B.C. Utilities Commission Concludes Regressive Taxation the only collusion contributing to B.C’s High Gas Prices – August 31, 2019,
Initially, when I heard about ridiculously high Gas prices in British Colombia, I thought it had more to do with Inflated Property Prices and government-enforced Provincial wage increases. Well, it turns out that I was only partially right, the unfortunate reality for Southern B.C is that their Regressive taxation model is actually the main culprit of the gas price hikes. I wrote an article about this before. The title of the post I wrote was:
In this post I made sure that I added all the taxes the people of B.C pay in taxes for gasoline, I added that portion to this article also for your convenience.
Here’s a list of all the taxes people pay on a litre of gas in B.C.:
- Provincial motor fuel tax (Metro Vancouver) — 1.75 cents
- Provincial motor fuel tax (everywhere else in B.C.) — 7.75 cents.
- B.C.’s carbon tax — 8.89 cents.
- The B.C. Transportation Finance Authority tax — 6.75 cents.
- TransLink tax (If you live in Metro Vancouver) — 17 cents, increasing to 18.5 cents on July 1.
- Transit tax (If you live in Victoria) — 5.5 cents.
- Federal excise tax — 10 cents.
- Finally, pay the five per cent Goods and Services Tax on top of the total price.
So, yeah, I’m obviously an Austrian economics guy, so from my perspective and my knowledge of owning a business, I know exactly what happened. For the record, I want readers to understand that there’s no escaping regressive taxation. Business owners can often swallow certain government fees, but regressive taxation, there’s no loophole or ways around not paying for regressive taxes. In Europe as an example, they created a VAT Tax. Briefly, A value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax placed on a product whenever a value is added at each stage of the supply chain, from production to the point of sale. A VAT tax is a regressive tax, meaning that the customer is going to have to pay each and every single tax that brought the product of their desire to the market.
Regressive taxes are the main reason why most European countries have growth problems. Public Services and paying for public servants is expensive, most public servants all over the world have fantastic pensions and above market wages. In a democracy every time the people vote for a Progressive Politician to give them free stuff, the Progressive politician has to find a way to get the money. Now, most Socialist and Marxists believe that the politician should take wealth from the wealthy using force, but because this is reminiscent of Fascism, Governments often resort to unique and novel ways of taxation.
Even if you believe in Climate Change, what would make people think a Carbon tax would make a difference? In a democracy, the poor who believe in government redistribution, Socialism or Marxism are taught to hate people that have quired more than they have. This Crab in the bucket syndrome that I believe is linked to a mental health-related problems leads to large swaths of people voting for higher taxes.
Income taxes disappear when jobs disappear, so although employees often think they’re paying for income taxes, the reality is that the employer is paying for income taxes because, without the employer, the employee couldn’t pay income taxes. Now, if you become a self-employed person and make enough money to get taxed, you’ll quickly realize the burden of having employees and if possible you’ll outsource particular tasks that the Government of Canada makes very expensive. Once this happens and unemployment climbs, the government loses a lot of tax dollars so what often happens is tariffs taxes to import goods into Canada go up and regressive taxes go after consumers for consuming by compounding taxes.
Being that a city like Vancouver is reliant on tourism, regressive taxation makes sense for their economy, because remember, a lot of the people who come to Vancouver, come there for vacation, they don’t work there, they come, they might even own real estate and then they leave. Regressive taxation helps the B.C Provincial government get max dollars out of these people. Now, sure the people who live in southern B.C suffer from this regressive taxation model, but if they don’t understand Austrian Economics or basic economics that you can’t get something for anything, it’s easy for the media and their Provincial government to manipulate and confuse them. Anyway, writing about B.C is depressing! Consider reading the articles below for your daily dose of MSM brainwashing!
BCUC release key findings from gas price inquiry – globalnews.ca
Interesting times ahead