Economy
Federal budget: You can’t solve a productivity emergency with tax hikes
News release from the Montreal Economic Institute
- Ottawa still has no plan to return to a balanced budget.
- Under Justin Trudeau, the federal government has hired over 98,000 new bureaucrats.
Montreal, April 16, 2024 – The increase in the capital gains tax inclusion rate will further exacerbate Canada’s productivity lag, asserted the Montreal Economic Institute in response to the publication of the federal budget this afternoon.
“Canada’s productivity is in crisis and the best way to get it back up is to attract new investments,” explains Renaud Brossard, Vice-President of Communications at the MEI. “And few are those who have been able to lure investments and job creators with promises of higher taxes.
“With this budget, the Trudeau government is shooting us in the foot.”
In the budget, the Trudeau government has announced the capital gains inclusion rate from 50 per cent to 66 per cent for capital gains superior to $250,000 per year.
Last March, the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Carolyn Rogers, spoke of a “productivity emergency” in Canada.
Canadians rank second to last among G7 countries in terms of productivity per hour worked, according to an MEI study published last August.
The Institute explains that this lag arises from a shortfall in private non-residential investment. In 2018, this investment amounted to an estimated $27,307 per American worker, but only $17,389 per Canadian worker.
“Every dollar the government expects to subtract from the pockets of investors with this tax hike is a dollar of potential investment lost,” explains Brossard. “It’s time for the Trudeau government to realize it doesn’t have a revenue problem, but rather a spending problem.”
The budget tabled by the Trudeau government today forecasts a shortfall of $39.8 billion for the year 2024-2025.
High interest rates are contributing to this situation, with interest payments on the federal debt estimated to reach $54.1 billion dollars this year, up 14.6 per cent over last year.
The MEI observes that one of the major sources of increased spending is the massive hiring of federal public servants under the Trudeau government.
Since the first Trudeau budget in 2016, the federal public service workforce has grown by more than 98,268 employees. Considered in terms of the number of government employees per Canadian, this represents a 28% increase according to an MEI study published in January.
“The explosion in the number of bureaucrats in recent years is symptomatic of a government that has lost all control over the growth of its spending,” explains Brossard. “There are now 28 per cent more federal public servants per capita, but very few Canadians would tell you that Ottawa is doing 28 per cent more for them.”
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The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policy-makers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Has the time come for America to seriously reassess its participation in and support for the United Nations (U.N.)?
It’s a question that some prominent people are asking this week after the increasingly woke and essentially useless globalist body attempted to sneak a global carbon tax in through the back door while no one was looking.
Except someone was looking, as it turns out. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who chairs the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is part of the majority on both the Senate Judiciary and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, said in an X post Thursday evening that this latest bit of anti-American action “warrants our withdrawal from the UN.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in his own X post on the matter on Wednesday that the Trump administration “will not allow the UN to tax American citizens and companies. Under the leadership of POTUS (President Donald Trump), the U.S. will be a hard NO. We call on other nations to stand alongside the United States in defense of our citizens and sovereignty.”
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Rubio took to X again to announce the news that efforts by himself and others in the Trump administration succeeded in killing an effort to move the tax forward during a meeting in London. However, the proposal is not fully dead – a final vote on it was simply delayed for a year.
The issue at hand stems from an attempt by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) – an agency of the U.N. – to impose net-zero rules on fuels used for seaborne shipping operations. The Trump administration estimates the imposition of the new requirements will increase the cost of shipping goods by about 10%, thus creating yet another round of inflation hitting the poorest citizens the hardest thanks to the globalist obsession with the amount of plant food – carbon dioxide – in the atmosphere.
Known as the IMO Net-Zero Framework, the proposal claims it would effectively “zero out” emissions from the shipping industry by 2050.
The potential implications if the U.N. ultimately succeeds in implementing its own global carbon tax are obvious. If this unelected, unaccountable globalist body can levy a carbon tax on Americans, a concept that America’s own elected officials have steadfastly rejected across the terms of the last five U.S. presidents, what would then prevent it from imposing other kinds of taxes on the world to support its ideological goals?
President Trump’s opposition to exactly this kind of international intrusion into America’s domestic policy choices is the reason why he has twice won the presidency, each time de-committing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords.
It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that the central goal of the global climate alarm movement is to dramatically raise the cost of all kinds of energy in order to force the masses to live smaller, more restricted lives and make their behavior easier for authoritarian governments to control. This camel’s nose under the tent move by the U.N. to sneak a global carbon tax into reality is just the latest in a long parade of examples that serve as proof points for that thesis.
At some point, U.S. officials must seriously reassess the value proposition in continuing to spend billions of dollars each year supporting and hosting a globalist organization whose every action seems designed to inflict damage on our country and its people. Now would be a good time to do that, in fact.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
A United Nations (UN) proposal for a global carbon tax, which threatened to raise consumer costs, was tabled on Friday following pressure from the Trump administration.
Members of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN body based in London, met this week to vote on a “Net-Zero Framework,” which would have imposed steep penalties on ship emissions. A majority of countries at the agency voted on Friday to postpone the decision for a year after the Trump administration pushed back and threatened retaliation against states supporting the measure.
“Common sense prevailed. The Trump Administration will not stand for the UN or any organization forcing American taxpayers to foot the bill for their environmental pet projects,” a senior State Department official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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The proposed IMO Net-Zero Framework, aimed at achieving global shipping emissions neutrality by 2050, would have imposed taxes of $100 to $380 per ton of CO2 on ships that failed to meet targets. If the global fleet fell even 10% short of the targets, costs could soar to $20 to $30 billion by 2030 and exceed $300 billion by 2035, by some estimates.
The Trump administration has warned the plan could raise global shipping costs by as much as 10%, forcing higher prices for American consumers.
“The collapse of the UN-backed shipping emissions deal is not the disaster portrayed by climate activists — it’s a victory for sovereignty over what amounted to taxation without representation,” Anthony Watts, Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute, told the DCNF. “Shipping may account for 3% of global emissions, but it moves 90% of global trade; taxing it in the name of ‘net zero’ would have punished consumers and developing nations alike while enriching bureaucrats and consultants in Geneva and New York.”
President Donald Trump personally weighed in against the measure.
“The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping, and will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form. We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR, the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform Thursday. “Stand with the United States, and vote NO in London tomorrow!”
The Trump administration had threatened that member states backing the measures could face a range of repercussions, including probes into anti-competitive practices, visa restrictions on maritime crews, commercial and financial penalties, increased port fees, and sanctions targeting officials promoting climate policies.
“Better than merely not signing a UN climate treaty is promising to punish countries that do sign. The result is no treaty. Thank you, President Trump,” Steve Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and former Trump EPA transition team advisor, told the DCNF.
Frank Lasee, president of Truth in Energy and Climate, said the president’s stance helped protect consumers from “neocolonial mandates that enrich China at our expense.”
“This global carbon tax isn’t climate action; it’s economic sabotage,” Lasee told the DCNF. “Trump’s masterstroke preserves innovation, low taxes, and freedom from globalist overreach — ensuring our future remains bright without new well-funded UN mischief.”
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