Blue Like You

Archive for September 21st, 2008

I’m a little confused. Garth Turner has a summary of the Green Shift which he has prepared for his constituents. He titled the post "Green Truth".

One item was bothering me:

Question: Won’t polluters pass the tax on to consumers?
"Most will reduce pollution, to avoid the tax. But others will pass the tax on in the form of higher prices, mostly for energy. But this is the reason everyone’s income taxes are going down – so nobody will be worse off, as we clean up the environment."

Yet, Adam Taylor of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has made the following observation:

The Liberal Green Shift plan, which has been sold as "revenue neutral," would raise an estimated $15 billion in taxes and yet only return about $9.5 billion in corporate and personal income tax reductions, says Taylor.

"So that’s not a revenue-neutral plan," he says.

"That is a net gain for some people and a net loss for others."

So, who’s right? If Garth is telling the ‘truth’, what does that say about Adam Taylor?

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Related : Green Shift would bleed Alberta, experts say - Times Colonist.

Talk about your non-partisan journalist panel on today’s Question Period - The Globe’s Brian Laghi and the Star’s Bruce Campion-Smith.

First they all slam Gerry Ritz, and then Laghi gives some helpful hints to the Liberals on how to further capitalize on the situation.

Then Campion-Smith says how that the Ritz story still has legs, because after all, if Gerry Ritz said such a thing, then the whole Government must feel that way, right?

On the issue of the economy, Laghi gives more advice on how to hit the Conservatives with the ‘non-interventionist’ hammer:

"..and I think if the Liberals and the NDP want to make some hay, as I was saying, they have to make the argument that this Government is not interventionist and WE would intervene…"

Now he could have said "that they would intervene".

But he said ‘we’.

So ya got that, Liberal and NDP war rooms? Or do you need a fax?

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Update: BTW, The Globe isn’t totally biased. They do have a class act by the name of Christie Blatchford who shoots down Campion-Smith’s argument that Ritz’s comment undermines the notion that the Government was taking the lysteria outbreak seriously:

…The fact that Mr. Ritz is "in public life," which his critics now hold up as the critical difference between ordinary folk and cabinet ministers, isn’t relevant. He wasn’t making a public statement. He wasn’t speaking publicly. He was at work, with people he works alongside or who work for him. He was having what he assumed was a private discussion with those who, like him, were dealing with an enormous and difficult problem, except one of them kept careful notes and released the minister’s remarks almost a month later, in mid-campaign.

Do people really believe these remarks represent what Mr. Ritz, or his government, think about the outbreak, least of all about the 18 Canadians who have died?

It is what we are meant to think, apparently…

Thank God for Christie Blatchford and her no-nonsense, common sense approach.

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Good read here too - Cold-cutgate is but a joke - (Michael Smyth -Province)