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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Real Man who wrote (5543)	3/26/2008 10:03:22 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71406

yeah we're helping everyone but ourselves...not good

To: Real Man who wrote (5543)	3/27/2008 4:45:14 AM
From: stan_hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71406

You can probably find a few diehards that would regularly cross-border shop for food, but not many. I go back and forth a lot myself for both business and pleasure, and even without the sales taxes, in my observation food prices on the US side are generally higher, although there are inconsistencies in both directions Restaurant meals are categorically more expensive in the US. Gasoline is marginally cheaper, but IMO not worth driving over to get without some other reason to go. Electronics tend to be cheaper, and in some cases, are only available on the US side period no matter what the price is, so there can be some motivation there You won't read this in the Canadian newspapers because it's not very self-complimentary, but what really spurs a lot of Canadians to do a US run is to buy those items with heavy "sin taxes" in Canada, e.g. beer, wine, alcohol and tobacco, because US prices for such things are drastically lower (for lack of the sin taxes). The quantities of those items allowed back into Canada is severely restricted as a tax avoidance measure, so people buy but don't declare them -- which is why the Canadian customs people have to take a lot of time in trying to ferret out who those awful tax offenders are, slowing down everyone else at the border Meanwhile, coming in the other direction are for example Americans who live near the border and who have obtained fake Canadian IDs in order to get so-called 'free' health care on the Canadian side. If you think somebody would take a trip over the river from Windsor to Detroit to save a few bucks on gasoline or a case of beer, you can bet your life they would drive from Detroit to Windsor to save a few hundred bucks on doctor's bills. In Ontario for example, an audit conducted several years ago determined that there were 27 million Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) ID numbers out there for a population of 9 million Ontarians -- obviously that isn't all attributable to residency fraud, but they've been working on cleaning up and revalidating their database ever since health.gov.on.ca