the government deficit, the largest contribution to higher saving the Ontario government can make. It is time for Ontario to adopt policies that encourage growth.

Philip Cross is the former Chief Economic Analyst at Statistics Canada and the author of the Fraser Institute’s evaluation of the proposed Ontario Pension Plan.

  • Find a

The Documentary, “DOWNWIND”, Premiers – JUNE 4, AT 8 PM. & 11 pm… Don’t Miss It!

TELEVISION PREMIERE OF DOWN WIND ON

SUN NEWS NETWORK — JUNE 4TH AT 8 AND 11 P.M.

Sun News Network will air the television premiere of the documentary film DOWN WIND on Wednesday, June 4 at 8:00 p.m. ET and 11:00 p.m. ET.

DOWN WIND is a tell-all film that deals head on with how Ontario politicians rammed through green energy laws and dashed forward with the installation of thousands of wind turbines across the province’s farmland and countryside.

The film exposes how the lights of liberty went out for Ontario citizens deeply opposed to wind turbine projects. It tells the stories of communities torn apart, and the rural warriors now fighting for their rights, health and happiness.

Sun News Network host and contributor Rebecca Thompson joined Surge Media Productions to create this passionate, yet alarming story of a flawed attempt to green Ontario’s electricity grid.

DOWN WIND debunks the Ontario Liberal government’s propaganda that wind power is economically and environmentally sound, by pointing to jaw-dropping wind subsidies and a fossil fuel back-up system.

The film tells the ugly truth about lucrative big wind power contracts, skyrocketing electricity prices, and the political connections behind it all.

It uncovers the skeptical sales pitch that wind turbines are good for the air and won’t impact health. And it provides a glimmer of hope that this nightmare can be overcome with fair-minded solutions.

Passionate stories, eye-dropping footage and never-before seen interviews are showcased in this highly anticipated Sun News Network film backed financially by hundreds of concerned citizens.

A DVD version, including bonus features, will be available for purchase atwww.DownWindMovie.com following the television release.

Sun News Network is available on cable and satellite across Canada; check your local listings to find it on your dial.

Capture