Expert: Financial impact of HST not that bad
Posted February 17, 2011 10:31 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – As the anti-HST campaign falls apart, new evidence suggests the impact of the tax will be far less extreme than some first thought.
An SFU researcher says compared to the old GST-PST system, for every $165 you spend, you’ll pay just one extra dollar in tax. For a single person who earns $30,000 a year, it can work out to about $140.
Jon Kesselman analyzed Statstics Canada‘s prices in Western Provinces through last December. “The impact is just six tenths of one per cent on our cost of living.”
He says extravagant claims made by groups about the impact of the tax simply aren’t founded. “Like Bill Vander Zalm‘s statement that the average family would be paying another $2,100 a year.”
“All of those claims were never founded in any reasonable forecast,” he says. “Now that we have really hard data on how prices have evolved since the tax began — they confirm at actually the lower end of the forecast.”
Still, Kesselman thinks the government could lower the HST to 11 per cent, along with a few other adjustments. That would cover what he calls the minimal impact, and make the tax more palatable.
