No it's not.... speaking as a Nova Scotian, whom were one of the first to be tricked into getting the HST tossed onto all our products of sale by the Liberals.
At the time, Nova Scotians were complaining about the high taxes being paid onto the more important things in life, like heating, etc. At the time there was a 7% GST and an 11% PST tax. Some things had one or the other, while there were other things that had both taxes applied to them, which rather then one thing being 7% additional tax or 11%..... they had 18% total tax on top of what you were buying.
So the Liberals said it'd be a good idea to merge the two into a lower % tax of 15%.
However they forgot to mention until after the fact, that everything that was just 7% or 11% taxed..... were all now 15% taxed.
So while we were spared 3% tax off of the things already having GST & PST applied to them..... even more..... countless more products suddenly jumped in tax.... between 4%-8% more.
So while they played it as though they were saving Nova Scotian's money on taxes, they in turn ended up sucking even more taxes overall from us.
All with a smile. :angry3:
If that's what the Fraser Institute believes, then they're fk'n high on opium and need to put down the pipe.
Don't believe the anti-HST rhetoric.....
Yeah ok.... don't believe someone who's already been living with HST for years now and knows first hand what happens in such an environment.... but believe someone who spouts off a copy/paste of some report, who hasn't even lived with the HST yet who doesn't even bother to see it for what it truly is.
Everything in the above report is almost identical to the same argument given to justify us having the HST tossed onto us.
It's pretty much one of the main reasons why the Liberals haven't lead Nova Scotia in like forever.
The HST is simply not beneficial for low and middle income earners, because more of the products they purchase that usually only have one or the other tax on, will now spike with more taxes on those products and any meager savings giving on the GST/PST products converting to HST, will be lost when covering these products that originally only had one tax or the other..... in fact, you will end up spending even more taxes per year then ever before.
In 1997, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia harmonized their PST with the federal GST.
^ That doesn't mean we did the right thing, nor does it justify continuing to expand the HST when clearly nobody is looking at the results that occurred here when we did.
By the way.... the term HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) replaced the old term BST (Blended Sales Tax) after it was discovered that most people in the Maritimes were referring to the BST as the "Bullsh*t Tax"