I’ve never been part of a formal negotiation before, but from what I hear it’s usually a fairly hellish ordeal. Hilariously unreasonable — even insulting — demands are presented under the guise of “starting positions,” emotional abuse is openly used to weaken resolve, and apocalyptic outcomes are predicted as the consequence of every minor concession. At the best of times, the process lags weeks simply due to mutual intransigence; a story in the Canadian headlines at the moment involves the Alberta government’s six-month effort to negotiate a contract with a new legal team — and that bid was supposedly rigged.

All this is a long way of saying that if you’re finding the current negotiations over the American “fiscal cliff” to be scary, vicious, immature, or pointlessly stubborn — well, that’s kind of the idea.

What exactly the “fiscal cliff” even is seems to be somewhat disputed, but in the easiest-to-digest sense, it’s simply a collection of deadlines and “triggers” set to occur on the date most normal people call “New Year’s Day” of 2013.

Most notably, January first heralds the formal expiration of the so-called “Bush tax cuts” (which “temporary” lowered rates for Americans of all brackets way back in 2001, but have been repeatedly renewed since) and initiates the mean-spirited, all-program spending cuts introduced in that “sequestration” deal both parties cobbled together in 2011 in an effort to scare themselves into being more productive in 2012 (and how well it worked!).

Added on top of those two biggies are some other expiration dates for a bunch of more minor tax credits and benefit programs, most of which are either related to the stimulus initiatives of the early Obama term, or are simply routine pieces of budget management legislation that are ordinarily renewed every year without controversy.

Anyway, economists have long argued that the threats posed by all these various things expiring and triggering at once would be severe, even from a pro-austerity perspective. Tax hikes and spending cuts may be reasonable deficit-and-debt fighting tools in theory, but like so much else in life, there are right and wrong ways to wield them in practice. The general consensus is that across-the-board tax hikes at the present moment would badly reduce consumer spending while simultaneously hiking unemployment, while vicious program cuts would similarly yield a harsh blow for all workers and industries dependant on government commerce — particularly the defense industry.

Now, for the last year, the conventional wisdom was that the threat posed by all this stuff happening at once would be so severe it would force the creation of some sort of bipartisan Congress-White House alterna-deal to avert it, and, as predicted, that’s exactly what’s happening now — sort of. Both the GOP-led House of Representatives and the Obama administration are indeed talking deals at present — the only problem is they’re mostly talking past each other.

President Obama’s fiscal cliff alternative, as he touted endlessly during the last election, is for the wealthiest Americans to “pay a little more” while simultaneously approving the renewal of the Bush tax cuts for everyone else, and implementing some vaguely-defined but supposedly “smarter” spending cuts rather than the draconian sequestration ones.

The Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner, on the other hand, want a far more spending-centric approach, with the Bush tax cuts preserved for everyone, even the richies, and the revenue problem addressed through some equally vague changes to the tax code that would close loopholes and limit write-offs.

Both negotiation positions are thus a fairly predictable mix of stubbornness on matters of ideological principle coupled with a much more indifferent attitude towards actions philosophically unpopular with the two parties’ respective bases. Topped off, of course, with a great deal of hypocritical bluster that the “other side” is being maddeningly dogmatic.

The GOP has repeatedly asked, to no avail, to see the White House’s “ideas” for spending cuts, while the Dems have pressed in equal vain for greater Republican specifics on revenue. “No substantive progress has been made” said Speaker Boehner the other day.

With only a month to go before D-Day, it all seems rather depressing. That is, unless you read nonpartisan inside-the-beltway gossip sites like Politico, which insist the public war of words is really just so much Kabuki, and the two sides are actually vastly closer to a deal than their Sunday morning talking points claim.

In a recent piece rife with anonymous sources, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen claim that shortly before Christmas, what’s almost certainly going to hashed out is some sort of compromise whereby Republicans agree to a tax hike on the wealthy (there’s “no chance taxes are not going up for people making north of $250,000″ they say) on the condition that the hike is balanced by a numerically equal cut in spending. The latter, in turn, appears most likely to take the shape of “entitlement reform,” which is to say, cuts to Medicare “through a combination of means-testing, raising the retirement age and other ‘efficiencies’ to be named later.”

