Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Thanks for the well thought out reply GP. I am on the fence as far as a tax increase. On one hand I pay enough tax, and really don't want to pay any more! But I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I'm slowly coming around.
Why do I think its prudent? Well frankly this might just be the actual fiscally prudent step. I'm younger (or at least consider myself to be). I'm self employed and have been for years, married and have kids, own property. I suppose I'm part of the 1%, although I loathe that label and the "he can afford it" attitude that comes with it. I just wanted to say this, so you see a little more of my own situation and how it affects my thoughts.
Maybe its just me, but in all honesty I'm tired of the generation ahead of me not paying their fair share. They don't want to work longer, and want every benefit paid for by someone else because they've "earned it". Heres the problem though: you didn't. Your parents did. You know, those folks who fought the world wars, went through the depression and built things from nothing. I have a hard time thinking these poor folks need more breaks.
So here we are in Alberta. We have all of these resources, and the most spending in the country to go with it. Our services aren't any better though. We're certainly not the envy of the country as far as our health or education is concerned. So lets pretend that just to keep these things rolling it costs a lot of money, and there is no easy fix. We have to get the money from somewhere, and our choice has been using our resource revenue and keeping taxes at the absolute lowest possible. We're using a finite resource (finite for a number of reasons) to keep taxes low...why exactly? We literally can point to nothing we have as a result of the resource wealth at this point. Our services aren't any better than others, we have no amazing piece of infrastructure or any savings to speak of. The only thing we've accomplished with this wealth is to have people pay less tax than anyone else in the country. How long can we do this? Its hard to say. Eventually the resource revenue will decline and we'll be forced to raise taxes, maybe for people my age or maybe for our children.
I think that the actually fiscally responsible way isn't to subsidize low taxes with this money. We could increase taxes, just a small amount, and actually save money. We could still be the lowest taxed regime in the country by a lot. We'd just be paying a little more to make sure that our competitive advantages are actually used to some real benefit.
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I see a major flaw in your logic. You acknowledge that we pay far more for our services, and have for a long time, in Alberta. You agree that we really don't see any advantage to this huge discrepancy in spending, but yet you support continuing down this path of overpayment and underdelivery of services but instead pay for it through tax increases instead of total reliance on resource revenues.
I guess it is a slight step in the right direction, because maybe people will start to realize that for the most part, services in Alberta are some of the least efficient in all of Canada.
My perspective is that we need to make it illegal to include resource income in general revenues and we should rely entirely upon 'traditional' sources of revenues (mainly taxes) to fund our expensive social programs, and to save resource revenues to supply a perpetual income stream from the investment interest. I don't share the concern of others that this fund would become a raid target for the rest of Canada, that's already been tried once and would likely lead to Western Seperation.
But the bottom line is we need to cut spending significantly and compete at a level of the rest of the provinces providing services to our populace at a reasonable cost. This whole 'spend it because it's there' approach has been lunacy and has not resulted in any measurable gains in service delivery.
So, let's spend a reasonable amount. Get reasonable outcomes. Stop letting our public service workers hold taxpayers hostage. And save for future generations.
Ie: Vote Wildrose...
