tax cut it out

during monday night's debate, god damn stephen harper - touting his proposed gst cut as a gift to the lowest incomers - invoked the name of an organization i used to run. aahhh, i recall a time when we couldn't get a politician to utter our name in a small ottawa meeting room, let alone by the poster boy for the radical right on prime time national television. i guess napo found a replacement for me who could actually manouever the organization to a place where the likes of harper use it an endorser of policy. gawrsh.

ok, so as if all that wasn't enough, harper citing napo, leaving me and likely thousands of anti-poverty activists choking on bile, now the yahoos at the howe institute have also suggested that the tory gst plan benefits poor people. hooweee, this matter of whether the gst cut results in a whopping 50 or 60 dollars of savings at the end of a shitty year for a poor family sure is getting lots of attention. what a provocative issue. oh i'm provoked alright: god damn is harper getting off easy if this is as good as it gets for addressing poverty in his platform.

i'm no economist muthafucka, but it seems to me that poverty reduction would require an actual gain for a poor person, not a miniscule returning of something we've gotten used to paying over 12 years. oh and also, it would require actual infrastructures and systems to deal with lifting up a whole level of the population. your idea of dealing with poverty is like the federal politics version of flicking a nickel into the panhandler's tin. how big-hearted.

we're letting this guy come off as the friggin' messiah for 50 fucking bucks, when every other plank in their platform is regressive, nay punitive, tantamount to poor bashing? i'm telling you, if he wins this thing, we best cling tightly to that fucking 50, hiding it inside our desperate hands as we watch everything around us crumble.