It is a supremely logical, adult solution, but of course politics is not very adult or logical these days, and part of the reason things are dragging on as long as they are is simply to slap some veneer of partisan credibility on a deal that’s would otherwise be (shudder) too bipartisan for either side.

Speaker Boehner, for his part, has to do some delicate salesmanship to his own caucus in order to win over the so-called “majority of the majority” in the House of Representatives, including more than a few Tea Partiers and Norquistites for whom any sort of tax raise will be a poison pill. President Obama’s game is obviously a bit easier, since he enjoys a more uncontested position as party boss, but he could easily lose that status in short order if Democrats in Congress are made to swallow a deal that seems too GOP-friendly — a la the widely unpopular debt-ceiling deal of last August.

There’s thus something more than a little darkly hilarious about a deal-making process that’s being protracted largely because two reasonable players are trying so hard to appear unreasonable.

But that, I suppose, is all part of the filthy art of negotiation.

Here’s a fun question: in the years since the current global economic recession struck in late 2008, how many western world leaders have been able to win re-election? Our own Stephen Harper would be one, as would Angela Merkel in Germany. But beyond that…

With the defeat of incumbent French President Nicholas Sarkozy to Socialist Party challenger Francois Hollande on Sunday, the papers have made much fuss over the fact that Sarko is the supposed the “11th consecutive” political casualty of a continent in crisis. I’ve been trying in vain to find an article that actually names names instead of just citing that number, but near as I can tell, the list is as follows:

1. Geir Harde of Iceland (resigned January, 2009)
2. Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom (voted out May, 2010)
3. Robert Fico of Slovakia (voted out June, 2010)
4. Brian Cowen of Ireland (voted out February, 2011)
5. Mari Kiviniemi of Finland (voted out April, 2011)
6. Jose Socrates of Portugal (voted out June, 2011)
7. Lars Rasmussen of Denmark (voted out September, 2011)
8. George Papandreou of Greece (resigned November, 2011)
9. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy (resigned November, 2011)
10. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain (voted out November, 2011)
11. Nicholas Sarkozy of France (voted out May, 2012)

Then there are a couple of more “iffy” ones, like the recently non-confidence’d voted government of Dutch Minister-President Mark Rutte, who may or may not be able to cling to office in his nation’s upcoming parliamentary elections,or former Slovakian prime minister Iveta Radicova, who resigned preemptively in October of 2011 rather than face certain defeat at the polls.

Outside of Europe, we can also look to Japan’s Taro Aso, who, in August of 2009 became only the second Liberal-Democratic Party prime minister since World War II to be unseated by voters, as well as Australia’s Kevin Rudd, who was forcibly removed by his own party in June of 2010.

It’s obviously a bit simplistic to generalize all these all of these unsuccessful incumbents under a so-broad-to-be-meaningless umbrella term like “political victims of the recession.” They may have been primarily unseated over economic concerns, certainly, but in the modern era, the vast majority of ruling party swaps are rarely provoked by anything else. Similarly, the broad “message” being sent by suffering western voters has hardly been consistent; in some cases, as in France and Denmark, anger over conservative debt-fighting austerity measures yielded a swing from right to left, but just as common was the reverse, as in Britain and Spain, where big-government Keynesianism was the target.

Still, the fact that the “recession” — whatever we interpret it to be at the moment — has overlapped with the end of the careers of a number of the democratic world’s most high-profile and previously successful heads of state does reinforce a kind of narrative, and it’s not a narrative that bodes well for President Obama. Unlike Harper and Merkel, who pre-date the crash of 2008 by a couple of years, Obama does fit the archetype of some of the shorter-reigning European prime ministers of late who openly carried themselves as post-’08 “fixers.” As opposed to being a man who merely had economic turmoil thrust upon him, Barack Obama chose to be president knowing full well the specific scope of the challenges that awaited, and, as books like Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men ably document, came to office with a determined strategy for a new style of economic leadership.

It’s for this reason that I’ve often thought Obama is best analogized to Herbert Hoover, instead of the the Jimmy Carter comparisons he usually gets. Fairly or not, Obama is seen by his critics as being an extremely ideological president, necessitating an equally ideological counter-attack. Should he fall, Mitt Romney will be under considerable pressure to lead with an administration as robustly anti-regulation and pro-market as FDR’s post-Hoover government was aggressively statist. A fixer to fix the fixes of the fixer, offering a stark, visible alternative in strategy.

