Murphy's Logic: Reducing taxes sounds better than it is

Barely past the halfway point, Nova Scotia’s fall election campaign has become an unwitting metaphor for the season itself.

The political ground is already covered in a blanket of promises that have been dropping from the sky as fast as the autumn leaves. They’re also plentiful and “colourful” – orangey red and brown – as in the heaps of $50 and $100 bills it’s going to take to pay for them!

The most expensive are the promises to reduce the HST. The Liberals want to drop the tax by two percentage points, the PCs by one point, and the NDP more modestly by removing the tax from grocery store items, phone bills, the internet and heat pumps.

Tax money not collected is money that can’t be spent – at least not without creating a shortfall. The 2024-2025 budget estimate already forecasts a deficit of close to half-a-billion dollars. And that assumes increases in revenue from population growth, which is slowing, and federal transfer payments, which could change with a change in government.

At the same time, the parties are promising to further reduce income from things like hospital parking fees, bridge tolls and public transit. They talk about making these things “free”. But nothing provided by government is free; everyone pays for it. User fees are inherently fair, in that only people who use the services pay for them. There’s nothing to say there couldn’t be relief directed to those experiencing particular hardship – might be given a discount or an exemption – while others continue to pay.

While most would agree that inflation has made life much more difficult for many people, this seems a strange time to willingly give up hundreds of millions of dollars likely to be needed to deliver important services. It’s not as if health care has been “fixed” to everyone’s satisfaction, and there are still people sleeping outside alongside those piles of leaves.

Mind you, in politics, there is always the option of going deeper into debt, worrying about it later, or not at all, believing or at least suggesting that future growth will pay for the spending of the past. To this point, that kind of thinking or dreaming has produced a debt of about $17 billion in Nova Scotia.

Come springtime the leaves of fall will be raked or blown away. But the promises and the cost will still be there. And unlike the leaves, there won’t be a fresh crop of money growing on the trees.