Someone said 3%, and they would almost be right. Five per cent is more than double 2%. It is an increase of over 100%. In fact, it is a massive increase and a massive change in our budget picture. When we more than double the interest rate applying to over $1 trillion of debt, we massively increase the amount of money diverted from social programs into the hands of wealthy and greedy bondholders, those people who lend us the money. They are not a charity; they are in it for profit.
Let us calculate what every point of increase would cost. It is very simple. At $1 trillion of debt, it is about $10 billion in new annual costs for the taxpayer every time interest rates go up by just one percentage point. Therefore, if they went up three percentage points to the normal average over the course of the medium term, which is four or five years, we would be paying an extra $30 billion a year to service our debt. That is almost what we collect in GST revenues. Imagine the government, in its back pocket, keeping open the prospect of doubling the GST to pay for the cost associated with interest rates returning merely to their normal average levels. That is the risk the Liberals are taking with our future.
What could we do differently? The answer is jobs, jobs, jobs. The only way to tackle this massive debt beast that our current government is creating is by returning our mighty workers to their jobs. Right now, we have a million missing jobs relative to the number of people who were working in February before COVID began. We now have the highest unemployment rate in the G7. Our unemployment rate, at over 10%, is three percentage points higher than the OECD average.
We need a plan to unleash the free market system to hire people back. Get out of the way and let our mines, plants and factories come roaring back to life. Why do we not let our steelworkers and trade workers build pipelines that will create jobs in the energy sector in the west and in the refining sector in the east?
Get out of the way of small businesses by cutting red tape and lowering taxes on those entrepreneurs, so that they can bring our main streets buzzing back to life. It is only through a bigger and broader economy that we can pay the prodigious costs, associated with this government, to continue to put food on the table and provide for our vital social safety net.
That is the plan, and that is what we must do.