I’m not sure if there are any campaign tips or tricks to be gleaned from any of this. Barring a universally-acknowledged economic miracle in the next five months, those who want to vote strictly on the basis of reactionary opposition to the “economic situation” will have no shortage of statistics to hand-pick to justify their anxieties. Likewise, if America swaps a Democratic White House for a Republican one, it will be easy to avoid reading too much into it, since it will be so easy to simply stamp Obama as “recession victim number 12,” shrug, and move on.

Do you guys see any lessons for Obama from the recession-era fall of other western leaders? If “the economy” kills this President, will it be because voters legitimately see flaws in his ideology and benefits to Mitt Romney’s, or because they’re simply engaging in the time-honored reactionary tradition of “trying the other way” when the incumbent doesn’t seem to be fixing everything fast enough?

Claiming it would help slash trillions of dollars from the next decade of deficits, President Obama once again called for increased taxation on America’s wealthiest citizens yesterday, embracing his first major cause of the campaign season. Evoking the name of billionaire Warren Buffett, who, as we all remember, wrote a famous editorial in the New York Times last month scolding politicians to “stop coddling” richies like him, Obama called for raising income taxes on Americans making more than $250,000 a year and proposed hiking taxes on earnings secured through stocks and other investments.

In predictable fashion, the Republicans quickly sprung to the defence of the targeted billionaires, blasting the Obama plan as “class warfare” — their favorite swear word for rich-taxing. But what does “class warfare” even mean? Speaker Boehner described it as “pitting one group of Americans against another,” presumably with torches and pitchforks. Some cartoonists have depicted it as greedy peasants shaking dollar bills from upside-down businessmen. Either way, the term evokes some degree of cruel vindictiveness, or as Paul Ryan put it, championing the “fear, envy and anxiety” of the have-nots at the expense of the haves.

But what’s funny is that a lot of the rich folk in question don’t seem particularly frightened. Many of them are actually downright cool with the Obama plan. Along with Buffett himself, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, HR Block founder Henry Bloch, former Bear Sterns CEO Ace Greenberg, former MGM chief Harry Sloan, and even noted millionaire creationist comedian Ben Stein have all came out in favor, and one imagines there are lots more to follow. As I’ve noted before, wealth in America actually correlates fairly high with liberalism, and even when it doesn’t, as in the case of Republicans Sloan and Stein, it at least correlates with a high degree of noblesse oblige in matters of taxation. We saw a similar example of this back in 2001, when a bunch of mega-millionaires assembled to denounce the Republican Party’s plan to eliminate the inheritance tax, another rich-targeting program that the rich were more than okay with.

So the politics of the whole thing are more than a little baffling. It’s not at all clear whose water the GOP is carrying by opposing Obama’s call for the rich to pay their “fair share,” other than some very hardcore libertarian ideologues who view all forms of taxation as theft, and all rich folk as Randian supermen who deserve no burden for their success.

To be fair, the current Republican line does shy away from referring to millionaires as such, preferring the label “job creators.” One’s ability to create jobs is directly correlated to the amount of cash in one’s bank account, you see, which does make some sense. Bill Gates could probably hire me to do something tomorrow, if he really wanted. But it’s also true, as The Simpsons taught us, that Mr. Gates did not get rich from writing a lot of cheques, either. Given the choice, folks like him would probably prefer to outsource their errands to some cheap non-union J.J. on a different continent, and pass the savings along to himself. In any case, the American rich are taxed at quite historically low levels already, thanks to President Bush, and that didn’t do much to spare the country from its current doldrums.

Unless we’re still clinging to “trickle down” theories, it seems the most surefire way to create jobs at this point would be to put more cash in the pockets of the lower classes, who actually do the sort of day-to-day retail and service sector shopping that employs people like themselves. In a capitalist system, job creators only create where demand exists, after all. For all the fear-mongering about socialism, it’s the constant expectation that economic prosperity will flow from the elite-down, rather than bottom-up, that truly evokes spectres of a planned economy.

