Couple will tie the knot, minus dream honeymoon

Couple will tie the knot, minus dream honeymoon.

The harsh comments in this articles about this couple are well deserved. Let’s recap, they are:

1. Getting married this year
2. Saving for business school
3. Just took out a mortgage on a condo
4. Because of the HST they will have to cancel their Mexico honeymoon.

You’re bloody idiots! It’s not the HST that’s killing your honeymoon, it’s your stupid spending habits! Spend within your means you fools! You should have stopped going to Tim Horton’s and Serious Coffee months ago.

I make more than the two of them combined and I have the good sense to avoid the coffee shop and make my coffee at home (I used to have a cup a day at the shop till I added up the money and realized I was STUPID). If any good will come of the HST, it will be to get these two to see how they are wasting money.

Onto the broader subject of the HST, the Times-Colonist is running a series on how the HST is going to ruin people’s lives. What I’ve learned is that people have trouble managing their money and that the Times-Colonist has had trouble finding people who are really hurt by this.

Yes, the impact according to the Stats Canada report they quoted sounds sizeable (it’s also more than I expected) but in context with how much you already pay, the worst case scenario is slightly larger than an accounting error and still worlds better than what things were like 10 years ago.

Looking at my income statement and my expenses for the year I figure the worst case impact for me is around $600-700 annually. Including all hidden taxes, city,provincial and federal taxes, things like CPP and EI payments, that $600-700 means a 2-4% increase in taxes over last year (not a 2-4% increase relative to my income, just to what I paid in taxes).

Considering that tax freedom day (the day when you’ve made enough to cover your taxes) has moved from June 24th to about June 9th in the last 10 years I’d say that we’ve got it good. Worst case scenario is that the government is scraping back some of those days.

Looking at the Stats Canada numbers I’m a bit skeptical of their math, if lower and middle income earners are getting increased tax rebates which I don’t qualify for I’m not sure how they came up with numbers so high. How does someone who is getting a couple hundred dollars of rebates end up getting hit as hard I would when I’m making twice as much as they are?

Democracy

I’m not really a believer in democracy because democracy gets you America and I don’t want to be America. The founders wanted a strong, balanced form of democracy and today what you get is terrible, unaccountable government that can’t get anything done.

Given my druthers I’d elect a benevolent dictator – one man or woman who gets control for 10 years with no ability to unelect them short of revolution. Or something like that. I want good government, I don’t need honest government.

That’s why I don’t care when Gordon Campbell lies to us and implements the HST just a couple months after saying that he wouldn’t do it – the HST is good government, not honest government so I’m for it.

It’s really no different than how Steve Jobs runs Apple. He is a benevolent dictator – he does what he wants. You get one option with Steve and while it may be one option, it’ll be one hell of an option.

I want my government the same way.

Lexington: Sex and the single black woman | The Economist

Lexington: Sex and the single black woman | The Economist.

I wonder how this is playing out in places like India and China where the imbalance is the other way and males are already the ones that do more preening.

Single Parents, Around the World – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com

Single Parents, Around the World – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Erm…does Canada not collect this data or do we just not matter? Considering the countries that are on this list how does Canada not get counted?

Ottawa unveils smallest spending increase in a decade

Ottawa unveils smallest spending increase in a decade – The Globe and Mail.

The article isn’t the good part of this – the flash widget on the right hand side which shows you a high level breakdown of where the money comes from and where the money is spent is terrific though. It shows things over the past 10 years and there’s some interesting things to see in there.

• Corporate tax revenue peaked at $40 billion in 07-08 and then dropped to a low of $22 billion. Corporate tax revenues now account for about 10% of federal revenue, 10 years ago it was about 15% – in other words corporate tax rates have been cut by about 33%.
• The growth in revenue has been 42% in the last 10 years – I couldn’t dig up economic growth figures but we definitely were closer to 2.5% annually this past decade meaning the government hasn’t actually been cutting taxes, just re-indexing to make it sound like they’re cutting taxes.
• Personal tax revenue increased by 52% during that same time. Corporate taxes were up about 6% in that same period.
• On the expenses side debt charges are down 25% in the past 10 years and this is absolutely huge – revenue up 42% and interest down 25% meant a HUGE increase in social spending. Enough to deal with the aging of our population and the resultant increase in health care costs.
• Transfers to persons (pensions, EI, child benefits) and federal programs doubled in the last 10 years. Social transfers (health care) more than doubled in the last 10 years while federal program spending.

Deficit spending in tough times is the right thing to do but the deficit matters because Canada is only able to pay for health care and federal programs because we’ve been paying off our debt over the past 15 years. The money freed up by paying down our debt has made it possible for taxes to be nominally lowered (they aren’t really lower) and allow us to not make tough decisions when it comes to managing how our social programs should be run.

At a glance it’s pretty easy to say that we have been deferring the hard reality that we can’t actually afford our programs the way they are unless we raise taxes and I would say that’s closer to the truth than we realize.

And the government gridlock caused by a minority government and an Prime Minister acting as Dictator is the wrong medicine for our country.

Vanoc wont change closing ceremony despite complaints from ethnic groups

Vanoc wont change closing ceremony despite complaints from ethnic groups.

