I'm sorry, I didn't think my approach was saying that tax cuts are bad. I think what I was saying is that if you are going to spend $200 billion on any given initiative, indicate who benefits from it.
Anything you do in government has an opportunity cost. If you spend, it means you can't cut taxes. You have three things you can do with resources: you can spend, you can cut taxes, or you can pay down debt. So in any kind of fiscal analysis that you are asking the Department of Finance to do, it should indicate who benefited from any one of those choices. This is why I said in my second item that budgets are more than about tax cuts. This analysis that we were asked to discuss was simply about the shopping list of this year's tax cuts. That's not good enough. If you have a series of initiatives on how you are going to, in this instance, spend the surplus, then you need to say, we did this, we did that, and we did that in these three areas, and here are the beneficiaries of these things; we chose this balance between tax cuts, spending, and debt reduction for the following purposes. That's what you do with a surplus.
I'm going to get to the difficulty of assessing the benefits from either tax cuts or spending in a moment.