-- Download People Want BC Corporations to Pay More Tax as PDF --

…or do they?

Every year the BC government consults with citizens on what should go into their budget.

Last year over 25% of the online survey respondents said new revenue should come from increased corporate taxes, triple the rate of people who thought personal income taxes should go up.

But there are problems with that; see below:

Programs and services are largely funded by tax revenues, and government works to balance where the money comes from. How would you generate one new dollar of tax revenue from among the sources below?

– from Report on the 2014 Budget Consultations

Problems:

1. There are 4.6 million British Columbians.
2. Only 262 people filled out the online survey. That’s a bad response rate of only 1/17,557 people.
3. The government does a poor job actually soliciting people to fill out their online survey of fiscal preferences.
4. The government doesn’t really care what we think.
5. So do you think the 2014 budget had massive/any corporate tax increases? The regressive MSP increased. Again. The general corporate tax rate remained unchanged at 11%

Solutions:

1. Get thousands more people to fill out the online budget survey, somehow?
2. Publicize the survey widely so people know it’s there, and have people login with their SIN to fill out the survey, making it like a referendum, which would increase people’s expectation of follow-through of their ideas?
3. Try to convince people that the government actually cares about what we think to the point that more than 262 bother to share their opinions?

Today is the deadline for submissions for the 2015 budget, though in the past they often extended the deadline. Did YOU even hear about it and the survey you could fill out? Will more than 262 fill it out this year? Will the government care about its civil society consultation, or are they far too cynical to actually care?

Apathy and ignorance favour totalitarianism. But when the government cultivates apathy and ignorance and cynicism, they manufacture a state of governance without oversight, a hallmark of the rising totalitarianism.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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