Obama has no-doubt polled his tax-hiking scheme from every angle, and all the available evidence on that front suggests it’s one of the most popular things he could possibly do. So embracing the position is hardly political genius on his part. He’s just lucky he’s got such incompetent opponents.

A number of readers have been asking me how America’s debt crisis, and ensuing credit rating downgrade, has been portrayed in Canada. The answer: very smugly.

You see, Canada also once had its credit rating bumped down from triple-A to double-A by those jerks at Standard & Poor, and we too once toiled under a seemingly insurmountable pile of debt born by decades of profligate federal spending. We even had our own Tea Party, known under the moniker of Reform, who had established a significant foothold in the legislature by channelling public frustration with the state of the national economy into uncompromising right-wing populism.

In short, there’s a real been-there, done-that sentiment being expressed in a lot of Canadian editorial pages at the moment, which is really quite rare, since, if nothing else, Canada is best known for lagging several years behind most significant American phenomena.

The smugness, in turn, comes from the simple fact that Canada considers itself to have, to a large extent, solved the Gordian Knot of 2011 America, and is in the unique position of actually having some practical tips for Uncle Sam to follow, if only he’d be willing to listen.

As I discuss in my review of a recent book on this subject, The Canadian Century, Canada of the early 1990s was very much an economic basket case par excellence. The spending spree of the leftist Trudeau years, followed by the handouts-for-all mentality of his nominally “conservative” successor, Brian Mulroney, had resulted in perennial budget deficits and an accumulated national debt equal to 72% of GDP. It was this fact, coupled with the rising fear of Quebec separatism, that caused S&P to lower Canada to double-A status in 1992, a grim episode for a nation already suffering badly in a global economic recession.

It took the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, elected the following year, to get things back on track. In an effort largely led by finance minister Paul Martin, who catapulted to fame as possibly the most influential man in the country, the new administration introduced a series of “austerity budgets,” beginning in 1995, that dramatically slashed government spending and services. Hundreds of government employees were laid off, Crown corporations were privatized, unemployment insurance was scaled back, and the Canadian Pension Plan (the Canuck equivalent of Social Security) was significantly reformed. In all, government spending was cut down by about 14%.

In four years time, Canada completely erased its $36 billion deficit and turned it into a $3 billion surplus, and by the early 2000′s, the national debt had fallen below 40% of GDP. As a reward, S&P promoted us back to triple-A status in 2002, and Chretien and Martin basked in the self-righteous glow of having saved the national economy from the complete bankruptcy many wags had previously deemed unavoidable.

Of course, the real story of Canada’s economic recovery is a bit more complicated, and as usual, the devil was in the details. One particular devil was the introduction of a new national sales tax, the Goods and Services Tax (GST), that the Mulroney government had brought about in its dying days. Hated by all, and opposed by the Liberal Party in the ’93 election, the tax later became beloved by the Chretien administration for increasing revenues at a time of declining expenditures, and was a huge factor in eliminating budget deficits in such a short period of time.

Likewise, conservative as he was in fiscal matters, Martin was no libertarian. Much of the federal spending he eliminated thus wasn’t really eliminated at all, but rather outsourced to other levels of government. Welfare, most notably, was essentially chucked to the provinces to deal with, as was health care. Most reformed the first effectively, but not the second, and today many of Canada’s provinces have ratcheted up enormous deficits and debt of their own in an attempt to maintain cradle-to-grave health care entitlements they cannot realistically afford to provide.

It’s similarly worth remembering that America also went through a reformist phase during the mid-1990s, with the Chretien-Martin reforms occurring simultaneously alongside the deficit-cutting and welfare reforms of President Clinton and Newt Gingrich. So the analogy that the US is just some lazy late responder to the omnipresent problem of budget woes is not exactly fair. America has obviously experienced a number of unique circumstances over the last few years that have no real equivalent in Canada, including the Iraq war and the “too big to fail” bailouts of 2008. We are likewise a vastly smaller and less globally consequential country than the United States, which can make heavy-handed Canadian “lessons” of how to run a national economy about as logical as a hot dog cart owner with ideas on how to manage Microsoft.

