These people have no shame. At every turn they advocate a regressive taxation and call it an improvement. Future generations will look back at these fighters for regressive taxation and think of them as flat earth types.

If they want the tax break on equipment and machinery, then the income tax on business must go up… it must be revenue neutral. No free ride on the backs of pensioners and the working poor.

If you run a service business be aware that what the chamber is really talking about is a flat tax on your revenue before your business expenses are factored in, as in a flat tax on your ‘revenue’, rather than a progressive tax on your ‘income’. This flat tax comes directly out of the value gap limiting your pricing potential.

we already pay enough.

The champions of regressive taxation… are out with bold lies and miss-truths in regards to the regressive carbon tax.

They proudly announce the regressive flat tax is revenue neutral because the revenue from it is off set with income tax cuts. So business guy making a million dollars a year saves $50,000 a year in income tax to pay $1200 a year in carbon tax… the difference made up by pensioner old ladies, the unemployed, and low income workers who despite what the rich will tell you, they too need to heat their homes and drive to work or the grocery store.

But it gets better, while the vast majority of us pay the $.50+ cents per liter in regressive taxes for gasoline, the business man is writing off the full $1.379 as a cost of doing business thereby netting him a tax deduction from his gross income at the highest tax rate… so in reality the regressive tax on his fuel is an income tax return making his actual tax bill next to nothing.

Meanwhile the working poor bend over and pay the full tax bill to cover for the rich, those in ‘business’, and otherwise tax cheats.

Its so shameful we get this guy on the radio yesterday from the University of Ottawa telling us slanted stats to prove the flat regressive carbon tax was good economics for BC. Someone should have told him its so good… Australia just had a coup to get rid of their carbon tax. Of course the CBC won’t allow a rebuttal on its story… closed from comments.

Claiming the carbon tax didn’t hurt the economy ignores the fact it is a regressive tax that even if offset by income tax cuts still hurts the poor who don’t qualify for the income tax cuts. Assuming it really is revenue neutral.

Of course fuel usage is down since 2008. A University of Ottawa professor should realize since 2008 we have had a huge curtailment in the forest industry by far the largest user of fuels, to say nothing of recent mine closures. A carbon tax on energy usage does not fuel economic growth (the Olympics with tax dollars might though?)… as Australia came to realize.

If one wants to test the carbon tax usage scenario than one should go the home of someone that lives in the North and see if the regressive carbon tax was successful in some poor guy not heating his home in the winter.

Greed, pure greed is what these regressive tax apologist are really all about.

IMHO

That kind of stupid preoccupation is just the mistake at this point that will keep you off city council. A basic post secondary education in economics should be a requirement for public office.

I’m sick and tired of all the organizations that advocate for the rights of business at the expense of the taxpayer. When special interests are the only people who have the ear of our representatives anymore, and continually vote themselves a piece of the public purse to the exclusion and detriment of all others, a democracy ceases to exist.

Your simple greed is not masked by your thin arguments about paperwork efficiency.

Eagle. I don’t disagree with all you say but it’s a myth a write off is a full recovery. The only portion of fuel that business recover is the gst 5%. The tax rate for small business is 13.5% so they recover that amount of any deductible expense. May seem unfair they can expense anything at all but if you taxed them on gross revenue there would be few businesses at all as most net profit margins are about 10% after all expenses. Personally I prefer raising business tax rate and scrapping pst as its a pain to deal with and you have to pay it whether you make money or not

I wouldn’t e surprised if the HST came back sometime in the future. It was a far better system than the current PST/GST we have now.

Right now, we would be paying 10% HST instead of the 12% PST/GST we are paying now if people had been able to see past their own noses. Oh well.

Not surprised this is the same COC that supported the HST and wanted additional voting privileges for owners of businesses in PG during civic elections…. The business vote!!!! I agree with Sine Nomine and Eagleone on this topic ……enough subsidies and preferential treatment is already awarded to businesses in BC we certainly don’t need to add another regressive tax to the mix. If this is the type of leadership Dorethy Frissen hopes to win a seat on City Council with…. She is far out of touch with the wishes and views of the general electorate IMHO

So far as administration is concerned, I’d tend to agree with you, Johnny. But the downside of the HST is that it transferred and increased taxation to BC consumers, reducing their disposable incomes, and negatively affected BC businesses that serve BC consumers. It may have been palatable if it had been introduced with the BC tax component cut to 5% instead of remaining at 7%, but the mob that brought it in didn’t have brains enough to do that. They preached “Tax cuts work”, but they obviously didn’t have the courage of their convictions that they really do.

Ski50 I would argue that it is a full recovery. For hypothetical argument sake if one is paying $1.50 for gas and gets to write it off from their gross income at the business rate of 13.5% that translates into a [$.2025(income) plus $.075 (GST)] $.2775 actual tax credit on a liter of fuel.

So essentially the business guy is paying $1.2225 for a liter of fuel when Joe public is paying $1.50. A savings that is compounded once the business ‘net income’ is realized by the shareholder at a much higher income tax rate of say 34% or whatnot… ie 34% of $1.50 expense a further $.51 for a total realized tax savings of $.7875 or more than half the original cost of fuel and 50% more than the cost of taxes on the fuel.

If I was paying a realized cost of fuel that was only $.7125 per liter rather than the $1.50 everyone else pays than I would not argue to much about high regressive fuel costs either… especially when it is used as an argument to lower the much higher income tax rates for the rich under the argument of tax neutrality.

Maybe if we want true tax neutrality than everyone should get an income tax deduction for the cost of fuel whether one is a millionaire businessman or a pensioner, student, or working poor.

