It’s too bad John Kenneth Galbraith died last Saturday at 97 — just before the Conservative budget. He’d have been the ideal commentator. He said it all nearly 50 years ago, in The Affluent Society. Today it’s called the Humming-Along society as in: “The economy is humming along.”

His thesis was: Despite so much abstract wealth, most citizens in our affluent society lead impoverished lives. That’s because the wealth gets frittered away in private consumption while the common goods that render life full — education, health, culture, even the air — are neglected since they tend to be in the public realm. The Harper budget is a fine example. It fritters away the potential in tax breaks to individuals.

Let’s be clear on the legerdemain involved. When you get an $80 “credit” for transit, it doesn’t mean you save $80. At most, you save about 15 per cent of that $80 that you would have paid, or about $12. Same goes for your kids’ hockey costs etc. When the Finance Minister puffs himself up in the House and lists the value of the “credits” you get, and his colleagues huzzah around him, it is worth about 15 per cent of what it sounds.

Plus you get to spend a chunk of your life looking for the targeted tax credits, punching numbers into your pocket calculator to learn how little they amount to, and deciding whether to go for them. It’s about as individually liberating as poring through stacks of supermarket coupons for the ones you really want to cash. Tick, tick, tick.

The Galbraith alternative was to invest affluence in public goods such as transit. That way, you don’t get a tax credit, you get a transit system you can go somewhere on, that runs conveniently, and doesn’t squish you like a sardine. With transit like that, enough people might use it that ticket prices could fall and you wouldn’t need the wee government handout.

The Harper budget ideas such as tax breaks may have seemed fresh 20 years ago. But they’ve been tried, they’ve failed as badly or worse than anything else, and now they look old, even olde. So we’re entitled to cast around for newer ideas. I’m thinking, for instance, of South America and a recent trade agreement between Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia.

It’s not free trade — you could call it fair managed trade, largely done in kind. Cuba sends medical and literacy expertise to Venezuela, which sends cheap oil in return. That’s in contrast to what we have with the U.S., which is definitely not free trade, not after the softwood lumber fiasco. It’s more like unfair managed trade lying through its teeth pretending to be free trade. In fact, it isn’t even managed so much as dominated trade, with one partner overwhelming the other. It’s like the Toronto Maple Leafs having a free-trade arrangement with the atom hockey team of some local store. The South American agreement makes more sense off the top; it’s between comparable economies.

But they’re not very democratic, are they? Well, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has used referendum votes to counter U.S.-backed “destabilization” efforts. Or take another South American nation, Uruguay. Last fall, it held a plebiscite on the privatization of water, which the people voted down. That doesn’t sound like an undemocratic way to deal with economic issues.

In fact, how about a national referendum on the most controversial item in the Harper budget: child care. There are two clear choices: the Conservatives’ $100-a-month versus the deal the Liberals signed with all the provinces. I seem to recall people such as Preston Manning and Stephen Harper were once keen on referendums and other elements of a revitalized Canadian democracy.

Why can’t our current leaders look further south than Washington for inspiration? Does it seem absurd to turn to Uruguay — “a little known, almost secret South American country,” according to writer Eduardo Galeano. Yet, he adds, it had “free public education before England, women’s suffrage before France, the eight-hour workday before the United States and divorce before Spain.” What economic good has the U.S. done for its citizens lately, aside from extending indefensible tax cuts on dividends and capital gains?

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.