Not so Harmonised Sales Tax

Signed up at Costco yesterday with the aim of paring a few dollars off the monthly shopping bill, only to find that businesses are already charging HST before it comes in officially on July 1st. Not that things are all cut and dried by any manner of means. The big anti-HST petition movement has snowballed, and at the time of writing, unless of course the Government can weasel out of their own referendum legislation, a referendum on HST looks inevitable.

The petition will be submitted on July 5 and could lead to a number of possible scenarios, including a review in the legislature, go to a referendum – or even trigger a recall campaign.

Today (June 7), Fight HST campaign organizers announced that they have met that target in all but five of the 85 electoral districts in the province and, in the process, have gathered more than 620,000 names on their petition.

Don't understand all the ins and outs myself, but this article in the Globe and Mail seems helpful.

My level of economic understanding is simple; more taxes won't help an economy grow. At the higher end of the taxation bell curve, extra taxes, especially those that hit the less well off worst, act as a serious hindrance to economic recovery. We need tax to pay for essential government services, but as once wittily observed by someone who has a handle on these matters; taxation is like milking a cow, you need to get the right amount of milk for the minimum amount of Moo. Something like that, anyway.