Charest & Dexter Both Screw The Working & Middle Classes

The working and middle classes are being made to pay for the dishonesty & mistakes of both Charest & Dexter. In Nova Scotia, those earning $34,800 - $83,000 will pay the increased HST, but get no progressive compensation, unlike those below them, rightly, and those above them, $83,000 - $150,000, wrongly. Dexter at least increases taxes on the highest bracket, 150+K, but continues regressive subsidies of wasteful anti-environmental behaviour. Charest at least raises Hydro rates & environmental taxes, a bit, with increased compensation for poor, but proposes introducing hideous regressive counterproductive health taxes, which, along with absence of tax hikes for rich, hurt poor, working and middle classes, while relatively benefiting the rich. Both Dexter & Charest favour business, and continue policies of effectively subsidising business through fiscal mix, relative to burden placed on individuals.

Charest's health taxes are more hideous than anything Dexter's doing, but that says something about just how bad they are, when Dexter & NDP are giving a tax cut to themselves and all MLAs & cabinet ministers in the upper middle class. Normally, that would be hard to beat, as far as stupid & bad fiscal policy, but Charest found a way (in latter table, compare tax paid by someone earning $125,000 vs. $15,000).

It is weird how they are both picking on the working & middle classes, who form the great majority of the electorate. Both intimidated by rich & business? Brainwashed? Full of shit themselves?

At least Nova Scotia budget means that in next Federal election, all non-NDP parties, especially Liberals, will profit from anti-NDP protest vote: a lotta seats to be won from NDP in Nova Scotia. Maybe Elizabeth May should come back. And also, subsequent provincial election will probably be Liberal minority, under excellent leadership of Stephen McNeil, who got his response exactly right (he sounds like Obama vs. Bush tax cuts, actually):

McNeil said creating a tax break for the well-off isn't fair especially when there is nothing for the middle class to offset the two-per-cent HST hike.

"I don't believe I should have gotten a tax break. At the same time, I'm looking in the eyes of people who sit in front of my desk who can't make ends meet, who are being told, 'Suck it up, pay the extra two per cent in HST and we're not going to help you','" McNeil said this morning.

There is a new tax credit for households earning less than $30,000. They'll get $240 a year, plus $57 per dependent child. The amount decreases for people making up to $34,800.

McNeil said that's still a low income.

"You tell me how someone lives on that," he said. "I've done it."

"I wonder if any of them (cabinet ministers) have ever been hungry? I'm going to tell you, there are a lot of Nova Scotians who are hungry and what they got yesterday was nothing more than their nose rubbed in it by this government who turned around and gave those of us who sit in the House a tax break. That is fundamentally wrong."

Cabinet ministers make $47,608.72 on top of their MLA's salary of $86,619.01, a total of $134,227.73. McNeil makes the same, as does House Speaker Charlie Parker.

Premier Darrell Dexter will also get the income tax break. He earns $109,484.76 in addition to his MLA pay, a total of $196,103.77.