{"id":1559,"date":"2007-10-30T20:28:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-31T00:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1559"},"modified":"2007-10-30T20:28:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-31T00:28:00","slug":"trick-or-treat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1559","title":{"rendered":"Trick or Treat"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s interesting to see the Tories rush what would have been a good news spring budget up to October and take a 1% GST<\/span><\/span> cut out of their next election platform by bringing it in now. I suppose with money to burn and Dion calling for tax cuts, it was inevitable<\/span> that Flaherty<\/span><\/span> would be slashing taxes. As for the GST<\/span><\/span> cut, given that every economist and every news story<\/a> calls it “bad policy but good politics”, I suspect Harper recognized that it’s usefulness as an election issue had passed and that he might as well get it off the table. People aren’t stupid – after a while “bad policy but good politics” simply becomes “bad policy and bad politics”.<\/p>\n

More interesting is the arrival of a new auditor general’s<\/span> report<\/a>. Even from Paris<\/a>, the timing looks a little coincidental:<\/p>\n

\n

Back in the mid-’00s, we used to enjoy a chuckle whenever the Paul Martin crew would come up with some extraordinarily contrived sideshow in an attempt to bury an embarrassing headline. <\/span><\/p>\n

But even that PMO<\/span> would never have thought it could get away with announcing tax cuts on 24 hours’ notice, simply to bury an auditor general’s<\/span> report.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

UPDATE:<\/em><\/strong> As pointed out by an astute reader, the federal government must give 60 days notice to the provinces that harmonize their taxes before changing the GST<\/span>. As a result, if they wanted to make the change for January 1st, it had to be announced yesterday so it was likely not connected to the AG’s<\/span> report. It’s still interesting to see them rush the GST<\/span> cut to January 1st, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything involved in the day-to-day timing of it.<\/p>\n

UPDATE2: <\/em><\/strong>I elaborate a bit more on my thoughts on this Macleans post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s interesting to see the Tories rush what would have been a good news spring budget up to October and take a 1% GST cut out of their next election platform by bringing it in now. I suppose with money to burn and Dion calling for tax cuts, it was inevitable that Flaherty would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}