If you find yourself digging deeper into a dark financial hole, the first thing any wise friend will suggest is to stop digging and stick to a budget.

A budget makes sure you are only spending money on things you can afford, not on fast food or new accessories for your truck.

But a budget only works if you stick to it, and the Saskatchewan government has been failing to stick to its budget for years and it’s costing taxpayers mega bucks.

The government blew past its spending estimates by almost a billion dollars in 2024. The government originally projected it would spend $20.1 billion last year. The newly released public accounts marking the end to the fiscal year 2024 show the government spent $21.1 billion.

That’s about $970 million more than what the government said it was going to spend.

The government is spending more than budgeted in nine out of 11 of its main departments. That includes $8.5 million in overspending in a slop bucket vaguely labelled “general government.”

Taxpayers should be very skeptical about the financial chops of a government that can’t stick to its spending plan in “general government.”  And this isn’t a new pattern. The Saskatchewan government regularly tells taxpayers one thing at budget time and then surprises them with huge increases in spending at the end of the year.

In 2023, the government blew past its budget by $2.2 billion. In 2022 it was $1.4 billion. And in 2021 it was $2.5 billion.

All that overspending has seen the government keep shovelling more money onto Saskatchewan’s mountain of debt. When Scott Moe became premier in 2018, Saskatchewan’s debt was about $11 billion. At the end of this year, it’s projected to be $23.5 billion. Moe’s government more than a doubled the debt in seven years. It took former prime minister Justin Trudeau nine years to double the federal debt.

But that’s not the worst part, the debt could go even higher this year if the government continues to blow past its own budget projections.

And that has consequences for taxpayers because debt isn’t cheap. Taxpayers are forced to pay millions of dollars in interest every year to cover government loans.

In 2024, debt interest payments cost taxpayers about $699 million, or about $560 per person. This year, debt interest payments will cost taxpayers $878 million, or about $702 per Saskatchewanian.

That per person number is more than double what a family of four making $75,000 can expect to pay in the gas tax this year. That means every dollar you and your family pay in taxes at the pumps isn’t being used for road maintenance or new highways, it’s being flushed down the drain to pay for interest charges on the debt.

That’s a waste. And the government can reduce the amount of money being wasted on interest payments by not blowing its budget. That’s because government revenue also increased by about $994 million compared to the 2024 budget. If the government hadn’t increased spending by almost the same amount, it could have used that extra cash to start paying down debt and reduce the annual interest bill.

But it couldn’t resist the urge to spend. And taxpayers are, literally, paying for it.

A budget isn’t supposed to be a suggestion; it’s supposed to be a serious commitment about how much the government is going to be spending every year. It’s a document that the government should follow to the letter and it’s something that taxpayers should be able to look at to know where their money is going every year.

Failing to follow that budget makes the government less dependable because taxpayers can’t trust the numbers coming out of the legislature.

Finance Minister Jim Reiter needs to stick to his budget and stop spending money as fast as it comes in to reduce the cost of government for taxpayers.