Once you leave Vancouver it’s obvious that we are still a very white country so I don’t know if I agree with those who are upset that no minorities were featured in the opening ceremonies and apparently no minorities will be featured (or even represented) in the closing ceremonies.

That said, it wouldn’t hurt VANOC to acknowledge that Asians exist. After all, the Olympics are being held in a city where the visible minority will shortly (in the next few years) become the visible majority.

Maybe they could do a Charlie Chan impression or something.

If not, I’d settle for an reenactment of the white man giving the natives Smallpox.

Vancouver downtown east side slowly crawls toward gentrification

Vancouver downtown east side slowly crawls toward gentrification.

A government infrastructure project I’m actually excited about. It’s not perfect but it’s going to go a long way towards making the downtown eastside of Vancouver a habitable place for people who like to sleep on beds and not do drugs.

I get those who say that the gentrification is bad and that we’re forcing poor people and drug users out unfairly – have you looked around the area? Do you really want it to stay that way forever? I can walk through there but I wouldn’t want any of my women friends going through there – it’s disgusting.

AND it’s potentially one of the few areas in Vancouver that’s ripe for redevelopment.

Now, if we could just tear down the Georgia Viaduct and we can rehabilitate Chinatown.

What kind of country do you want to live in?

Tax burdens in developed nations

Canada comes out pretty low relative to the other countries on this list which isn’t that surprising to me as the federal government has been cutting taxes ever since we slayed the deficit monster.

The numbers are misleading in a sense because there’s no discussion as to private costs for services that are not available from the government. In the Denmarks, the Norways and Finlands you get a range of services that either don’t exist or are extremely costly in countries like the US or even here. No nurse visits you at your home when you have a new baby in North America. There are no special immigrant integration services that help immigrant children pick up the native language faster. When you pay more taxes you get these services.

Well, not you in particular. Society gets those services and in these countries it’s believed that these services are a public service that are good for everyone or are good for the nation. Eg. Helping immigrants integrate reduces crime and unemployment among the immigrant class.

I generally am in favour of more taxes and more public services although I grow concerned with the benefits of these services are used by the few and far between. On the flipside if the benefit of said service is great then maybe it’s okay to do it – I’m sure new mothers in France GREATLY appreciate having a nurse come into their home during the first few weeks to help them. In Canada you get a year off and hopefully your parents. In America you get nothing.

I’d be interested in joining this report with one that includes the costs for private services – eg. medical care in the US to show how much income gets used to pay for “essential services”. I suspect the range suddenly becomes narrower – you’ll see Americans and Canadians paying out of pocket for things that are free in Europe, things that are everyone considers essential but for which we have decided we don’t want to pay taxes for.

The American habit of not wanting to pay for anything (no taxes but I want the service) is where they shoot themselves in the foot. Every modern health care system outside of the US is better run and less expensive yet because it’s paid for with taxes rather than private money a sizeable portion of the citizenry refuse to support it even thought it’s much cheaper and much better.

In all modern countries there are a core set of services that people use and more often than not the public one is more effective (but not necessarily more efficient) are producing outcomes that are better for the country. That’s not to say there isn’t waste in public programs (most public infrastructure projects are a waste of money) but private programs intended to serve the greater good rarely work out because the metrics they are measured against are rarely those that serve the greater good.

So what are our core services? Obvious ones are military, education, health care, infrastructure and law enforcement. Less obvious? Daycare? Arts and Culture? Environmental regulations? What else? Even within the obvious core services we don’t have clear tenets that define what each provides. How strong should our military be? Is university free? For how long is it free?

No discussion appears to be taking place in Canada about this while in the US the discussion has devolved into “death panels” and cries of communism. Our government isn’t doing its part since they have a very clear desire to cut as much as they can and are trying to cut as sneakily and quietly as they can.

It’s pretty sad.

Canada Line

I hopped on the new Skytrain line a couple weeks ago when I was travelling back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria and while it is a nice bit of kit and pretty convenient for a ferry rider like me I find it an appalling waste of money done mostly to make money for the moneyed interests of BC that had no basis in terms of urban planning or future funding or growth.

As it is built, the line is underfunded and undersized and is built not to carry residents of Richmond to work downtown but to take airport passengers downtown. The system fails both from a lack of capacity and a lack of population density – two things that shouldn’t happen at once for a shiny new rail line. The stations are sized for ridership of 10 years ago (too small) and the areas which it traverses are low density neighbourhoods populated by people who do not favour transit.

As a flood plain, it has long been agreed by most urban planners that Richmond should not pursue high population growth as a matter of safety. Chinese immigration put paid to that but this Skytrain line makes it worse and Richmond leadership is eagerly building up apartment towers near the stations in an area which is a total mess in terms of traffic congestion (immigrant Chinese do not like transit).

The money (several billion) would have been better spent on expanding services in Burnaby and Coquitlam and maybe even that dump we know as Surrey. All those areas could use it and it could have been either more buses or a number of light rail lines that would have led to better communities instead of an underground line that is a waste of money.

Oprah!

Who’s worse? Oprah or Scientology? – Newsweek

I vote Oprah. Ok, maybe.