Fleeced and bitter
LINDA LEATHERDALE IS FURIOUS THAT THE $11B FEDERAL SURPLUS HAS NOT YET LED TO TAX BREAKS
By LINDA LEATHERDALE, BUSINESS EDITOR
HERE'S MY demand: If the fat cats in Ottawa, who are sitting on a huge surplus of $11 billion, can forgive 100% of debt-servicing charges for the world's poor nations, plus throw in an extra $172 million in relief money, then why can't they help struggling, over-taxed Canadians who can barely pay the bills.
This latest relief plan for Third World nations was announced yesterday by our federal finance minister, Ralph Goodale, who'll proudly take it to the meeting of G7 finance ministers in London this week.
Help out, too, will be his plea.
But instead of throwing us a lifeline (pssst, Goodale, a little tax relief would go a long way), our leaders sit back and let the picking of Canadians' pockets continue. I ask:
- Where's a clampdown on the record spreads between the Bank of Canada rate and the rates charged by greedy credit card firms?
- Where's some relief from the obscene tax load at the gas pumps, where prices are robbing us blind? And making government coffers very rich.
- Where's a probe into our oil and insurance sectors, where I smell a price collusion rat?
And don't get me going on Queen's Park, where the only promise kept by Dalton McGuinty's FIBerals was to hike the minimum wage.
BLUE BOX TAX STUPID
It's nice to get a pay hike, when your employer goes belly up because he can't afford to pay for skyrocketing costs for electricity, insurance, property taxes -- and now a stupid blue box tax, which has created yet another bloated government bureaucracy to steal our tax dollars.
Then there's MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corp.), the baby of the Tories' flawed Fair Market Assessment. What's fair about squeezing more and more money out of people who already pay the highest property taxes in the industrialized world?
No, it's not enough. Let's go after trailer owners, cottagers, horse farms. What's next? Hot dog stands?
Did we get fooled. Vote for us, and we promise "no more taxes" was the rallying cry of the FIBerals. Then bang -- we're whacked with the biggest tax grab in 10 years with the $11-billion health care tax coming off our paycheques under income taxes.
The money sits in general coffers and isn't even dedicated to health care. Meanwhile, despite being armed with new tax dollars, plus health care relief money from Ottawa, crybaby George Smitherman takes a big axe to our already bleeding health care system, telling doctors and nurses to stuff it. And the U.S. is sitting there with open arms to give them a new home.
Do I sound bitter? You betcha. I just opened up my electricity bill. Working three jobs that can eat up 15 hours a day just doesn't cut it anymore. My insurance bill is due, too, just when I should be topping up my RRSP.
Can't count on government is the warning -- while company pensions plans are dangerously in the red. Freedom 55, forget it.
Not even drowning my sorrows in a beer makes me feel any better. McGuinty hiked taxes on suds too.
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Don't get me wrong: We are lucky to live in the land of the free, but the reality is the people who are meant to spread their wealth to less fortunate nations are drowning in a sea of debt.
Record low borrowing costs have, so far, saved indebted North Americans from the Day of Reckoning -- but with interest rates moving up, I worry.
6TH HIKE SINCE JUNE
In the U.S., where consumers owe a record $7.6 trillion, prime lending rates jumped to 5.5% yesterday, after the Federal Reserve hiked its key rate by 0.25% to 2.5%. That's the sixth hike since last June, when the rate was at 46-year low of 1%. Analysts say it could hit 4.25% by year-end.
Here, in Canada, consumers owe a record $900 billion -- and though the Bank of Canada held the line on our bank rate, leaving it at 2.5% last week, it's up from its record low.
U.S. debt sits at $34 trillion US or 300% of GDP (gross domestic product).
v :twisted: :evil:
