Mismanagment. Who understands the word budget?

To the Editor,
Once again as an Alberta taxpayer I find myself disgusted with the blatant mismanagement of our hard earned money. As if it wasn’t bad enough in August when Finance Minister Doug Horner announced taxpayers could be paying a $3 Billion deficit this year, there is no end in sight to the fiscal mismanagement of this current government. Horner decided not to release details of the budget update for us uneducated Albertans, saying to reporters “The reality is if we have to do a technical briefing for you (reporter) folks, how do we expect that Albertans are going to understand what I am telling them?” Wow.
Personally I am sick of this entitled government. In the last couple months there was $350,000.00 in lavish expense claims by an Alberta Health Services Executive exposed, over $2 million of money thrown away in preliminary work on the cancelled police college in Ft. Macleod (not incl. any monies paid back to the town), and the latest in the trough feed being the $518,000.00 on the trip to the London Olympics that they claimed would be around $80,000.00. Now I don’t disagree we need to promote the province, certainly though the Government has a responsibility, no…an obligation, to spend the taxpayer dollars efficiently. Of this half a million dollar trip to the Olympics, 22% or $113,000.00 was spent on hotel rooms that were never used. Without scrutinizing any other expense 22% is wasted money on absolutely nothing, all the while Premier Redford is patting herself on the back claiming she could have spent another $123,000 bringing more staff but didn’t. I shake my head.
Something has to change is all I know, as an Alberta Taxpayer making $50,000 per year would pay $4002 per year in provincial income tax. On waste alone on these three items, it would take the same taxpayer 615 years to pay this out, so to our Finance Minister Mr. Horner I question who really understands the word budget.
Derrick Jacobson
Langdon, Alberta