Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for October 30th, 2007

To quote my favorite basketball guy Dick Vitale. Yup Count Jim Flaherty (AOOOHHHH!!! Those Halowe’en tax cuts are scary kids), will bring out his ghouls and announce, what? Some of the ideas put forward:

• Cut the GST to 5%, which is great, now if Ontario would do the same, I’d be delirious, but some are not fond of changing CONSUMPTION taxes.
• Move the middle income tax bracket up a little higher, thus cutting taxes by about $700, which is good too.
• They could raise the minimum income tax threshold higher too, but no one thinks that.

Canadian Dollar Too Strong

How will Canada deal with the MIGHTY Canadian Loonie? It sits poised to break the $1.05 US threshold, and what will that do to this hot economy of ours? Not sure, yes it is going to hurt manufacturing jobs, but is it as bad as we are hearing? I guess we’ll only know looking back in hindsight.

Cheaper Computer parts

The Computer Price Index for parts is down 1.4% from July to August, which again astounds me. I thought that prices would flatten, but they continue to plummet. How does anybody make any money in this business?

In August, the index for commercial computers decreased 1.4% from July to 34.2 (2001=100). The index for consumer computers also declined, down 1.4% to 14.1.

We are Eating Out More

At least that is what Taverns and Restaurants are seeing:

Total estimated sales of the restaurants, caterers and taverns industry reached $3.7 billion in August, a 3.1 % increase over August 2006. (Data are neither seasonally adjusted, nor adjusted for inflation.)

The increase in sales, at the national level was due to higher sales at full-service restaurants (+3.4%). Sales for limited-service restaurants increased 2.0%. These two sectors accounted for more than 87% of the industry’s sales in August. The food service contractors sector also posted an increase (+6.4%). That sector accounted for almost 5% of the industry’s sales in August.

We are eating out more? Sounds like a booming economy to me.