Nor is it fair to imply that Canada, which, under Harper, has been disturbingly eager to ratchet up spending, has somehow completely forsaken its reckless past of fiscally unsustainable decisions. Deficits are back, and our debt has been climbing up steadily for the last couple of years, after a decade of stable decline. And Canada’s universal health care remains a ticking time-bomb with every bit as much destructive potential as Medicare or Social Security.

The key, as it always is, is for both countries to simply solve their own problems using tactics that are most appropriate for their own unique contexts. Across-the-border glances of schadenfreude and envy can provide a temporary, and even helpful, boost of motivation and focus, but in excess, such feelings can subvert rational analysis of serious problems with cheap slogans and oversimplified cliches.

And both countries have enough of that as it is.

Regardless of what you think of the man, or the party he leads, it’s very difficult to deny that Republican House Speaker John Boehner has simply been a better negotiator during this current round of debt ceiling negotiations.

While the Democrats, led by President Obama, have consistently pleaded, in increasingly fevered terms, that an increase to the ceiling must be passed by Congress this summer lest the United States be forced to default, and all manner of calamity ensue, the Republicans have countered with cool indifference. It’s not that they necessarily want a default any more than the Dems do; they simply refuse to entertain the idea at all. From their perspective, there is no automatic cause-and-effect. Raising the debt ceiling is bad because it justifies Uncle Sam’s further spending of borrowed money. End of story. Or at least the last page they want to read.

John Dickerson over at Slate estimates that about a third of Republicans in the House of Representatives they control will simply never vote for an increase in the debt ceiling under any circumstances, and that another third of the caucus is very much on the fence. When you contrast this to the Democrats, who are 100% in favor of a raise, it’s not hard to realize why the former party has the upper hand. And since appeals to fear clearly won’t get them moving, the only solution is for the President to negotiate a tit-for-tat legislative compromise, almost entirely on the Republicans’ terms.

In theory, it’s not terribly hard to arrange what the Republicans say they want from any debt ceiling deal — namely an end to the federal government’s perpetual debt addiction. Simply raise taxes, cut spending, and watch an increase in revenue and a decrease in expenditures solve the problem. But of course Republicans don’t want tax raises, any taxes raises, for anyone, ever, which leaves only the cutting. “Cuts or nothing” has been the Republican mantra, and since the party seems equally prepared to tolerate either outcome, the Democrats find themselves bullied into a tight corner before talks even begin.

The cleverest response the Dems can muster at this point is deception. If they can offer a deal with enough spending cuts to look significant, yet not be deep enough to be too consequential, and enough tax tweaks to offer plausible deniability that they’re actually raising taxes, the Republicans might be mollified enough to pass it. This seems to be the plan at present. In order to achieve around $2.5 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade, Democrats have said they will agree to cut spending for a variety of their beloved executive branch programs, but spare social security and medicare. They’ll then drum up some modest increases in revenue though the not-quite-a-tax-hike tactic of closing several tax loopholes and tax breaks, mostly those presently employed by folks at the highest point of the income pyramid (for instance, curbing existing tax breaks offered to jet and yacht owners).

Obviously this plan doesn’t go nearly far enough in the eyes of many Republicans, both in terms of the amount of money saved and the ferocity of the cuts. It’s likewise still a fairly open question as to whether or not the closing tax loopholes and scaling back tax credits will sufficiently appease anti-tax fundamentalists, who have made solemn pledges not to vote for anything even resembling a hike, regardless of who it affects.

Regardless, it seems that Boehner is prepared to test his luck, and push ahead with a “good enough” deal sooner, rather than later. “Despite the tougher talk, aides say behind closed doors the tone in the White House meetings has been frank and constructive” says FOX, and many Washington insiders are speculating that an arrangement is only days away. Others, however, aren’t willing to take any chances. A letter signed by representatives of hundreds of leading US corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce arrived in the mailboxes of Congress and the White House today, warning that a “default would risk both disarray in those markets and a host of unintended consequences.”

In his heart, Boehner clearly believes them. But in the American system of legislative democracy, the buck ultimately stops with the House itself. And it remains to be seen if its members can be persuaded by argument alone.

