Alberta raises taxes - just call it the Enron Advantage

So here we go. Premiums on health care up 20%. More user fees. Even alcohol taxes are up - you’ve got to fight for your right to party, as the Beastie Boys said, though nobody here is willing to do that.

That, after all, would be uncompetitive. The Alberta Advantage, after all, is that Alberta’s advantaged can get poor people to pay their taxes for them.

Albertans are dealing with rising taxes in their own ways. On Rock 97, a radio station that believes "Patio Lanterns" by Kim Mitchell is cutting-edge rock, an announcer whined that Alberta’s taxes are to be blamed on Cretien. You know, that guy who ISN’T the premier of Alberta.

Others, of course, don’t consider user fees to be taxes at all. To many sylables perhaps. IMO renaming taxes to user fees is an accounting numbers game worthy of Enron.

I have an idea for Ralph Klein - how about instead of calling it "raising taxes" call it "boosting" or "strengthening" taxes. That’s what the liberalmedia [TM] calls it when people have to pay even more at the gas pump. When people pay less for gas, the headlines worry that gas prices are "weak". Speaking of Orwellian wordplay to hide rising gas prices, you can also do what the Calgary SUN did for ATCO, who advertises on their front page every couple of days. When ATCO raised prices, the Calgary SUN said that the prices were "changing". No rate of "change" was given. The new price was listed, but the old one was not - just in case some reader somewhere was attentive enough to do the math.

So how about that for a headline: "Alberta taxes changed"? The National Post (National Socialist Post as I call it) had another lead story. Was it the sudden collapse into the sea of a chunk of iceberg the size of Delaware? No, it was "UN pokes holes in Kyoto" - never minding that the liberalmedia [TM] thinks that the UN are evildoers who probably abduct cows with black helicopters.



The race to the bottom means more taxes



Listening to QR77 (wormtounge radio, if you really care what my nickname for them is) I heard the Alberta Federation of Independent Businesses go right ahead and say that corporate taxes were bad but that higher health premiums were okay. He had no economic arguments whatsoever, just said that it was up to the government to send "messages" presumably to investors. It sounded so much like a threat was surprised his sound-bite did not end with "Kapish?"

If you are an investor, (a person who owns machines other people built, and who thus is paid for allowing people the privilidge of working their own machines) you want to find the place with the lowest wages and the lowest corporate taxes. What taxes the workers pay, of course, makes no difference. How can a province or country be competitive? By taxing the poor and giving the money to the rich - feudalism.

In all my time in Alberta, I have yet to meet an Albertan. Everyone here is chasing jobs that were stolen from their communities. Like donkey chasing a carrot dangled in front of their nose by a rider, they think that if they run harder they will somehow catch those ever-outsourcing jobs. In the end though, all they do is give a good ride to the fat bastard on their backs.

Eventually, when someone becomes more "competitive" than Alberta, the machines that we built will be shipped there, and we have to follow. There will be a globalization of begging as we will wander the Earth endlessly, accepting lower pay and higher taxes every time.



The Sudan Advantage



Lots of people don’t seem to mind giving investors all of the control. When taxes are raised on the workers and middle class, it’s just proof that government should be run more like a business. Like Enron - Or Talisman.

Talisman Energy should be called Taliban Energy, because it helped harbour Osama ( Usama ) Bin Laden. By funding the Islamic fundamentalist Sudanese dictatorship while Sudan harbored Bin Laden, one was to wonder if they "with us or against us". There are obviously "with" the Sudanese dictatorship, even helping defend them in court.

It’s no wonder that Talisman invests in Sudan - Sudan is more competetive than Alberta. In Alberta you can get the poor to pay taxes for you, but you can’t order the government to murder anyone who lives on the route of your planned pipeline.. At least, not until Klein decides to send a good "message".

Collaborating with the enemy is refered to in corporate politically correct as "constructive engagement". During the confusion after Sept 11th, George W Bush gave goodies to the genocidal Islamic fundamentalist terrorist dictatorship of Sudan.

He claimed that Sudan had given him information on Bin Laden, because Bin Laden has not been found, obviously Bush either lied, or accepted false information that allowed Bin Laden to get away. Either way, his oil connections will get to profit from Sudan, and more Christians will be raped and murdered as the oil companies demand. Talisman’s new logo?

So now that you understand just how corrupt the oil industry ("energy sector" - pardon my politically incorrect) is, you might be wondering what we can do if we don’t want them to be able to do here what they do in Sudan in the name of competitiveness.

You can find many links here.

Why protest the G8? | How to organize against the G8 | Canadian News | American News | Frequently asked questions about Globalization |