As A Senior I Am Thankful For A Little Increase

as opposed to no increase and at the same time I am not niave enough to believe that a year from now we will here horror stories about tory spending but hopefully it will not be comparable to the liberal's Chainsaw Massacre II.

Your tax dollars at work Public accounts reveal the ugly story of where your cash goes when it goes south

By GREG WESTON

OTTAWA -- Just days after Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government was accused of being stingy "mean-spirited" for cutting federal spending, the Conservatives are generously giving a truly eye-popping increase in old age security to millions of needy seniors.

A press release just out announces that as of Oct. the basic old age pension will increase a whopping $4.39 a month, or roughly the cost of a regular Tim's per week.

I didn't expect that an increase would allow me have dinner at Hy's....at least at Timmy's I have something in common with the patrons.

The federal largesse doesn't end there. The guaranteed income supplement paid to sustain poorest of the poor seniors is also going up by whole $5.38 a month, or enough to make that a large coffee.

While a combined increase of 33 cents a day may not seem like much windfall for the millions of seniors living below the poverty line, government obviously has just many other darn spending priorities.

As it happens, details of all that other spending just landed on our desk in the same pile of future recycling as the pensions press release three thick volumes of the annual public accounts showing what happened to all our tax money in the past year.

Here's a sample (and we're not making this stuff up):

- Harper's first photo op with George Bush set the treasury back almost $300,000 for their 36 hours Mexico, not counting the government jumbo jet, but including the costs of the PM's large communications entourage that spent most of time hiding from the media.

The cost of that trip, however, pales compared to some of the bills left behind by Paul Martin and friends

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Weston_Greg/2006/10/03/pf-1942242.html