In the wake of last week’s big, drawn-out legislative compromise over the passage of America’s 2011 operating budget, attention has quickly shifted to the matter of future budgets, and how to best avoid the same sort of agonizing partisan horse-trading every time the government needs money. While America’s sky-high deficit and debt levels remain far from resolved, there seems to be a growing consensus that the time has come for a single, comprehensive, adult solution to dealing with these problems, rather than just a lot of falsely scandalized fear and self-righteous outrage over these very old, omnipresent fiscal concerns.

It’s in this context that Wisconsin GOP Congressman Paul Ryan, currently the House budget chairman, has stepped, releasing an ambitious “budget blueprint” that sets out strict guidelines for the next ten years of US spending, which, if followed, will supposedly get the nation’s fiscal house in order. The plan, which is far more heady, intellectual, and serious than much of what passes for Republican policy these days, received largely favorable coverage in the press — at least initially — and was widely celebrated as a “visionary” and “courageous” document in official GOP circles. On Friday the Republican-controlled House of Representatives easily passed the Ryan plan on a strictly party-line vote, and though the plan will never pass the Senate or get President Obama’s signature, it will nevertheless serves as a very clear and accessible artifact of the conservative agenda for a long time to come.

What makes the Ryan plan so “congrageous” in the eyes of many right-wing observers is that it’s extremley unapologetic and shameless in how far it takes the principle of spending cuts. After ushering in $100 billion in cuts for the year 2012 — almost tripling the cuts that were approved for this year — Ryan’s plan continues cutting at similarly high levels, year after year, for the next decade, lowering the amount of government spending as a percentage of the GDP, as one article put it, “to levels not seen since the first half of the 20th century.”

Such cuts will come at the expense of federal departments like education and environmental regulation, but significantly, also Medicare and Medicaid, which had, until now, usually been considered third rails to even the most heard-hearted GOP politician. While Medicaid will simply be dumped on the states to pay for, the Ryan plan retains federal responsibility for Medicare, but also beings a process of gradually privatizing the seniors’ program of subsidized health care. In the same way many Republicans advocate government-backed “vouchers” to allow parents to enroll their kids in private schools, and minimize the need for state-managed ones, Ryan advocates giving seniors insurance vouchers so they can purchase medical coverage from the private sector, rather than a government-run insurer.

It’s a divisive and controversial strategy to be sure, but the degree to which it’s at least “a plan,” as opposed to just a collection of talking-points, goes a long way to explaining why initial reaction, even among those who are not ordinarily GOP-backers, was so commendatory. As the days have passed, however, the tide seems to be turning a bit. Though the Ryan plan was indeed brave for its bluntness, it was also remarkably uncourageous in its deference to traditional conservative sensibilities and sacred cows. Bush-era levels of defense spending — ones that exceed even the spending seen during the Cold War — remain protected, as are Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. Corporate tax levels are likewise promised to be slashed down to 25%, a level that would swap America’s current status as the second-highest corporate tax region of the G7 to the lowest.

President Obama has already declared these conventionalities as evidence that the GOP is more the same than ever, and, in a speech last week, declared in some of his most robust language yet, that the era of compromise on the fundamental role of government was basically over. We need high taxes on the wealthy and big business in order to pay for the safety-net services government must provide, he said, using rhetoric that was clearly a gear-up to his 2012 re-election campaign. The Prez conceded that while some spending cuts will always be needed here and there, the idea of privatizing or abolishing the last remaining chunks of the post-war welfare state was a bridge too far, if not downright anti-American.

As Ryan was with conservatives, Obama’s latest non-compromising stance has been praised by liberals for its courage. But it’s just as conventional and safe. It’s clear that neither party is interested in comprehensive solutions to America’s fiscal mess, only plans that are half-solution, half voodoo magic. Raising taxes and cutting entitlement spending is a supremely obvious fix to any sort of fiscal imbalance, yet it’s also a plan that lacks an ideological, partisan tradition to defend it. If anything, it would require the backing of some sort of political leader who had a combination of both left and right wing ideas, and as we all know, such a creature is as implausible as a unicorn.

I’ve often written about the ideological credentials of Stephen Harper on this site, and highlighted the massive, disappointing disconnect between what the man has (very articulately) stated he believes about politics and economics, and what he’s actually done during his five years as prime minister.

