Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
the raising minimum wage isn't increasing business, I don't know where that's coming from when you can see a lot of instances of businesses contracting because of it. Because of the increases in priced goods, plus the carbon tax they're not going to have significantly more disposable income to spend.
I like the grants for apprentices, that makes sense
trying to get pipelines approved, all that's happened is that Notley's gotten slapped in the face by Quebec and Ontario and BC after announcing things like the Carbon Tax.
And hiring more people increases the operating deficit and especially worthless if they aren't hiring front line people like doctors and nurses and teachers where the money should be going. Instead it looks like they're just hiring more bureaucrats which is a net deficit increase. It will be interesting to see how many people they jam in to run this carbon tax. On top of that it just makes the pensions more unaffordable under the current budget.
At this point the best thing that they could do is announce a hiring and wage freeze and let some attrition happen.
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Workers having more disposable income will help boost some businesses. That being said, some businesses will suffer due to the increased labour costs, however that does not mean that those same businesses won't have the labour costs offset by an increase in business from those extra consumer dollars from minimum wage workers. People can make the argument until they're blue in the face about businesses contracting because of the increase, but I have yet to see any concrete data that indicates the bad will certainly outweigh the good, my guess is you are in that same boat.
As for the carbon tax and the increased cost for goods and services, the attacks from the right wing parties claims that this tax will cost families about $600/year, but if a worker goes from making $13/hour to $15/hour they will have over $4k annually in extra income, which will offset that cost substantially, not to mention the rebates of up to $420 annually for certain incomes(minimum wage earners included) which will also help.
The article below doesn't say whether or not that total cost is just for the direct tax or if it includes the increase in prices of other goods, but for arguments sake I'll assume it doesn't, so let's say a family currently spends $200/week on groceries and those go up by 5% because of this tax, that would add $520 annually, so minimum wage earners are still coming out ahead. While higher income earners may not get a break, I think it's fair to say they are likely in a better position to lower their overall costs by taking measures to reduce their impact from the carbon in other ways, and typically those measures create an economic boost by creating income for others(renos etc)
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/c...aign-1.3790992