According to respected economist Jack Mintz, Notley’s plan to hike business taxes will destroy thousands of jobs, along with causing over $1 billion in lost investment.
Fundamentally, collectivists like Rachel Notley neither understand nor respect the idea of wealth creation.
For them, all wealth is somehow stolen from others. They fail to realize that the economic ‘pie’ isn’t fixed, but rather is potentially limitless. If you told someone 200 years ago that a country would have a GDP in the trillions of dollars, it would have seemed absurd.
Today’s technology would appear like magic to someone from the distant past, just as the technology of 200 or 300 years from now would be almost incomprehensible to us.
Unfortunately, the closed-mindedness of collectivists blocks them from seeing the potential of human advancement. Instead, they view the most ambitious and productive people as a threat, and seek to shackle them through excessive taxation and regulation.
In the minds of collectivists, higher taxes and the concentration of financial resources in the hands of the centralized state are the fixes for every problem.
So, it’s not a big surprise that arch-collectivist Rachel Notley is pushing for a tax increase on businesses in Alberta if she wins the election.
It’s also no big surprise that such a policy would be completely counterproductive. Collectivist economic policies aren’t based on logic or rationality. Instead, they are based on emotion – particularly envy. They envy the productive powers and abilities of successful businesspeople. Deep down, they recognize that success in the business world is more ethical and moral than success in the political world, because people in business expand their power through voluntary trade and association, whereas collectivist politicians increase their power through force – or the implied force – of government coercion.
Policies based on envy don’t lift people up, they can only drag people down.
And a new analysis by respected economist Jack Mintz details how far Notley’s policies will drag down Alberta’s job market and investment climate. According to Mintz, Notley’s tax hike will cost the province over 33,000 jobs. Here’s what he said in the National Post:
“I estimated the economic impact of Notley’s proposed corporate tax hike on Alberta by using an effective tax-rate model I developed several years ago with Philip Bazel at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and the effects are projected to be significant.
The three-point hike in Alberta’s corporate income tax rate is estimated to result in an investment loss of $1.1 billion to Alberta — and an employment loss of 33,700 jobs. This is a conservative estimate since I don’t include the impact of corporate tax hikes on available cash needed by businesses to pay their bills.”
Notley has claimed the tax will increase government revenue (aka transferring wealth from businesses to the government) by $6.2 billion over three years. But unsurprisingly given that it’s ‘NDP math,’ the NDP has made some errors in their calculations:
Says Mintz, “…as pointed out by University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, that fails to account for the impact of investment and tax planning losses that can result from a corporate income tax hike.
Based on my earlier research, I estimate that a three-point increase in the corporate income tax rate will cause the corporate tax base to shrink by 15 per cent. This would imply that the NDP estimates of the corporate tax hikes are off by close to $1 billion over three years. This does not include the loss in personal and excise taxes that would result from people becoming unemployed.”
Here’s what the NDP doesn’t want you to realize: When they talk about ‘revenue’ for the government, they are talking about a transfer of wealth, not the creation of wealth. And with their calculations being off, the absolute ‘best’ case scenario for the NDP plan is that it ‘only’ destroys about $1 billion in net wealth in Alberta. Again, that’s the best case scenario. Far more likely is that much more wealth is destroyed.
Thus, Notley’s tax hike would be disastrous, killing jobs, pushing investment away, and destroying wealth. Notley’s plan would leave Alberta poorer and worse off as a province.
Spencer Fernando
Photo – YouTube