Yesterday’s National Post laid the data depressingly bare. Under Prime Minister Harper, that supposed most conservative of conservatives, Canada’s government spending has massively increased virtually without exception across the board. To quote the article, “Federal program spending during [former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin's] final year in power — 2005-2006 — stood at $175-billion. By 2009-2010, under Mr. Harper, it had climbed to $245-billion.” Every year of Harper, in short, has seen more government spending than the year that preceded it — even while adjusting for GDP growth — meaning Ottawa is projecting no identifiable signs that it is slowly transitioning into a new era of fiscal restraint, as Harper himself often claims.

The Prime Minister also often claims that his spending sprees have been carefully targeted, either as recession-battling stimulus initiatives or much-needed investments in crucial government services such as military and policing, which had gone dangerously under-funded during previous Liberal administrations. As the Post piece makes quite clear, however, the data doesn’t exactly back up such rhetoric; spending has pretty much increased everywhere, in all ministries and departments, regardless of how historically “good” they’ve been portrayed in Conservative Party talking points. Indeed, many of Canada’s most famously bloated and wasteful ministries, such as immigration and Indian affairs, have seen their funding grow significantly under Harper, along with their roster of full-time employees. The Government of Canada, already the single largest employer in the country, now has a staff of around 280,000; an addition of nearly 33,000 new government jobs since 2005.

Harper will unveil his sixth federal budget within the next month or two, a document that will no doubt be eagerly analyzed to see if, after one of the highest-spending eras in Canadian history, the Conservative Party will finally unveil any tangible plan to scale back our country’s ballooning deficits and debt. Significantly, there is also much talk that 2011 may be the year Harper chooses to call an election and seek a third term, so it seems reasonable to presume the two announcements will sync up in some strategic fashion. Regardless, until the PM shows some willingness to reverse his government’s current course of unbridled, unapologetic high-deficit spending, the Conservatives are going to have a very difficult time convincing voters what makes their “fiscally conservative” party a more responsible alternative to their left-wing, “tax and spend” opponents.

It was not too long ago that Ireland was being heralded as Europe’s great success story; a country that had gone from back-breaking poverty as late as the 1950s, to an unprecedented economic wealth in the mid-90s. So great was their boom, in fact, that by the dawn of the new century, Ireland had managed to secure a per-capita standard of living even higher than that of the United Kingdom — which must have seemed rather poetic.

Today, however, Ireland finds itself suffering under the same sad status as Greece and Iceland;  a country so massively in debt that they must venture cap-in-hand to wealthier EU capitals to bail them out. Ireland’s national debt is now one of the most daunting in all of Europe, representing over 100% of the nation’s GDP in a country of just four million people. A deal hammered out this week will thus see the European Union and International Monetary Fund agree to loan almost 90 billion Euros in order to prop up the emerald isle’s teetering economy, but, as usual, there are many strings attached. The government of Prime Minister Brian Cowen has agreed to institute sharp cuts to the country’s minimum wage and public sector salaries in exchange for the bailout cash, and income and property taxes will be hiked. All will be pretty bitter pills to swallow in a country that had gotten quite comfortable with its newfound reputation as the wealthy cause celebre of the industrialized west.

What went wrong? Well, some of Ireland’s troubles are rooted in the same sorts of problems that plague much of Europe — and indeed, welfare states everywhere — which is to say, way too much extravagant government spending at a rate completely at odds with the amount of revenue coming in. But a lot of their economic woes also stem from a more particular US-style banking crisis, whereby Irish banks were handing out all sorts outlandish loans they could not afford, creating all sorts of artificial consumer bubbles, particularly in real estate, in the process. Then the bubbles (of course) eventually burst, which in turn necessitated government bailouts for the irresponsible banks, which in turn bankrupted a state that was already spending beyond its means. Paul Krugman wrote a very good piece about it all the other day.

If there’s a lesson to be drawn from all of this, other than the obvious policy ones, it may be that economic success is an achievement best viewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. So many around the world were so enamored with the romantic idea of Ireland becoming the wealthiest country in the world that they failed to ask the hard questions about whether the country’s apparent achievements were actually based on anything tangible in the long-term. Questions that the Irish themselves, so happy to be basking in their long-overdue moment of global acclaim, didn’t seem to be in any particular rush to ask, either.

