In a gob-smackingly partisan speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa yesterday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty had this line:
Experts estimate the Michael Ignatieff-NDP-Bloc Québécois tax hikes would kill almost 400,000 jobs.
And then later that day, in Question Period, Flaherty repeated this assertion:
The Liberals are proposing tax hikes that would wreck our economy. It would kill about 400,000 jobs, according to the experts.
I, like you, I'm sure, wondered who these “experts” were.
Flaherty's office was happy to satisfy my curiosity. Your call if the charge, based on this evidence, stands up …:
Job losses caused by GST hike:
GLOBE AND MAIL
Liberal MP calls for debate on increasing GSTCarl Sonnen, the president of Infometrica, said his firm's economic modelling shows a two-point cut in the GST translates roughly into about 162,000 new jobs. Conversely, reversing the Conservatives' cut would mean losing those jobs. “You can't argue that raising the GST rate won't hurt jobs. It will,” said Mr. Sonnen, who said the Conservative GST cut likely softened the recession's blow. “In our analysis, we got some positives out of that [cut] for GDP in the second quarter of last year. Otherwise we might have been in recession much earlier.”
Job losses caused by Ignatieff's corporate taxes pledge:
May 27, 2010
Is Canada Tax Competitive?
Jack Mintz, director of The School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, in a long-awaited 80 country tax competitiveness comparison … was able to determine the attractiveness of each country to investment and job creation – a critical measure in a global economy. The report found that Canada has made significant improvement and is well placed amongst its main competitors … By 2013, Canada will also be more tax competitive against G-7 countries but still less tax competitive against many other OECD or emerging countries … “There is a risk is that politics could get in the way of good policy,” Mintz said. “Some federal political parties are calling for the elimination of the planned reductions in 2013. Going back on the plan for reducing corporate tax rates is very simply, bad policy”. Mintz estimates that the three point reduction in the federal corporate income tax rate would lead to $49 billion in greater capital investment and 233,000 jobs over time.
I think there is certainly some political ammunition here but I think Flaherty will be vulnerable when someone gets around to calculating potential job losses (or job creation foregone, which is what Mintz and Sonnen are both kind of getting at) from the sharp jump in EI premiums that will happen on Jan. 1.
so, dig up some expert with the opposing view
there is a good reason economics is called the 'dismal science'
and it is never more aptly so described, as when used to defend class warfare via tax-cuts
You seem to have a very sensitive gob, if it can be smacked that easily …
I found a transcript of the Minister's speech. It totalled, according to my word-processing application, 2441 words, including a few sentences in French.
Then I highlighted all the sentences that were partisan in nature, including the French version of the partisan sentences. That word count amounted to 649 words.
Now comes the tricky part — math was never my strong subject — but according to my (hopefully) correct calculations, the partisan part of the speech amounted to a mere 26.58%
Maybe “gob-smackingly” is a slight exaggeration?
Yeah, I know, everybody's a critic. I plead guilty.