Beginning of Essay
Linda McQuaig's most recent book, "Shooting the Hippo" is about the causes and results of the debt. It is a look at both the factual causes and the arguments which are merely presented to us through the various elements of the media. McQuaig delivers an insightfu ....

Middle of Essay
.... hippo, born in a zoo, is to be shot because of recent government cutbacks which leave nothing to feed or care for the hippo. This image grabs the attention of the reader and leads to numerous other examples which McQuaig uses to break down the popular myths about the deficit. McQuaig, determined to expose one by one, several of the current myths about the state of the Canadian economy, backs up her arguments with interviews and publications. These include: a chief statistician at Statistics Canada who has been working on the statistics of social spending since the middle '60s; the man at Moody's bond rating service in New York who is in charge of se ....