Local MLA is anything but clear, certainly confused

By Letter to the Editor on August 23, 2017.

Re: “MLA Report: Let good people do good things with their time and money,” Aug. 18

Ronald Reagan may (or may not) have “understood the vast potential of a giving, caring, conservative culture,” but Kenney doesn’t seem to care enough about this to crystallize the idea. According to a news report on Aug. 2 “Kenney is not running on any kind of platform as he seeks leadership, saying the party itself should form the policies.” Barnes is riding Kenney’s coattails and doing a poor job of it.

Barnes declares that the government’s policies are handicapping charity. Can he prove this? It sounds like dogma. It says little about those who profess charitable inclinations that they would reduce or even cease giving just because of taxes. Charitable donations are tax deductible. I bet high taxes don’t discourage conservatives from donating to their party.

Ninety-five per cent of the Wildrose voted for the merger but only 55 per cent of the Tories did. Barnes logical processes are flawed if he thinks these numbers are any indication of how the majority of Albertans feel. Barnes is preaching to the choir and apparently those are the only ones to whom he listens. He should get out more.

J.M. Keynes, with whom Barnes, expert in macroeconomics, is undoubtedly intimately familiar, enunciated the position that during recessions, the government can stimulate the economy by intentionally running a deficit, a practice with which most economists agree (Wikipedia). When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it said that “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism.”

Barnes is anything but clear. He is confused. This citizen doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he does know for whom to vote.