It's no secret, there are a lot of struggling families in Cochrane this Christmas. Most families have faced salary cuts, reduced hours or even layoffs. Our municipal government needs to figure out how we can help.
It's no secret, there are a lot of struggling families in Cochrane this Christmas. Most families have faced salary cuts, reduced hours or even layoffs. Our municipal government needs to figure out how we can help. I think the best thing we can do is to let you keep more of your money. When we were drafting our budget I felt we should be delaying some of the less important capital projects, freezing government salaries, and giving you a big tax cut. Even if council couldn't stomach the salary freezes, we had a real opportunity to give you a small tax cut just by pulling out a few silly expenditures, like $70,000 for new chairs. Unfortunately, even that idea was dismissed. Those opposed to cutting taxes argued that a 0.5 per cent tax cut is basically the same as 0.8 per cent tax hike. It was said that families won't notice the small amount of money. Some even suggested that fighting for such an insignificant tax cut was only about looking good politically. I completely disagree.
Cutting your taxes isn't about letting everyone keep a little extra money for Christmas presents. It's also about stimulating real growth in our private sector. Most politicians seem to have forgotten that the best way to sustainably grow the economy is to expand the private sector, not the government. Every dollar the government doesn't take from you stays in the economy to be used shopping, saving and investing. All of these things generate profit, and that profit gets reinvested in our community. On the flip side, when the government takes your money, we spend it on profitless projects like wave pools and a Visitors' Centre. Instead of generating profits each year, these projects always need more tax dollars to stay operational. That's why government spending usually doesn't create wealth, it destroys it.
It's important that families and businesses get to keep more of their money, even if it's only a small amount. If we can just cut taxes ever so slightly each year, the economic growth will compound annually. The private sector will firstly benefit from the small percentage of a direct tax cut, plus it will grow by the exponential private spending and reinvestment that will occur. With this compounding effect, even small consistent tax cuts over a long period of time can create tremendous opportunities in our economy.
Cutting taxes isn't just about politics. Continually raising taxes every single year isn't sustainable. The government simply cannot demand a bigger slice of pie every year, because eventually we are going to run out of pie. That's why I won't vote for tax hikes.
Merry Christmas, Councillor Morgan Nagel
