The Silver Lining in B.C.'s HST

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Hysteria aside, B.C.'s HST might make people more intelligent consumers.

We’re five days into the HST and it’s my fervent hope that the noise around it may make people in B.C. actually consider a little before they blindly buy things.

I suspect most people had a rollicking good time signing their petitions and attacking the government(s) who brought in the HST on July 1. Of course, the world didn’t fall apart, as many of the anti-HST zealots indicated it might. Despite the sturm and drang stirred up by the zealots, people weren’t suddenly plunged into poverty.

That’s because the HST, when all is said and done, is a consumption tax that has always been there in most cases. It was just so familiar most people didn’t notice it. Now that it has a new name and, yes, is being added to some purchases that previously weren’t taxed, people may actually start noticing it and change their bad habits accordingly.

Of course, this possibility was rarely mentioned in the anti-HST hysteria. Instead, people seized on the one or two things that would now be taxed, added their existing prejudices to the issue, and blindly lashed out at anything and everybody who might have had one good word for the tax.

So you get dumb statements like the one from a person who posted on the Globe and Mail website. The HST, he (presumably it was a he) opined,  is “a payoff to Campbell’s big business backers for the past favours of corporate tax breaks, PPPs, selling off public assets and so on.”

So, let me get this straight. The HST isn’t simply a realigning of a tax system that didn’t make much sense in the first place—it’s part of an entire (and entirely stupid) conspiracy by Premier Gordon Campbell to screw the little guy, who, of course votes in the government?

Sorry poster, but that’s not only absurd, it's pure misinformation put out there by leaders of the anti-HST forces – an unholy alliance of extreme right wingers and extreme left wingers, ex-politicians who see a new opportunity to get into the limelight, and anyone else who is trying to either throw out the government (and take over themselves) or just stir up the population because … well, they just like to stir stuff up.

The PST was an unfair and cumbersome tax, period. It screwed the little guy and big business with equal gusto. And it created an out of control bureaucracy that now, blessedly, will be jettisoned and thereby save taxpayers about $160 million.

The HST, while painted wrongly as a new tax, won’t change people’s lives very much.  Even that ridiculous 50-inch television you may desperately be wanting won’t be affected, since you would have had to pay PST on it anyway.

Besides, there may be a silver lining in the whole exercise. In this society we’ve become prisoners of our consumer lust. Now that people are actually looking at the tax they’re paying for consumer trinkets, they may think twice about emptying their wallets for some brief moment of pleasure.  

If the HST turns people into thriftier and – dare I say it – more intelligent buyers, I’m all for it.

MORE HST BC ARTICLES FROM BCBUSINESS

HST in BC: Business Responds to the Tax

Poison Pill: BC Liberals and the HST

Beware the HST Revolt

BC's HST: Sudden Death

BC HST: High-handed Selfish Tax

An HST Ray of Hope

HST Follies

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