“It’s not necessarily tax increases, but perhaps looking at tax exemptions that exist in the province and eliminating some of those,” Doherty said.

“Looking at tax exemptions?” Isn’t that far too timid from a government that’s transferred the province from a position of wealth to adding a billion dollars in debt each year?

Absolutely.

But understand that for a quarter century now, talk of tax change has been absolutely forbidden … unless, of course, we were talking about reductions. We have been conditioned to believe increasing taxes is always wrong and that resource wealth will always cater to every spending whim in government.

Sask. Party politicians need to be both blamed and credited for creating this public outlook.

Some credit is deserved because in past NDP and Progressive Conservative governments hiking taxes was the all-too-easy remedy to cover budgetary mismanagement. For example, the last gasp of the Devine administration was to harmonize the provincial sales tax with the federal GST — a policy reversed by the NDP.

But what has emerged in the quarter century since the NDP’s last big round of tax hikes to address those massive PC debts is a sometimes ridiculous series of exemptions that often don’t reflect fairness or today’s economic reality.

For example, farmland values have doubled since the demise of the Canadian Wheat Board as large corporate operators have bought up more and more land. Yet we still subsidize corporate farms as if they were still subsistence operations.

Consider the provincial sales tax exemptions in the current 2016-17 budget: Children’s clothing/footwear, $13.4 million; prescription drugs, $36.2 million; electricity, $49.4 million; farm machinery and repairs, $83.8 million; fertilizers, pesticides and seed, $163.4 million; food, restaurant meals and snack foods, $84.2 million; basic groceries, $129.3 million; natural gas, $24.8 million; reading materials, $8.1 million; construction materials, $486.6 million; other services, $36.5 million; used goods, $300,000; used vehicles, $98.8 million; professional agent fees, $33.9 million; energy-efficient appliances and furnaces, $2.5 million; toll-free telephone calls, $200,000, and; feminine hygiene products, $1.7 million.

Sure, there are reasons things we need (basic food, kids clothes, gas and electricity, reading materials) shouldn’t be taxed. But can we say the same for junk food and restaurant meals? Total the above exemptions and we forgo $1.4 billion in PST revenue — an amount we would capture through harmonization with the GST.

And that doesn’t include corporate and personal income tax revenue, which Doherty noted Wednesday is falling. Generous exemptions and rate reductions that have mostly benefited the wealthy need reviewing.

We’ll know a year from now whether Doherty is serious. What is known now is that by themselves, his death-by-a-thousand cuts won’t solve the $1-billion-a-year deficit mess he’s created.

Doherty does have a big revenue problem, but it isn’t just the falling resource revenue he complains about.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post.