Canadian Politics Today

In New Brunswick they raised he HST back to 15%. It will be cute if they raise GST back to 7% and the province doesn’t reduce the HST by 2% because we’ll be paying 17% consumption tax if they don’t.

A consumption tax is actually a better, more intelligent and even more progressive way to collect taxes than income taxes. However if you have a high consumption tax you're supposed to compensate by lowering income taxes.

How so? Everyone has to pay consumption taxes equally, this is just another way of shifting the burden from the haves to the have nots.

Well food is exempt from the HST.

People who can afford expensive products pay 13%, 15% or whatever on those products.

And there are GST rebates for lower income people.

How so? Everyone has to pay consumption taxes equally, this is just another way of shifting the burden from the haves to the have nots.

If you make a lot more you spend a lot more, which means you pay a lot more. If there's no consumption tax on basic necessities like some foods and medicine - and rent, then you wind up paying a higher percentage of your income in taxes, too.

This is Canada, we need to wear clothes in the winter and the prissy conservatives will complain if we don't in the summer.

And clothes you buy at Walmart probably cost a fraction of what they do at Harry Rosen's. So the rich guy is still going to be paying way more than the poor guy.

NB compensated by having one of the highest provincial income tax rates.

The Atlantic provinces have the highest personal and corporate tax rates in Canada.
Which helps to explain their sky high unemployment rates. What business wants to locate there unless it's one that needs the ocean?

Yet the taxes are high because there are so few businesses here. And make no mistake about it, The Irvings are not paying the "legislated" tax rate. The breaks they get are enormous, just like the "call centres" that were bribed to move here. It's a chicken-egg problem. They can't lower taxes because the tax base is too small. The tax base is too small (according to you) because they can't lower taxes. So what interventions do you propose? (even though this probably isn't the thread for it)

I'm not an expert, though I play one on the internet. So I'm sure not going to propose solutions to state of moribund economies of the Atlantic provinces which has existed as far back as I remember. But when government becomes a major part of the economy and the major employer you usually wind up with masses of unneeded bureaucrats and a bureaucracy which delays, deters and depresses economic activity - on top of the high taxes. If the Atlantic provinces want to draw business investment they need to be a better place to make money than other places business can locate. Why locate a factory in New Brunswick rather than Ontario or Quebec, with their much greater populations and closer access to big US population centres? The only reason would be it's cheaper there. And it's not. It's more expensive and how do you make it less expensive? Why is it more expensive? That's something that has to be looked into by people with a lot more knowledge than me.

The difference is entirely accounting and not actual spending.

The difference is entirely accounting and not actual spending.

They say they're spending one thing but it's actually another, so that people are more likely to vote for them soon.  Sounds like anti-democratic corruption to me.