‘@ — Friday, November 22,1991 — North Shore News

Make anot

MY ATTITUDE toward a
bill is:

Pay it right away — before they
decide to charge you more.

This abject fear has served me
well. It has saved me countless
thousands in interest charges. 1
have shown a fast pair of heels to
any bailiff tempted to snap at
them.

Some may think I take this to
extremes. For instance, the only
kick that I used to get out of life
was prepaying an extra amount on
my mortgage every year on the
anniversary date.

It was also, understandably, the
only hobby I could afford.

Some peopie — probably the
very same people I mentioned in
the paragraph above — may think
that waiting a whole year to get
one’s jollies is very s:range.

Weil, that’s exactly what
sharpened the anticipation.

The day after the excitement of
writing the cheque, I always felt
quite dismal. It was as if life
wasn’t worth living any more.

However, ! was cheered with
the thought that there were only
another 364 days till I wrote my
next cheque.

(Of course, leap years left an
extra sense of depression. But |
consoled myself with the thought
that pechaps that was only
because my wedding was on 2
Leap Year Day, in 1980. Yes, in
1992 my bride and I will celebrate
only our third anniversary.

(This may be hard to explain to
our children as they get older, but
I can solve only one problem per
column, and that one will have to
wait.)

But, getting back to my mort -
gage prepayments, naturally my
spirits rose day by day throughout
the year as the mortgage anniver-
sary —- not the wedding one —
approached. (Just kidding. Very
happy, dear.)

Mind you, this was complicated
by the fact that the mortgage an-
Niversary was Jan. 1.

Not surprisingly, many people
thought I was a tremendously jol-
ly companion on New Year’s Eve,
not realizing that I just couidn’t
wait to pay off another chunk of
the mortgage at the stroke of
midnight.

You can see why I’m considered
Mr. Excitement of the North
Shore.

Unfortunately, though, paying
off a mortgage fast is obviously 2
kind of disappearing ecstasy, €x-
actly like coming to the end of a
Lotto 6/49 windfall.

Last January | made the final
payment. Since then I have
wandered around with a dazed
took on my face, not knowing
what to do with the extra money.

Also, people are sure to notice
that ! am an awful lot less fun
this New Year’s Eve.

Still, I take some consolation in
paying my B.C. Hydro and B.C.
Tel dills almost instantly.

I have described this at length
not only to test your capacity for
really award-winning boredom —
I mean, other than describing my
laundry (1 like my shirts on
hangets, no starch, at the
cizaners), I can’t think of any-
thing less thought-provoking than
a history of my mortgage pay-
ments -~ but also to lure you into
the serious matter of how dif-
ferem | am from the governments
of Canuda.

And | expect you are too, dear
reader. If not, you should check
to see if you are reading this in
jail.

Because you and | would be
thrown into the slammer quite
swiftly if we rolled up debts the
way governments do -— and
blandly paid them off with new
debis.

By now you know that a large
fraction of your tax dollar goes to

Thank you,

Trevor
Lautens

GARDEN OF BIASES

service the federal debt.

It’s not so well known that be-
tween January and August of this
year, the consumer price index
rose only one-half of 1% — if
you exciude the part attributed to
government-regulated prices, in-
cluding taxes on tobacco and
strong drink, utilities, property
taxes, public transportation, and
supply-managed products like
poultry and dairy products, which
are controlled by marketing
boards.

Put another way, an Octcber
StatsCan report said that in the 12
months ending in August, non-
regulated prices rose just 4.4%
while the regulated variety rose
10.5%. That trend has been ac-
celerating in recent years,

Those figures show that the
Bank of Canada’s famous war on
inflation has virtually been won —
except for the inflation originating
in government itself.

One expert precticts that, ad-
justed for infation, after-tax
disposable family income, which
hardly grew at all in the 1989s,
will actually decline in the 1990s.
The extra setting at the family

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TREET, NORTH VANCOUVER’ HON

er setting for the

table will be for the taxman.

Peter Cook in the Globe and
Mail predicted the other day that
in the face of Ontario’s expected
recovery — forecast to be
Canada’s strongest — by 1995 the
Ontario New Democratic govern-
ment, for every $2 in extra reve-
nue that it will have collected, will
have spent $3. it will make up the
shortfall through new borrowings.

Even the NDP, always big
talkers about spending money —

. other people’s, i.e., yours and

mine — sounds a lot more sober,
now that it’s taken power in three
provinces within fess than 14
months,

Saskatchewan NDP Premier
Roy Romanow, for example, in
office one month, now says wor-
riedly that the Constitution isn’t
his biggest worry. Not while his
farmers are fighting just to sur-
vive.

The new NDP government in
Victoria has similarly opened the
till, declared that its Social Credit
predecessors in effect cooked the
books, and is obviously now soft-
ening up the public for bigger def-
icits and new tax blows ahead.

Yet there is no demand for
reduced government services. On
the contrary. Nor is there a move
toward smaller public-service wage

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hikes: the widely accepted target
figure is 7%, at a time when
private-sector raises are running at
less than half that.

Meanwhile Canadian com-
petitiveness is sliding.

Among the Western industri-
alized nations, our industrial
prices and labor unit costs have
risen fastest. And our productivity
has fallen from second to fifth
place in the last 15 years.

All of this points to a cruel, and
growing, inter-generational debt.
It’s common knowledge that the
young will inherit not a wider
patrimony but a deeper debt.

As a people, we simply want
more than we’re willing to pay
for. And our example coaches our
children in similar ways.

What wili actually happen, as
experience shows, is that those
who can flee the wreckage will do
so. The French have a phrase for
t: Sauve gui peut — roughly,
every man for himself. But even
the ‘‘saved”’ can’t live happily or
safely among the desperate.

All of this could be avoided if
governments behaved like I do,
and like other sensihle citizens:
Pay your bills —~ ov time. Not
over time.

’, Great moments ©
come out of the biue.

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