Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto StarRe: Ontario reporting 3,065 new COVID-19 cases and eight deaths; record number of patients in ICU, April 6, 2021.

During the last year of the pandemic, capitalism and governments have been stripped bare. The gross and extended underfunding of governments which began in the seventies after the post-war infrastructure boom had faded during a misguided effort to stimulate the economy by cutting corporate taxes. The philosophy of the neoconservative right has taken over government and hollowed it out under their watchful eye. Corporate tax cuts became the mantra for governments of all political stripes to stimulate the economy even though they didn’t work.  Corporate taxes were cut to the bone while profits skyrocketed. As governments’ major source of funding shrank cuts had to be made across the board to programs and services. We entered the “Age of Austerity.”

Now in 2021 we find ourselves mired in a pandemic without the proper social infrastructure to deal with it. If governments had raised taxes 1% a year for the past fifty years they would have had an extra fifty percent more to spend on PPE, hospital staffing and infrastructure spending like building new hospitals.  Long-term care homes could have been spared the horrific deaths we have witnessed. In every area of society funding has been reduced to minimalist levels leaving them in jeopardy. This would have been fine except for the pandemic.

Now governments are spending massive amounts of money they don’t have to counteract the pandemic while Canadians die waiting for vaccines that are rolling out far too slowly. This should be a lesson to governments everywhere about raising  taxes regularly to keep up with inflation and growth. Cutting them has gotten us into a real deep hole and does not work. The old expression is true – pay me now or pay me later. Later is always way more expensive.