Big Business wins and you lose with HST
Sep 9, 2009 Details
Alcan Aluminum alone stands to gain many tens of millions of dollars when they proceed with their already announced Aluminum smelter expansion in Kitimat. They like every other big Company will get the taxes they pay refunded from you the consumer. Alcan, like so many other big public companies, has most of its shareholders in the U.S.A., Europe and Asia – they’ll all be grateful to you for your generosity. The government argues that they need this to compete, I don’t believe for one minute that the big oil and natural gas companies nor the coal companies or the mining operations and Forestry companies will pack up and leave for Ontario or Nova Scotia if they don’t get their taxes refunded.
Even smaller companies will benefit from the tax refunds but they will lose sales because the consumer will have much less money to spend. Losing sales means lay-offs and loss of jobs and this will be particularly evident in the restaurant and tourism related businesses. Mr. Campbell says we need this to compete with Ontario, we never worried about Ontario before, maybe we should be worried about Alberta where they have no provincial sales tax and will not have an HST. Ontario’s economy is very different from ours, we don’t make cars and the likes but it makes a good story.
Why is the Federal Government so anxious that they will pay us $ 1.6 billion? The GST was supposed to be removed completely at some time in the future, it will be removed as a GST when it gets replaced with the HST but as important to the Federal Government is the fact that they too will make much more money. Today any business or individual doing less than $30,000 per year does not have to be a GST registrant and therefore need not charge the GST, this is costing the Federal Government many billions of dollars. With HST everyone will need to charge HST, no exceptions.
The thing they still don’t seem to realize is that this will create an enormous underground economy and not only will they lose the HST in an underground economy but they’ll also lose the income tax because the “undergrounder” will not report the income.
How can we justify taking an extra 2 billion dollars out of the economy during a time of recession when we should leave as much money as possible with the consumer to spend and keep business thriving?
How can we justify taking 2 billion dollars from the person packing the lunch-bucket or the Senior or others on low or fixed incomes, not to fund healthcare or other government programs but to refund taxes to business, especially big business?
Tags: alcan aluminum, aluminum smelter, billions of dollars, coal companies, federal government, forestry companies, gst registrant, HST, hst tax refunds, mr campbell, natural gas companies, nova scotia, provincial sales tax, sales tax, shareholders, smaller companies, underground economy
