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The Underground Economy

Will the Budget drive us Underground?
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With the recent Ontario Budget promising new taxes, continued debt and various nefarious schemes to take more of our money in return for fewer services in the North, I foresee more temptations to join the underground economy. People, tiring of the fiascos at Queen’s Park, are going to look for more ways to avoid, maybe even evade, government taxes. People will be planting gardens, cutting their kid’s hair, even eating at home! DIY and save the taxes.

Cash will again become King when making transactions for services. The opening gambit will be “Do you need a receipt?” The reply in the game is “How much for cash?” These may already be the transaction tools in the home or car repair / improvement businesses, maybe even for other private services, but I await the day when it happens at the grocery store or haberdashery, or better still, at the coffee shop.

Paying with plastic leaves an audit trail and does not lend itself to avoiding those sales and income taxes but then I wonder if some of those on-line transactions actually do forward the taxes they collect to the government. The tax collectors at Queen’s Park may also be wondering the same thing. Can they get access to the records of the internet merchants or will they too hide behind the privacy wall of the Apple iPhone vs the FBI in the States? Can the tax man look at my sales or purchases on my smart phone?

On the surface, the new Carbon Cap & Trade taxing system may seem like a good method of attacking the issue of Global Warming, but is it, under the surface, just another tax grab by our Provincial government? Will adding another 4.3 cents a litre to the price of gasoline do anything for the environment? Likewise, the Ontario Pension Plan: on the surface, it is an idealistic scheme to make certain that workers do have a supplementary pension plan, however, underneath the pension Nannyism is the grabbing of money now for deferred payments in the unforeseeable future: anything to make the provincial debt appear smaller for the next election.

Trees, of which we have a few, are mostly carbon and will be subject to the Carbon Tax so be prepared to replace your wood-based products with who-knows-what since any oil-based products will face the same tax increase. Whoever it is who is growing all those trees will have to buy a passel of carbon tax credits or stop growing the trees. Setting the trees ablaze to avoid the tax will attract another carbon pollution tax so forget that idea. Harvesting hay and grass will draw the carbon tax so expect the price of meat to rise. Turning carbon grass into methane is a no-no so the owners of cows, goats, horses and sheep - watch out! Get thee to the stock market and buy your carbon credits now before the stock price goes up.

What we need now is a real underground economy.  We are a nation of natural resources and as much as we like to tout that we are very capable of using computing technology, we need to apply our natural resource uniqueness to our advantage.  Fossil fuels have a limited lifetime as we turn to solar and pedal power so we may as well market them while we can. However it is the mineral wealth under our feet that we ought to be using now to our advantage. We have to bring those metals to the surface, transform them into useful items, (tax them) and sell them to the world.

That is the underground economy we need here in the North where it is too cold to work on the surface in the winter and too nice to in the summer. We need to get that Ring of Smoke and our other mining, smelting and forming businesses moving now.  That market is here now, and like the fossil fuels, it may not be here fifty or seventy years from now.

The manufacturing track record in Ontario has been anything but positive for the past decade. The government is driving the economy underground but all in the wrong way. Let us get the environmental safeguards in place now; get the land access agreements now; apply the same urgency to the needs of the north as to the wants of the south - now.

Now, about that promise of wine in the grocery stores: why did I ever think the Liberal government would not add even more tax to a bottle of grocery store Cabernet? Maybe it is time to start making my own wine again. Or I wonder if my neighbour who makes his own wine - another DIY industry - might sell me a bottle  . . . for cash, of course . . . just saying.

 





Bill Walton

About the Author: Bill Walton

Retired from City of North Bay in 2000. Writer, poet, columnist
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