Deliver us from the Critics

The contents of page F3 of today's Ottawa Citizen is enough frost the nuts of an Old Salt.  Certainly annoys me.

Jonathon Chevreau is identified as the author of Findependence Day, a tome about which I have never heard.  In his opinion piece he uses contrived number to prove that the new HST plan in Ontario is a tax on the rich.

I say contrived because Chevreau picks little bits of the plan to make his point and conveniently ignores other bits that blow his thesis to smithereens.  He claims, for example that the tax will be levied on investment vehicles such as RRSPs, RIFFs and more, which is true.  Then he totally ignores the compensation package available in the first year to minimize the impact.  He then goes on to state that this is not a one time hit; it happens every year; which again is true.  Then he ignores that HST will become an Input Tax Credit, same as GST and collected at the same time as GST, which means that the fund managers will be able to deduct HST paid out for all sorts of things from the HST they collect (something that they could not do with the PST.)  This feature means that the fund managers will be able to lower prices because their costs have gone down.   He also ignores the fact that, when the HST is fully implemented, the number of public servants at the province needed to manage the system will be less, thus lowering costs and reducing the need to heavily fund the system.  Note that I did not say that people will be fired because I do not know if that is true.  Chances are they will be moved to other ministries and reduced through attrition.

History in the Maritime provinces and Quebec shows that costs have gone down following the implementation of an HST.  Prices did not drop where greedy companies decided to pocket the windfall.  We already know that financial companies are greedy.  Chevreau's article underscores that feature.

The second article on F3 is by Garry Marr, the Family Man.  He laments that the the tax credit for kid's sporting activities is not enough to motivate parents to get little Johnny active.  He quotes a partner at KPMG who said that the tax credit is too small.  Got news for you Garry, my kids were in soccer, hockey, horse jumping and a plethora of other sports and activities well before the politicians decided to give a tax credit.  We enrolled them in sports to keep them fit and to encourage team play.  Maybe we should not be critical of the little bits of money thrown to parents by the government but rather be critical of the parents who think that subsidies is the only reason to enroll their kids.

Sermon complete... for now.