Slash or spend? Cut or conserve? The federal government will bring down its budget on March 22. What should be in it? We ask five prominent Canadian thinktanks to offer their fiscal fix for the coming year. The Harper Government (formerly known as the Government of Canada) has made clear its intent to tighten spending in the 2011-12 federal budget. Its goal is to vanquish the deficit, pegged at $55.6 billion in 2010. But is this objective achievable? The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, has argued that several successive tax cuts have created a structural deficit -one which won't be eliminated by slashing spending. How has this happened? Since 2006, the Harper Government has drained its own coffers. After taking office, it cut the GST by two percentage points, creating an annual revenue loss of $12-billion. It trimmed corporate taxes, from 18 to 16.5%, effective 2011. It made other smaller tax cuts, including allowing pension income splitting for wealthy seniors, which taken together deprive it of a significant amount of revenue. Yet the government somehow manages to find money for its favourite expenditures: War and crime. Significant amendments to the Criminal Code will cost Canadians an estimated $1billion annually over five years. This, despite evidence that building massive prisons has already proven ineffective and breathtakingly expensive in the United States, because every dollar spent on prison is a dollar not spent on the factors that contribute to criminal behaviour.