"Tax credits – which are officially called tax expenditures but are often referred to as boutique tax cuts because they can be targeted at specific segments of the population – are worth about $100-billion a year in foregone federal revenue."

100 billion? In boutique tax credits? Maths are hard, I understand, but 1 billion is a *really* big number; a hundred of them even more so. If we could only just eliminate 50% of boutique tax credits and then balance the budget, life would be simple. For context, total Federal government revenue in 2009 was 237 billion.