Chapter 4- Budget slashes Income Tax

Link: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=d94976b1-d47d-4264-8a46-3aa2b2ee9b81

Almost all of the BC taxpayers are getting a 10 percent tax slash in their income tax as of February 19,2007. This message was announced by the Finance Minister Carole Taylor through the pledges of Gordon Campbell. Taylor says this new tax reduction is aimed for people who live in British Columbia and have yearly incomes of $100,000 or less than $100,000. This announcement is introduced as a leading of the new budget's housing measure and what Taylor would call the "the most aggressive, ambitious, comprehensive housing initiative in the history of British Columbia. Taylor adds that the key measure involved is the First Time Home Buyers' Program. This program gives an incentive to people are wants to buy their first homes. This project that worth $2 billionaire is started so that it can help British Columbians that are facing housing problems whatever the problem may be. With the new tax cut, BC will have the lowest taxes in all of Canada.

To many people, this is absolutely a good news!!! 10% off taxes, who wouldn’t like that? Think of all that money that you could be keeping to yourselves instead of giving it to the government. You could also be helping the government, even without paying that much tax. There are Canadian bonds where you can lend money to the government, and they will even pay you back interest. However, on the other hand, cutting 10% off taxes will also lead to more complaints on public services. Such as healthcare, education and more. Since less taxes are collected from us, there might be more complaints about the lack of doctors in the hospitals, the long waiting line and lack of service. For education, more teachers may go on strikes and/or schools can’t afford to buy better supplies, technologies and etc…

Actually, since in chapter 4, it talked about the different kind of taxes, the system that we use in Canada is called the marginal tax system, this is a system where, the more you earn, the more tax you have to pay. Another kind of tax system is the regressive tax system, in this system, the higher you earn per year, the less tax you pay. The con about this type of system is that lower income people have to pay even more taxes. It just doesn’t seem fair. I think the best kind of tax system is the progressive tax system. Everything is equal, no matter what your income is, your taxes will still be the same. If 10% is reduced from a progressive system, let’s say, it was originally 30%. Then this would be more significant.