You know how wonderful Canadian banks are. They didn't fail when others did, and didn't need to be bailed out. We are standing tall among nations in that regard, and the Harper government can stick out its chest and preach the Canadian model of prudence and caution to a profligate world. Even the Americans are agog at our fiscal virtue.
Plus, our economy has been recovering from recession faster than others just in time for the G20 meeting in Toronto. It's wonderful, fake lake and all.
It's budget season everywhere, and it's all about debt and deficits and the elusive quest to balance the beast, which can only be done, it is said, by cutting services or raising taxes.
The burden of interest charges -- on the same scale as health or education in most provincial budgets -- doesn't get questioned because interest is fixed by the gods according to divine law, retribution from which we can only escape through harsher and harsher penance.
Or is it? Let's chew on a couple of startling points.
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With all the predictions of doom and gloom coming from the austerity camp, one would think that Canada was already about to hit the famed (but never seen) "debt wall." Before we get too carried away, however, with the scary debt stuff, consider these two indicators of the fundamental fiscal fragility/stability of Canadian governments.
The time since 2008 has been a crucial historical moment for progressive economists to pull back the green curtain that surrounds the operation of the for-profit banking system, and expose that system for what it is: a government-protected, government-subsidized license to print money.
The problem is, as soon as you start saying things like that, people conclude you are some kind of wacked-out conspiracy theorist nut-bar. It sounds insane to claim that private banks have a license to create money out of thin air. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it, "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
Yesterday's GDP numbers (a sprightly gain of 0.3 per cent at basic prices in July) ensure that there will not be a so-called "technical recession" in Canada -- at least, not yet.
Economists have a perverted definition of "recession," whereby it's considered official only if real GDP declines 2 quarters in a row. That's hilariously arbitrary. And the flip side of the coin is even more galling: "recovery" is with us, they say, once real GDP stops contracting and starts growing again. That's why Mark Carney could declare the recession over in July 2009 (when real GDP started to grow again), even though for most Canadians it hasn't stopped feeling like a recession ever since.