Possibly the most extravagant compliment that I've ever been paid

The National Post's Full Comment section occasionally links to us. (No, we don't get paid for this; they follow the usual blog convention of copying a couple of paragraphs and sending readers here for the full article. Everyone is free to do so.) My post Economic policy advice for the NDP, Part III: The GST ran there awhile ago, and it elicited this comment:

This guy is smart and evil, i.e. the most dangerous. He is full of ideas for the NDP on how to increase taxes in a way that the parasites in government milk the most of the tax paying citizens.

Finally, someone understands.

Comments

[jg]

Brilliant.
Man, the comments over there are nutty. You better hide in some sort of Soviet communist bunker before they come and get you and all the taxpayer money you stole....Oh wait, you are already there in your make believe world of academics.

[Patrick]

Mwaahaha

[TGGP]

That was exactly the thought I had when I heard of "The Rebel Sell" and checked out its website. Since then I saw one of them have a diavlog with Will Wilkinson and I concluded he either shifted to the right since that time or he was only pretending to be a lefty in order to fool other lefties.

[westslope]

LOL! Backhanded compliments like that are hard to come by. (The tragedy is that most of the current crop of NDP rocket scientists won't get it.)

So lemme see now.... Our consumate economic policy expert, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, cut the GST (value-added federal sales tax) not once but twice during a rip-snorting out-of-control commodity-driven boom because he wanted to create a structural deficit that would

a) limit the federal government's ability to spend and/or transfer money to other governments and Canadians; and

b) transform Canadian government bonds into higher yielding yet still extremely low risk financial assets for his constituents who are apparently financially illiterate yet have a good nose for a free lunch.

[Min]

You did a good comparison of the GST and the income tax. How about a comparison of the GST and a flat wealth tax? :)

Many thanks.

[Matthew]

Westslope:

A third could be c) create a structural deficit to starve the beast that is the federal government.....but I doubt it.

[westslope]

Matthew: Your point c) is well taken but perhaps just a more colourful way of expressing point a).

There are points d) and e) for those who believe that fiscal stimulus impacts have real, measurable impacts. Harper cut the GST twice to further stimulate the economy, drive the value of the Canadian dollar higher, and in the process

d) make it less expensive for his resource-industry buddies to import foreign capital machinery, and

e) crowd-out non-resource activies and increase the dependence of Canada's economy on resource extraction thus helping to shift economic power to western Canada where coincidence of coincidence resides Harper's core constituency.