Category Tax policy
Taxing my patience
Dumb tax proposals o' the day: The Liberals will go back to giving tax breaks to income trusts. I have to wonder what Ralph Goodale must be thinking about all this. It was a good idea to remove those tax breaks, and it's still a bad idea to put them back in place. The NDP […]
The GST cut: stupid economics, smart politics?
Paul Wells offers some very persuasive insight into why Stephen Harper cut the GST: It's not always true, after all, that long-term change and electoral expediency are necessarily antagonistic. The GST cut is a case in point. Economists, or at least economists who aren't named Stephen Harper, hate it. As a mechanism for encouraging growth […]
Statutory and effective corporate tax rates across countries
I'm not spending a lot of time following the US election, but I've noticed quite a few posts in the economics blogosphere about John McCain's proposal to reduce corporate tax rates. The issue of whether or not to cut corporate tax rates has been hashed out pretty thoroughly in Canada over the past few years, […]
On the political economy of a basic income
The idea of a basic income – it’s generally referred to as a Guaranteed Annual Income in Canada – has been floated again. My initial reaction was that this is such a good idea that it’s hard to figure out why we don’t have it already. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to much in […]
Canada’s tax system is regressive
A while ago, I blogged about a study using data from way back in 1988 that suggested that Canada had a tax system that was essentially flat. Since then, we’ve seen the arrival of the GST and any number of changes to personal income taxes, so an update to that study was high on my […]
Why progressives should support reducing corporate tax rates
A recent working paper, entitled "The Incidence of Corporate Income Tax on Wages" (26-page pdf) by UBC’s Mick Devereux an entirely different Michael Devereux (thanks to Martin Boileau’s correction in the comments) and a couple of colleagues at Oxford’s Centre for Business Taxation, provides even more evidence to believe that the traditional aversion to corporate […]
The federal government’s proposed tax cuts are just as stupid as we’d feared
Sigh. The Conservatives set out an Economic Statement this afternoon, and it includes a measure to further reduce the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from 6% to 5%. From this, I infer that the Conservative government is willfully stupid: Reducing the GST is bad economics. Just ask anyone who has given any thought to the […]
Reducing the GST again would be stupider, stupider, stupider, stupider
I keep hoping that the Conservatives’ throne speech proposal to reduce the GST by another percentage point will receive the recognition it deserves: derision and disavowal. The derision part seems to to be covered: Plan to cut GST blasted: The Conservative government’s plan to trim the GST for a second time has been soundly rejected […]
Why doesn’t the US have a consumption tax?
The obvious answer would be ‘because it’s unpopular with voters’, but that really isn’t convincing: no-one likes to pay consumption taxes (the adjective most associated with Canada’s GST is ‘hated’). Come to think of it, no-one likes paying personal income taxes, either. But among OECD countries, it is only in the US where the architects […]
The social spending and GDP per capita graph redux
For reasons unknown to me or to Mark Thoma, The Economist blogger doesn’t seem to be willing to engage me directly in the interpretation of the following graph from this post: My original comment on this graph was: ‘These are countries whose per-capita incomes are greater than the OECD average. The point here is that […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments