Tax cuts offset by wide-ranging increases in fees
Posted by newbrunswickpolitics on March 27, 2009
Is anyone else already as sick as I am of the radio ads touting how great the Graham government’s tax cuts supposedly are? The voice-acting is almost as contrived as the hoodwinking being perpetrated on the people of this province. I cannot help but feel bad for the myriad of New Brunswickers who are misled by these ads into thinking they will save “25 dollars a week”, because the amount of New Brunswickers who earn enough money to qualify for such savings can hardly be described as a myriad. How many New Brunswickers make $150,000 a year or more? Didn’t think so.
On top of this, little attention has been paid to the swathe of user-fee increases and implementations on everything from camping fees to vehicle registration. As this editorial in today’s Moncton Times & Transcript points out, it takes little more than 5 minutes of a Service New Brunswick employee’s time to make a few mouse-clicks and give you a new tiny sticker to place on your license plate – after you’ve waited two hours to see that employee, of course. Obviously vehicle registration is a necessary measure long in place, but to increase the fee from its already unnecessarily high rate to just under $100 ought to qualify as robbery. It will be the New Brunswickers benefitting least from Graham and Boudreau’s tax cuts that suffer the most from these across-the-board fee increases.
How much longer are New Brunswickers going to let themselves get hosed like this year after year?
