• 7 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2025

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  • We should have just increased GST a small amount across the board instead of creating a tax that had such a concentrated impact on businesses from the country that is our largest trading partner.
    There are these things that Canada does to protect industry or raise funds, but there are consequences for the quite convoluted way we go about it. VATs are a normal thing around the world, but we engineer these weird solutions to try to hide our protectionism.
    For example instead of raising taxes and subsidizing the news media as a public good, we made (certain) Silicon Valley companies pay (certain) publishers for linking to them. Facebook then said it just won’t link to them and now there’s no news on Facebook. This was a backfire.
    Instead of GST we could have taxed lots of things, fiber internet plans, advertising or digital services across the board, many people warned against the Trudeau era bills, they caused a rift with Biden too, and we’ve now lost the game of chicken and wasted 4 years on something we had to tear up.















  • I’m a person who doesn’t like private ownership of housing much, and personally wants to see co-ops as the predominant form of housing… But: Fuck these think tanks like IRIS, adding net new housing units helps as studied by actual academics in published in academic journals
    Social housing is great, private housing, co-ops housing, housing is great. Choose your preferred one and then support making it easier to build more. Attacking the other types? You’re drinking economic ivermectin if you think housing supply doesn’t help reduce the overall price of housing. We’re way too deep into a housing crisis, short literally millions of units, and instead of pushing for (say) automated upzoning on sites with non-market units to increase supply these guys are firing off blog posts which will be used by NIMBYS to undermine housing developments across the city.







  • Paige@piefed.caOPtoLemmy@lemmy.mlGetting Started on Lemmy
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    22 days ago

    Perhaps you could write up the sort of guide you are talking about so I can see what you mean? I haven’t found people respond well to hitting them with much more than this upfront, and they get anxious when you don’t give them some specific recommendations to get started.