absent.canadian

It’s Friday, thank god, and I was a little more stimulated than usual when I logged into my bank account.  A rather respectable sum, deposited last night from the coffers in Washington DC.

I’ve long been a proponent of education and healthcare and the stimulus payments got me thinking: instead of giving Americans enough to make a few minimum payments on their credit cards (something I’m sure will make a few people happy), why not do what our parents told us to do and invest it?

Sure.  They tell us it’s an investment.  Spend more, and the economy will thrive.  But there’s more to spending than knocking $600 off the Visa bill or buying a few new trinkets for the home, and I really wonder if this administration thinks past the next five minutes.

The IRS estimates that one hundred and thirty million households will get a check.  Even if everyone got the minimum $600, that still works out to seventy-eight BILLION dollars.  Divvy that up among the states, and we’re still talking over a BILLION dollars per state.

I bet we could build a lot of schools with a billion dollars.  And buy a lot of textbooks and pencils.  Heck, we could even spring for a few new computers.

And the best part?  Building new schools would create construction and infrastructure jobs, not to mention teaching jobs and support staff jobs.  The value of communities increases as the quality of the infrastructure increases.  The quality of education improves and we produce better citizens.

So which do you support?  A few dollars in our wallet, or an investment in our country?

Canadians are often branded as whiners, but Americans take the cake when it comes to complaining about taxes.  And seriously, I’m tired of hearing it.

This country is a bounty of cheap, low-taxed junk.  It’s also full of creditors who are all too willing to finance that junk for low monthly installments (and no payments until June of 2086).  In fact, it’s entirely possible to live like royalty in America, finance this lifestyle over the next four-hundred years, and pay a pittance of taxes for all of it.

Please understand that I have tremendous respect for the mantra “no taxation without representation”, and I agree that taxes need to be managed carefully and spent appropriately (something the United States and Canada are not particularly good at) … but I also think that people whine about it way too much in this country.

Take, for instance, a car purchase.  Let’s suppose this new car costs $20,000.  For the privilege of that purchase I’ll donate an additional $600 (which technically isn’t even sales tax – it’s a “highway use tax”) to the coffers of North Carolina.  That same purchase in Ontario would have resulted in a $2600 windfall for the government.  And we can make this comparison relatively easily, since the US dollar and the Canadian dollar are virtually at par right now.  In the UK, the same vehicle (based on the VAT percentage rate) would net Her Majesty about $4200 – give or take a bit, since nobody really understands how taxation works in the EEC (and there’s a good chance that they don’t, either).

We also enjoy a deluge of tax deductions.  The interest from my mortgage, for instance, is a healthy tax deduction that puts a good bit of money back in my pockets at the end of the year.  No such luck in Canada.

But going back to cars (which is much more interesting than houses).  Now that we’ve bought that $20,000 car and made some government richer, we need to fill the tank.

In the United States, 15 gallons of regular fuel will run me about $47, based on the prices I saw this morning.

That same tank in Canada will cost me $59.53 (converting back to USD, based on today’s exchange rate).

That same tank in London, England will cost an agonizing $120.  And in the Netherlands?  You’re better off just walking.

In fact, the United States has some of the cheapest gas in the world, outside of the oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

I could go on and on, but I won’t, because I don’t want to give the impression that Canadian are whiners.