People just can’t seem to leave things alone long enough for the dust to settle. Seriously the chamber of commerce doesn’t actually achieve anything really useful 90% of the time, kinda like the useless DBIA with people who have special interest at the helm. Can you say self serving and crooked. Just wish folks would quit poking the ant hill with the province long enough for things to become some what organized again. Just three months into the PST and some idiot thinks it’s a good idea to stir the pile again. Getting tired of it.

socred: “But the downside of the HST is that it transferred and increased taxation to BC consumers, reducing their disposable incomes, and negatively affected BC businesses that serve BC consumers. It may have been palatable if it had been introduced with the BC tax component cut to 5% instead of remaining at 7%, but the mob that brought it in didn’t have brains enough to do that.”

That’ exactly what the Libs were going to do had the Province voted to keep the HST. It would have been 10%. Right now, we’re paying a 12% consumer tax. Before Palopu chimes in, yes, I know that HST is dead. But perhaps not forever.

No surprise they wouldn’t like returning back to paying their share instead of having the consumer pay it for them.

Dear JohnnyBelt,

I get where you’re coming from, I truly do. The cascading nature of the PST makes it horribly inefficient and regressive, but the government has grown dependent upon it. You’re right, if the Liberals had strategized the approach to bringing it in a little more, there wouldn’t have been hardly a whimper about it. When Ontario brought theirs in, they even added 8% to the price of gasoline, but all citizens got a cash inducement before it was brought in, which lubricated the transition I suppose even though it was still very unpopular there.

The very clear shift of sales tax though from business to consumers was the fatal blow. A $2billion transfer of tax from business to consumers was outrageous. They could have done much to temper that, but the revenue generation estimates were way off, and they were worried about going in the hole as all the studies showed that this would reduce overall revenue to the provincial coffers. They were wrong. It was a boon. I think taxing restaurant meals was a killer too. I recently heard a statistic that 1 in 4 people in this province are employed in the food services industry. That’s huge and was a huge blow to them, and I know restaurants were hurting for a good while afterwards.

Bottom line, the Liberal government is stupid. They know what the problems are with the PST (or at least one assumes they do) and had 18 months to re-engineer it, but did they? No, they’ve become dependent on the revenue that the cascading PST generates, so they haven’t made any improvements at all. To do so would mean that they would have to address the revenue shortfall with dreaded income taxes or fees or raise the provincial sales tax rate to compensate. All really unpopular concepts unless you sell it properly. Cash inducements work great, because lets face it most taxpayers are absolutely stupid when it comes to matters of finance. Give them $100 today and they’ll happily let your tax them $1500 over the next 10 years in compensation.

You know in retrospect I’m surprised the vote to overturn the HST wasn’t by a much larger margin. An enormous propaganda campaign was launched, using our tax dollars, so I think that changed a lot of people’s minds. Again the average citizen is not very bright though. More should have been angered that a host of promises the government made in selling the public the HST did not come to fruition. In a lot of cases, the reverse came true…

It didn’t generate increased investment
It didn’t generate increased employment
Businesses did NOT pass on their savings to consumers, at least none that I frequented did. In fact, I think the reverse is true. Some prices started going up right after the introduction of the HST.

I’m so sick and tired of Neo Liberal ideology and it’s lying, thieving and conniving proponents, I want them to all be fired and made to work at fast food restaurants for the rest of their lives and have their pensions revoked. Neo Liberal ideology is NOT sustainable, it’s a race to the bottom for the majority of society. Actually all of society, just some of us will hit the bottom long before the wealthier do. You can’t just keep grinding the working class until they have nothing left and nothing left to lose and so start to revolt. This is a losing proposition for everyone and lots of people are going to get hurt in the process. But people have become drunk on the idea of lower income taxes, but every other single tax the provincial government has control over has skyrocketed. Giving money in one hand and taking it away with the other is not progress and “free enterprise” the new euphemism for extortion, theft and racketeering. It’s a shell game, only the prize money has already been doled out to friends and campaign contributors and the ball is effin gone.

Our economy is based on consumerism, so if you keep chipping away at that by continually raising VAT taxes, eventually, you end up with Greece. People get tired of the corruption of their representatives and continually having their disposable incomes eroded by ever increasing consumer taxes. It’s no surprise that the black market starts to flourish, along with barter systems and people just start flouting the law outright. Suddenly the state can’t pay for what it was created to facilitate in the first place; protection, police services, military, judiciary, trade, education & healthcare. Then the entire system crumbles and everyone loses.

One day, hopefully under a new regime, they can bring in the HST again, but do it properly and raise and or lower income taxes at the same time for different groups to compensate for the change. Make it revenue neutral and nobody would say anything about it, I guarantee it. They’d welcome it. Then they could sell the efficiency of the tax and even if businesses don’t pass on the savings to consumers the next time around either, they’ll know that overall they’ll be better off, because that income gain will be taxed. Anyway, I’m getting long in the tooth here about this. In truth, I could write a book about this fiasco and maybe I will one day. I voted to repeal the HST and I was happy it was voted down. The icing on the cake would have been if we had a viable alternative government to vote for and soon after the HST was kicked out, so should have been the corrupt and intransigently ignorant Liberal government.

They want more subsidys for these free enterprise companies that the C of C represents. They were one of three groups that wanted to go to court over the HST. I am seriously considering not shoping at C of C member businesses. The Chamber appears to be a self interest group who care nothing for the general population. Money is what it is all about as far as the C of C is concerned