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With several elections looming in the coming year, all the budget making we’ve seen in recent weeks is more about politics than sound economics. Politicians are scrambling to pick off voters with various bribes. As the federal and most provincial governments relentlessly increase our debt, they have no time to worry about the inevitable reckoning that will come when their budget plans are blown out of the water by a recession.

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Experts will properly evaluate budgets in terms of their impact on the economy. But economists’ views have little to do with political budgeting. Politicians budget using three golden rules.

Rule #1:Hide the deficit as much as possible

Politicians will push deficits off the balance sheet as far as they can bend the rules to do it. Case in point: Ontario cutting $25 billion in today’s hydro costs by stashing $45 billion of future interest and debt repayments in Ontario Power Generation’s books.

Other governments play similar tricks. They’ve generally stopped counting capital expenditures as spending to make deficits look smaller (they might itemize capital depreciation costs, but those are typically much smaller). As the accompanying table shows, while Quebec and B.C. have declared a budget “surplus,” their debt is actually rising. (Capital budgets are theoretically sound for businesses, where investment can increase future profits. But plenty of public projects simply don’t contribute to growth, and politicians will often reframe obvious social spending — like hockey rinks and low-income housing — as capital spending.)