Mintz is Right on “Small” Business Tax

One of my main undertakings on this blog has been to debunk Jack Mintz’s relentless advocacy of tax cuts for large corporations. However, I also give him credit when he proposes good policy, such as raising potash royalties and the small-business corporate tax rate. This past week, he was out with a paper on the latter subject. The small-business deduction […]

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Mintz: Wrong Again on Corporate Taxes

Ten days ago, Jack Mintz released yet another paper claiming that international competitiveness requires continued corporate tax cuts. In addition to the usual questionable interpretations, it featured at least one straight factual error. Mintz inaccurately reports Iceland’s 2010 statutory corporate tax rate as 15% (Table 2 on page 7 and Table 3 on page 9 in the PDF). In reality, […]

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Mintz Misleads on Corporate Taxes

Jack Mintz is out today with yet another paper applauding the federal corporate tax cut from 18% in 2010 to 15% in 2012. Revenue Fudge He claims that the revenue loss will be “relatively small” or “relatively insignificant” without actually suggesting a dollar amount (pages 3 and 20). By comparison, the Department of Finance (see Table 3.5), the opposition parties, […]

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The Mintz Report and the Pensions Debate

I blogged back in August to express some concern about the implications of Jack Mintz’s appointment as research director for the federal and provincial finance minister’s review of the Canadian pension system. http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/08/06/jack-mintz-research-and-pensions/#comment-20646 .   Suffice to say now that the general thrust of  his report, tabled this week,  http://www.fin.gc.ca/activty/pubs/pension/riar-narr-eng.asp , did not come as a great surprise to me.  (The […]

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Jack Mintz Eats Up Ontario’s Budget

This past week, Jack Mintz issued a report (PDF) praising Ontario’s last provincial budget. I like East Side Mario’s because it features both all-you-can-eat bread and all-you-can-eat salad. So, it is not surprising that a corporate tax-fighter would love a budget featuring both corporate income tax cuts and the removal of sales tax from business inputs. Queen’s Park is giving […]

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Mintz Hits a Triple

I had been fiddling with my last post in spare moments since the federal NDP convention. I fiddled long enough that Jack Mintz beat me to the punch in critiquing the proposal to eliminate corporate tax on small-business profits. His op-ed appeared in yesterday’s Financial Post. His priority is to slash the general corporate tax rate down to the same […]

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Jack Mintz, Research and Pensions

It is a bit stunning to discover that Jack Mintz – former head of the CD Howe Institute and now at the University of Calgary – has been appointed research director of the federal – provincial review of pensions. http://www.vancouversun.com/business/fp/Jack+Mintz+research+director+pension+reform+task+force/1794203/story.html Even Finance Minister Flaherty should be a bit embarassed to appoint as a “researcher” someone who is so strongly on […]

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Dion’s Green Plan or Mintz’s Tax Plan?

There is a lot of the colour green all over Dion’s Green Shift plan.  But after reading it, the greenery appears almost as superficial as the green shift caps that Liberal MPs wore awkwardly with their business suits at the launch yesterday. Dion’s plan is really a proposal for a tax shifting budget and doesn’t contain any new proposals to […]

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Mintz on Tax-Free Savings Accounts

As Andrew, Marc, Toby and I pointed-out at the time, despite the low up-front cost of Tax-Free Savings Accounts, they will become exponentially more expensive over time. To obnoxiously quote myself, “this measure could burn a significant hole in future government revenues.” It is worth noting that Jack Mintz, a huge fan of Tax-Free Savings Accounts, suggests essentially the same […]

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Jack Mintz on Budget 2007

In yesterday’s Financial Post, Jack Mintz repeated the notions that the Budget featured “no broad tax relief” and big spending. He wrote, “Certainly, the idea of making the tax structure more efficient, fair and simple takes a back seat to the rash of special politically driven measures.” However, the tax measures that Mintz specifically endorses – the Child Tax Credit, […]

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Five Good Economic Developments in 2014

Every year has its ups and downs, of course. But there’s something about New Year’s that makes one naturally want to emphasize the positive.  So here is my personal list of 5 positive economic developments from the year past — both globally and right here at home – that warmed this particular economist’s left-wing heart in 2014:

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(Macro) Econ 101

On December 2, Chris Ragan wrote a column for the Globe and Mail titled “Another (Macro) Defense of Econ 101.”  The link to his column is available here .  My brief reply was published in the Globe and Mail on December 13.  The full version is below: Professor Ragan defends conventional (macro) Econ 101 as a pedagogical tool for training students’ minds to […]

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Benjamin Zycher’s Eight-Year Itch

The controversy regarding the mathematical errors in the Ontario PCs’ “million jobs plan” went viral last week, after a critical mass of economists weighed in to confirm that the party had indeed badly misinterpreted the findings (by as much as 8 times over) of their own consultants’ studies.  This sparked a firestorm of media coverage, inspired the Globe and Mail’s […]

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Good Time to Rethink Corporate Tax Cuts

Canada’s macroeconomy continues to be lethargic at best, and there is growing recognition that the continuing sluggishness of business capital spending since the 2008-09 crisis is a big part of the reason why.  Governments are in austerity mode; consumers are maxxed out and cautious about new spending; our exports are restrained by an overvalued dollar and uncertain demand in our key markets.  […]

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Provincial Corporate Taxes: A 12% Floor?

