Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
So matching the next lowest province in taxes would give as an extra $14.4 billion dollars? We could still be the lowest taxed province and bring in an extra $10 billion, if we wanted. Our house is run by fools.
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Uh huh.
And look, I get Locke's point that it's not as simple as "bring on PST, rake in $14.4B". But this is a conversation Alberta needs to have. Maybe you only get 70% of those revenues and it's not going to be 100% efficient, but there's a lot of room between 0 taxes and the next lowest province.
Personally, I don't think it's responsible to run our budget/deficit on oil royalties simply because we don't like the idea of paying taxes.
We essentially have three choices (or a blend of all three) and it doesn't have to be partisan politics. Quite simply, we can either:
1. Raise Revenue
2. Cut Expenditures
3. Run up huge deficits
So far, all we're doing is #2 and #3 and we're not even going to consider #1 because "Alberta Advantage". We're betting on the price of a historically volatile commodity to fund everything. That doesn't seem rational to me. And yes, I know the NDP didn't really address #1 either aside from Carbon Tax. This doesn't have to be a partisan issue.