Apologies if this comic seems a bit more absurd than usual. For those who miss the reference, I’m paying homage to the surprisingly insightful Dinosaur Comics of Ryan North, a fellow I met last week at the big New England Webcomics jamboree. (You can see my portrait of him, and several other webcomickers here, by the way).

Anyhow…

Here’s a fun fact about myself: I have a younger sister who lives and works in Dubai. My parents want to go visit her, but it’s become a bit of a bureaucratic hassle as of late, because the government of the United Arab Emirates has recently imposed a visa requirements on all Canadian tourists. The move is a brazenly vindictive response to the Harper government’s decision last month to not allow the Dubai-based Emirates airline corporation to set up shop in Canada, on the basis that doing so would take business away from Air Canada, Canada’s notoriously troubled national airline.

And perhaps we’ll soon see some vindictive gestures from Australia, too. This week marked the formal conclusion of Australian mining corporation BHP’s efforts to buy out the Regina-based Saskatchewan Potash corp., a company that presently controls the mining and distribution of one of Saskatchewan’s most lucrative national resources. The government of Saskatchewan didn’t want one of their favorite business partners to be controlled by foreigners, so the Harper administration stepped in to veto the takeover, and send BHP home.

Canadian commerce law grants sweeping powers to the federal government to prevent foreign firms from taking root in Canada. In most cases, all that needs to be proven is some vague evidence that the foreign company’s presence would not be in Canada’s “national interest” — a concept often defined exceedingly liberally and chauvinistically. In most cases, the decision is a brazenly political one; usually some short-term drive to protect jobs and votes, and not the long-term financial interests of the country at large. Though one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, Canadian industry is still fairly small and uncompetitive by G8 standards, and thus must be heavily coddled by the state in order to survive even domestically.

This whole philosophy of economic nationalism tends to fall in and out of favor among the Canadian ruling class from decade to decade, but its’ generally considered a cause far more fashionable among parties of the left than the right — which is what makes Stephen Harper’s newfound embrace of it so surprising. If anything, it seems to be just one more entry in the long story of the decline of Stephen Harper, the conservative man of principle, into Stephen Harper, the man of expedience.

The soon-to-be-installed Republican majority in the US House of Representatives has made no secret that one of their main objectives in the coming legislative session will be the full-scale repeal of Obamacare. Opposition to the President’s sweeping healthcare reforms has been a standard GOP talking-point for almost as long as the Democrats have been in favor of them, and as it stands, the issue represents one of the most clear-cut differences between the two parties.

Problem is, the public doesn’t seem to care much either way. During the lead-up to the passage of Obamacare, the country was pretty much split 50-50 as to whether or not they approved of the Democratic legislation, a divide which remains virtually unchanged to this day. Hardly a resounding mandate for either side. Exit polls from last Tuesday’s mid-term election likewise indicated that only 17% of American voters considered “healthcare,” as an issue in the abstract, their nation’s most pressing problem, and of those who did, opinions were all over the map regarding whether the government should get more or less involved in providing and regulating medical insurance.

The number one issue, remains, as it has been for a very long time, the economy and unemployment. According to this story, a full 90% of voters claimed to have anxieties about the present state of the US economy, perhaps predictably considering that the latest numbers indicate around 10% of the American population remains out of work, with many more having suffered reduced pay or benefits as a result of the current recession.

But how does the government fix such problems? Neither party has offered any readily-apparent solutions, which is likely why they seem to prefer to play in the sandbox of healthcare, an issue that’s always been far sexier in the eyes of the governing class. Indeed, even from the perspective of the Democrats, who seem to be the obvious losers in the GOP’s desire to reopen the Obamacare debate, revisiting the issue is great politics. After all, in the aftermath of this recent election I’m sure they have horned as many wonderful sophistic, defensive arguments to use in favor of their reforms as the Republicans have assembled sophistic, antagonistic arguments against them. Everyone can have a great ol’ time re-fighting a debate the country didn’t really want to have in the first place, and no one’s on the hook for ignoring more pressing matters, since both sides can now equally be accused of being instigators of their own irrelevant healthcare discussion.

Good time to find work as a healthcare lobbyist, though. Maybe that was Congress’ employment plan.