Ok Andy, Here Goes Nothing…

The writer behind The Andy Fletcher Show blog challenged his fellow Manitoba bloggers to write about how we would improve Manitoba. So without further ado:

Eliminate taxes that have nothing to do with income, profits or consumption.

Taxes that are based on assets and not profit/income are an economic disincentive to capital investment in our province. Examples include the Provincial Education Support Levy on the City of Winnipeg property tax bill, the Capital Tax and Payroll Tax. It would be naïve to assume that these taxes could be eliminated without a corresponding increase in some other tax. I propose taking a geometric average (to smooth out abnormally high or low amounts) of the past three years of each of these taxes and then increasing the PST by an amount commensurate with the revenues associated with the former. This could be phased in over a 5 to 10 year period so that consumers would not experience sticker shock in Year 1 (i.e. one tax reduced at a time).

Eliminate/reduce government overlap.

While all levels of government have relatively clear delineations of their jurisdictional domains, they also insist on infringing on each others’ turf. For example, the housing issue is addressed by the Manitoba Housing Authority, the Winnipeg Housing and Homelessness Initiative, Winnipeg Housing Rehabilitation Corporation, the federal National Homelessness Initiative, not to mention charities such as Habitat for Humanity and Raising the Roof. If the goal is to shelter the less fortunate, the plethora of agencies that take it upon themselves to do just that detracts from optimizing the finite amount of resources leveraged to combat this problem. Each entity incurs administrative costs that would be better off going straight to the people these initiatives are all trying to help.