Madam Speaker, I am delighted now that we have made a motion that at least one Liberal has decided to appear and to listen to the rest of the debate on the budget.
As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by the absence of members opposite, those debt interest costs will be $45 billion in tax dollars for this year, next year, the year after, and the year after that. That amounts to two full years of CPP benefits for every pension beneficiary in the country. Just the interest this year amounts to two and half years of GST revenues.
Seventy-one per cent of all personal income tax revenues paid this year will go just to finance the interest on the debt. All that we spend in benefits for old age security, the Canada health and social transfer for education and health care and employment insurance, the three big social programs administered by the federal government, are the amount equivalent to what we will spend on debt interest because of this budget and this bill.
The debt interest costs are equivalent to the entire annual budgets of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The debt interest this year alone is equivalent to the entire net debts of all provinces, except for the three largest provinces.
The $45 billion interest bill is enough to pay for all Canadian hospitals, all physician charges and all drug and pharmaceutical costs for an entire year.
That is how much this government has chosen to spend on debt interest because it has not made the right and difficult choice to reduce the debt and to prioritize spending.
What we spend on debt interest through this budget would be enough to cut taxes on an average of $3,200 a year per taxpayer, not per household. It is closer to $6,000 a year per household. It is enough to provide for a $30,000 a year endowment for every poor child in Canada.
The Liberals talk about their millennium prime ministerial endowment fund, heritage fund, or I do not know what spin name they have given it. If they had started earlier in the 1980s when they were in power to make the difficult choices and if they had continued on today, we would not be spending $45 billion a year in interest. Then families could keep $6,000 a year in their pockets, or we could set up an endowment of $30,000 for every poor child in the country.
If we were to convert the annual interest bill into $100 bills and we stacked them up one on one, the pile would be 118 kilometres high. The pile would be 214 times higher than the CN Tower.
That is the status quo which we are going to let sit there, that huge debt which is festering. This government and its spin machine talk at great length about prosperity in the Canadian economy and growth of jobs and so on but they have fallen prey to the very same fatal hubris of the Mulroney government. The Liberals believe arrogantly that they have managed to defeat something called the business cycle, the notion that in a market economy or any economy there are ups and downs.
Unfortunately there will be a downturn sometime in this economy. The finance minister speaks as though he is a Pollyanna. He speaks about a new golden age where this country will have 20 or 30 years of uninterrupted growth. I am an optimist and I wish the minister were right but any rational, objective reading of economic history in this or any modern country will indicate that it simply will not happen.
There will be a downturn in our economy at some point, a recession at some point. Government revenues will drop at some point and social expenditures will increase at some point. Should that happen while we are still sitting on a $583.2 billion debt with $45 billion in interest payments and the highest income tax burden in the G-7, it will be too late.
We have not solved the problem, the problem that Reformers came here to solve in 1993, the problem of overspending, the problem of overtaxation and the problem of too much debt.
We say here today as this government rams this bill through this parliament that it is time to stop and get our heads out of the sand. We have to realize the Mulroney government made precisely the same mistake in 1988 when it thought it was facing a decade of future growth. That government decided to let it go easy on the spending side. It decided to let up on the fiscal reins as this government is doing in this bill and this budget today. We are paying the price today with a $600 billion debt and $45 billion in interest payments.
It is time for us to remember the fundamental principle of the terrible lesson we have learned with the fiscal history of this country in the past two decades. We have not yet solved the problem. That problem is still very much the $583 billion debt which the government leaves completely untouched, an act of fiscal irresponsibility which is almost unparalleled in the history of this country.
What have the Liberals done on the tax side? They talk about tax relief. Whenever we ask the finance minister he stands up and blathers about how he has given the child tax credit and all this stuff but most of what they call tax cuts are in fact tax expenditures. They are government cheques that are being cut. That is the Liberal accounting.
If we account for the $10 billion annual increase in CPP premiums and the enormous effect of bracket creep which sucks up $2 billion to $3 billion a year out of the pockets of taxpayers just through inflation, what we find is that this is actually a tax increase budget. When we calculate the total net effect of the CPP payroll tax, the EI tax, the bracket creep higher income tax revenues and everything else and what they call their tax cuts, when we add it all up what we end up with is this budget being a tax increase budget. It is the fifth consecutive tax increase budget from a government that promised in the 1993 and 1997 elections not to raise taxes. Another promise broken. Another trust betrayed.
Since 1993 the government has taken a cumulative $49.1 billion from the pockets of taxpayers amounting to an average of $3,500 per taxpayer. That is more than was being taken. That is an increase over the enormously high tax burden of this government's predecessor.
When we take into account this budget and the future years projected in the budget documents, the government, when it closes its books in the fiscal year after the next one, will have raised taxes by a cumulative total of nearly $80 billion. That is $80 billion, or $5,700 per year for the average taxpayer. Compare that to what we have proposed in the official opposition which is to cut personal income taxes by $12 billion a year, or $2,000 for the average family by the year 2000.
Another little feature, or technical flaw as we might say, in the budget bill is the change being made to what is called the child care tax deduction. The government has decided to raise by $2,000 the amount parents can deduct in the cost of paying a third party to care for their children. That is fine. We respect the choices of people who decide to do that.
There are millions of Canadian families and parents who make the sacrifice to stay at home and raise their children to do what they believe in their conscience is best for their children. Do they get the benefit of the $2,000 additional deduction or even the $5,000 deduction that is there now? They do not get one red cent of it. They are told if they give up the second income they get no consideration under the tax code. It is a two tier tax code, one for the daycare choices the government supports and the other for families who want to make choices for themselves.
This bill is a disgrace. Closure is a disgrace. The lack of disclosure is a disgrace. The public accounting principles that are manipulated here are a disgrace. The unfairness for families is a disgrace. The $583 billion the government is passing on to future generations is a disgrace. That is why I and my colleagues will be voting against it.