HST is not a tax increase, just a replacement

CANADA - Hello fellow Ontarians.

If you live in Ontario you may have recently received emails asking you to sign an online petition against the Harmonized Sales Tax that is due to come into effect on July 1st 2010.

I am going to point out that the HST is just an amalgamation of the 5% GST and the 8% PST. Its not a new tax. Its just a replacement of two old taxes. Its not a new tax. Its not even an increase. Its just a renaming/amalgamation of the GST and PST.

Several other provinces in Canada already have HST including New Brunswick, Newfoundland & Labrador and Nova Scotia. British Columbia is also switching to HST in July 2010. Doubtlessly other provinces will eventually follow.

There is actually some benefits of switching to HST too. Ontario will be able to decide what things are EXEMPT from tax instead of the federal government. There is a long list of things in Ontario exempt from PST but not from GST. There are some luxury items that may see a slight increase, but overall its nothing to be worried about.

More good news is beer and liquor taxes will come down 2% in restaurants and 4% in LCBOs. There are other examples too, too many to list them all.

Its unfortunate sometimes that some politicians sometimes get a bad reputation for "taxing the people" when in reality they haven't actually increased any taxes, just rearranged it a bit.

Take Barack Obama for example. In order to pave the way for universal health care in the United States he has cut the amount Americans who make over $250,000 / year get back when making charitable donations. It used to be if a wealthy American gave $ to charity they could claim it on their income taxes and they would get 35% back from the government. Barack Obama has since cut that amount to 28%.

So its not like Obama raised taxes or anything. All he did was shave 7% off the refund, and apparently that was a substantial amount enough to pay for universal free health care in the United States.

And yet you should see the lineup of people criticizing Obama for "increasing taxes", bringing about "socialized health care" and calling him a Communist for wanting to finally make the United States join the rest of the free world that already has free health care. Prior to this change the USA was the only western country that didn't have free health care.

Sometimes people need to give politicians the benefit of the doubt, even though they are generally an untrustworthy breed.