Sunday, April 3, 2011

If Harper aims for majority, promising tax credits on tax hikes ain’t gonna do it

If Harper aims for majority, promising tax credits on tax hikes ain’t gonna do it

One of the budget highlights Harper singled out last week called attention to a tax credit to businesses to cover the extra costs of his own employment insurance premium hike. A tax credit for his tax hike. Thanks. That ought to go down in history.
So.... one would have to assume that Mr. Akin was AGAINST any changes to Employment Insurance which were implemented last spring. Of course, a search of his blog comes up with crickets. It's a reality that the more people that get benefits from a group insurance plan, such as EI is set up to be, the higher the premiums for everyone are. It costs extra money for people to sit on Pogey an extra year without contributing anything extra. It costs extra money for people to be eligible for full EI after 450 working hours. The money had to come from somewhere.

But here's the math - 1 new hire cancels out the EI increase on employers for 20 employees. For large companies, all they have to do is rehire the people they were going to rehire anyways this year, and not only do they get a credit on their EI premiums, but it also serves to encourage employers to hire more people. Some might call that encouragement stimulus.

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