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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (3239)	10/20/2001 5:02:46 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

I hate sales taxes. The provincial and federal sales tax here total 14%. So a $500 item is $570. Thus anyone who has a way of doing a cash transaction has a possibility of not only disposing of an irritant but also of tax cheating. And they do: garage sales, flea markets, curb transactions of any sort. Roofs, gutters, repairs, surplus inventory.... Get it out the back door and the government sees not a dime of sales tax. George, the old retired guy has a garage sale every Saturday. Black economy is big. Regular employees of Revenue Canada who deal with income tax want absolutely nothing to do with national sales tax to such a degree that it is totally segregated from them and is a whole other mess. (Personal report to me from a highly intelligent Rev Can employee). From the point of view of tax collection cost, income tax is far more efficient. The basic income tax requirement is that a resident of Canada must file. Nevermind if you can't pay, you must file, they're only going to charge interest. Send them post dated cheques for what you owe when you file and the only answer you'll get is a bill for interest on the unpaid balance. It is a self reporting system as in the US, (although from what I can gather Canadian auditors are not quite as ferocious the US ones). What's wrong with having employment income taxed at source? It's one less irritant and there's a running total of taxes paid on each pay stub. It's simple and relatively cheap to administer especially with widespread computer use. A flat tax would make it even simpler. Sales taxes are wildly complicated and add huge collection costs, and business costs which contribute not a single dime to net income. Our national goods and services tax was so forbidding in some of its possibilities that when it was first considered and implemented, food and used things were exempted and they didn't even want to know if you sold less than $30,000 worth of goods p/a. So it was much higher than it would have been otherwise, and it penalized some parts of the economy and rewarded others - eg tax on new house but not an old one: no wonder Home Depot is doing great here; an old $100,000 house was suddenly worth more and a new $100,000 house was worth less but the cost of building it remained the same. Financial transaction fees like stock brokers' commissions were exempted but the cablevision was not. They had to build a new bureaucracy so that businesses could get sales tax exemption numbers so they wouldn't have to pay the tax and pass it on. See second paragraph, above. Sales taxes in their application are subject to even more jiggery pokery than income taxes - lobbyists find it much easier to argue for an exemption of (eg) food than a certain segment of the population be exempted from paying income tax because it's a category rather than real people. What's in, what's out, sounds a lot better than who's zinged, who's not, because everybody gets not to pay what's out and the tax on the unexempted stuff has to be higher.