Canadian Personal Finance Blog

My guess would be BOTH, so thus the budget will be simply a political “ruse” with a lot of “would be nice” stuff in it, that will never see the light of day, to convince me “John Q. Public” that the Tories are the right choice to run the country (a cynical point of view, but then again, as a Christian, I think cynicism is what keeps the world evolving and learning).

So what has Count Floyd (Jim not Joe Flaherty) the Finance Minister got cooking for us? Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Capital Gain Cuts? Whooo…. that’s scarey Igor! It’s like in Alien but instead of the capital gains shooting out of your stomach, they jump into it!!! WHOOO….. scarey kids!

No seriously, the new budget has a bunch of crap possible in it:

• A tax break of some kind for capital gains, which was promised in the election last year, so the Tories need to do SOMETHING about this, but what? Who really knows? Maybe they will bring back Brian Mulroney’s infamous $250,000 life time exemption? That would be cool.
• An increase to the personal exemption? That would be nice too, since that helps everyone across the board.
• A TPSP? What’s that well that is a tax pre- paid savings plans that the C.D. Howe Institute thinks is a GREAT idea. You put after tax money in there, but it grows tax-free so when you take it out, the growth isn’t taxed. I like that too, if I could figure out how to make my money grow correctly.
• Income splitting? Well, if I see that, then I know that the Tories want a spring election, because that is something they are going to keep in the “bag of tricks” ’til they need it, because poor suckers like me, will vote for the Communists if they promised that!

No matter how it’s sliced, there will be many promises made, but how many will be kept?

More interestingly, the CCPA (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) thinks the Tories are frittering away the Government’s surplus by cutting taxes.

“Prime Minister Harper’s tax cut plan is so expensive, he may soon find himself having to choose between putting the nation back into deficit or slashing programs,” says CCPA senior economist Ellen Russell.

Let’s hope it does not get to that point!