I just finished watching Marketplace on CBC this Sunday afternoon. That’s what happens when CTV cancels this weeks edition of Question Period.
The last 10 minutes of Marketplace was dedicated to seeing if consumers were really seeing the GST cut that the Tories have brought in.
They start off with a Tim Horton’s coffee and confirm that Tim’s is, indeed, passing on the GST cut by cutting the cost of coffee. I can confirm this because the price of an XL coffee used to be $1.59 and after the 2 point cut it is now $1.56. Yay Timmy’s!!!
But every other price they looked at was for a set price item. i.e. prices that have traditionally been rounded to a dollar (or half dollar).
They start off with a Saturday Toronto Star. $2.00 before and $2.00 after. Since a large portion of newspaper sales are via the box on the street corner, this one is a given as an item that would not change in price. Who the heck is going to want to put $1.98 into a newspaper box slot?
They then proceeded with Parking machines, parking meters, Live Theatre tickets, taxi cab fares and movie tickets. All of which have stayed the same with the base rate of the product going up meaning no cost savings to the consumer.
I don’t know about you, but I have noticed the tax saving on restaurant food, where the tax is added in AFTER the cost of the meal. I have noticed the tax savings in my grocery bill which far outweighs any money I put into movies, cabs, or parking. I have also noticed it anywhere the price of the item is set with the tax being added after the fact. Store owners did NOT go around the store bumping that $3.99 box of cereal to $4.03.
This was simply a poor reporting job by the CBC. The sad part about something like this is that most of the items they looked at were items that lower income Canadians do not typically use.
Lower income earners ride the bus over taking a taxi or paying for parking. The Conservatives put in a tax credit for the bus riders. Lower income earners might go to the movies occasionally, but more often than not they do not go see a $120 show at the Royal Alex in Toronto as the Marketplace segment showed. In fact, video rentals add tax AFTER the fact so that $3.99 rental that cost $4.59 after tax is now only $4.51. Thank you for my 8 cents!!!
Chalk this one up to that left wing bias our publicly funded network is known for.
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So transparent it is funny. I save the GST when I buy the Toronto Sun at a corner store. I rarely buy it since Ms. Copps started writing for them, although I heard she quit. Mr. Margolis makes it very easy to save my money.
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I think it’s more noticable here in Alberta, where there is no PST.
Why didn’t they go to Future Shop? Parking meters, and newspapers, what a joke. Do they seriously think we are idiots?
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Ah the Toronto Sun, liberals pretending to be conservatives posing as moderates… What about asking bled to death taxpayers if they feel they get ‘value for their taxes paid’ is that not a lot better show to run?
(real conservative)
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After scrimping and saving for the last 25 years, you finally bought a new house in 2005, including 7% GST. After your meagre down payment, your mortgage is $250,000 at 7.5%.
Now, before CBC’s Marketplace protests that only the “rich” could afford such a luxury, they need to know that to in order to pay for your dream house, both you and your wife work full time planting trees on Suzuki’s estate, your senior citizen parents and in-laws work part-time collecting re-cycled broken glass and barbed wire, and your kids cut pesticide-free grass, shovel what’s left of the arctic snow, and flip tofu burgers part-time, all just to chip in on the crushing mortgage payments.
Amortized over 20 years, your $250K loan costs:
Total Repaid: $483355.20
Total Interest Paid: $233355.20
With the GST now cut to 5%, the same house costs (1.05/1.07) % less, so with the same down payment, your mortgage would be $245,327. Amortized over 20 years, your $245.327K loan costs:
Total Repaid: $474321.60
Total Interest Paid: $228994.60
That measly 2% reduction in GST saved your struggling family a total of $9,033.60, including a reduction in interest payments to those “greedy corporate banks” of $4,360.60!
For all those latté-sipping CBC executives earning well over six figures in taxpayer subsidies per year, $9,033.60 may be peanuts; just an annual raise in a bad year, but perhaps for struggling Canadian families, it makes a significant difference.
http://ray.met.fsu.edu/~bret/amortize.html
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Anyone who would rely on the CBC for their news is an idiot so, yes the CBC thinks Canadians are idiots -that is their target demographic.
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For what it is worth, I didn’t see it as an attack on the Harper government. It was rather a criticism of companies that are pocketing the gst savings rather than passing them on to consumers.
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I bought a car this year for $20K. Savings of $400 with the 2% reduction.
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CBC doesn’t like that the CPOC actually KEPT its GST promise while the LPOC broke theirs.
We didn’t get this type of negative analysis from the CBC when the LPOC was in power. How many Martin budgets did they refer to as containing “significant” tax cuts for Canadians? In Feb 2000 we were told by the CBC that $100 BILLION would be coming our way over the next 5 years.
It didn’t seem to matter that the Liberals had collected $250 BILLION over 13 years from a tax they promised to no longer collect from Canadians! No, that wasn’t factored into the equation. Instead we were all going to get a big tax “cut”.
The CBC has no credibility on the issue.
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Back when the GST was cut from 7% to 6%, I went and gathered as many opinions as I could from economists about the change:
http://tinyurl.com/2xplet
I must go replicate this work for 6% to 5%, but I thought I’d post the link as a matter of interest.