By Kris Rondolo and Gage Haubrich

We’ve been sharing some pretty ridiculous things that you could buy with the trillion dollars that governments have wasted on interest payments since 1990.

With one trillion dollars of our hard earned money interest payments, the federal government could have given each Canadian 11 ounces of gold, bought the CN Tower 2,613 times, or become owner of each of the 31 NHL teams, 42 times. 

But here’s where it hits close to home: That wasted money was enough to pay for eight months of income assistance during the pandemic. 

That’s eight months of CERB and EI combined, 12 times over.

Individuals and families save so they have some money to use if their car breaks down or they need to fix their furnace.

The government should be expected to do the same. 

But since the government did not save, we wasted over a trillion dollars on debt charges. Money that could be used for a rainy day instead of paying for the bad decisions of the past.

Instead of managing their spending and adding little to no debt, politicians have grown the federal debt to a point where we are wasting billions every year on interest payments. 

Not a cent of that trillion dollars goes to debt repayment, it’s just to cover the cost of borrowing all that money.

What a waste.

Kris Rondolo is the Executive Director for Generation Screwed and is the national spokesperson on intergenerational fairness for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Gage Haubrich is the Prairie Regional Director for Generation Screwed. He holds a Bachelors of Economics and will be pursuing a Masters of Economics at the University of Saskatchewan in Fall 2021.