In his 2007 “Economic Statement,” Jim Flaherty threw down the gauntlet for provincial governments to cut their corporate income tax rates to 10%. Initially, it seemed like he might succeed in stampeding the provinces down to that level. Alberta and Quebec were already at 10% (although Quebec had announced an increase to 12% in exchange for eliminating its corporate capital […]

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Dutch Disease is Dead … Long Live Dutch Disease!!!

In the hyper-polarized context of Canadian energy policy debates, even suggesting that there might be a downside to the untrammeled energy boom centred in northern Alberta is enough to get you labelled a traitor or an economic illiterate — or both.  Conservative political leaders in both Ottawa and Edmonton, backed by energy-friendly think-tanks and the Sun media chain, have tried […]

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Effective Corporate Tax Rate Falling

Further to my earlier post critiquing the recent  Mintz study -  which argued that cuts in corporate tax rates are not significantly denting corporate tax revenues – I looked up the effective corporate tax rate (income tax paid as a percentage of taxable corporate income.) Here is what shows up on CANSIM 180-0003.   2006 – 31.0% 2007 – 29.9% […]

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What To Do About Dutch Disease?

In response to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s complaint about oil and the exchange rate, several (conservative) commentators argued that this “Dutch disease” is not what ails Ontario manufacturing. Andrew Coyne took a different tack yesterday, agreeing that petroleum development drives up the exchange rate to the detriment of manufacturing and hence Ontario’s economy, but concluding that nothing can or should […]

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Provincial and State Corporate Taxes

The following commentary also appears on The Globe and Mail’s Global Exchange blog: What Obama’s Corporate Tax Proposal Means for Canada Last week, there was much consternation in Canada’s business press that some modest reversals of provincial corporate tax cuts and President Obama’s proposed corporate tax changes could erode our competitiveness. Canadians should maintain a healthy skepticism about possible U.S. […]

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Why taxing food staples should not be considered a policy option in Canada

Here’s an excellent piece by Sam Boshra, about the recent proposal by Michael Smart and Jack Mintz to apply the GST to food, from Sam’s blog at Economic Justice: Low-income households can’t buy food today with a larger HST rebate they hope to get sometime in the future.  A key objective of the social safety net, welfare, disability, unemployment, child tax, […]

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Cost of Inequitable Tax Loopholes Increases

Finance Canada published its annual Tax Expenditure Report for 2011 and it shows that the cost of some of the most inequitable tax preferences and loopholes continues to rise. For instance the stock option deduction, which allows CEOs and executives to pay tax at half the rate of ordinary working income, is estimated to cost the federal government $725 million last year. […]

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McGuinty’s Graph Misleads on Corporate Taxes

Further to Jim’s excellent critique of the Ontario Conservative platform’s graphs, I am similarly struck by the Liberal platform’s lone graph. “Cutting Ontario’s Taxes on New Business Investment in Half” (page 25) purports to show that corporate tax cuts are required to get the province’s “Marginal Effective Tax Rate” below the US and OECD averages. It compares projections of those […]

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So the BC HST Was Defeated. Now What?

Earlier today, Elections BC announced the much anticipated HST referendum results. British Columbians have voted to scrap the HST. The best part about having the results is that now we can move on from the narrow issue of what type of sales tax is better and focus our energies on some of the bigger issues affecting British Columbia. Since the […]

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The Town Without Poverty

A guest post from Richard Pereira, a recent winner of the PEF Essay Contest… – Canadian Economics Association – The Town Without Poverty There were hundreds of speakers at this year’s CEA conference in Ottawa.  About a dozen of these were designated “Special Lectures/Conférences spéciales” and among them were Jack Mintz on “The GST After Twenty Years”, Don Drummond on […]

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Saunders and The Value of CIT Cuts, Part I

Doug Saunders, of the Globe and Mail, has gamely launched a real and meaningful discussion about corporate tax cuts on these pages. See the comments section of this post. Since that forum was getting unwieldly, I’m starting a new post. Doug’s stated pursuit (and mine, and I wager most readers’) – how to harness growth to maximize social welfare – […]

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Why is BC’s business sector so small?

Despite all the arguments outlined on this blog, and the federal election debates, the race to the bottom in corporate taxation seems to be alive and well in the G-7. The latest move comes from the UK, whose March budget announced a new 2 percentage point reduction in their corporate tax rate. Meanwhile, Canadian provinces have their own corporate tax […]

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The Borg and Corporate Taxes

Perhaps the most compelling villain on Star Trek: The Next Generation was the Borg, which seeks to assimilate other groups into its hive. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute seems to be performing this function for Canada’s conservative pundits (although corporate-tax cutters also resemble the Ferengi). Yesterday’s Globe featured an op-ed by Brian Lee Crowley, former President of the Atlantic Institute for Market […]

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