SK: Wall the Subsidy Killer - Great Quote

Author: Colin Craig 2012/04/05

Those following the Saskatchewan Film Tax Credit issue might find the quote below from Brad Wall of interest. I saw while doing some research on the issue and thought the Premier was bang on.

In fact, it covers off a lot of what the CTF has been saying for decades now - if special industry subsidies like the film tax credit really created all the economic benefits that proponents suggest...why doesn't every industry have one? The answer of course is that it's simply unaffordable for taxpayers to fund every industry and the benefits aren't usually what they're cracked up to be. In any case, on with the show...here's the quote:

"I’ve heard the arguments say, well but there’s all these spinoffs. Mr. Speaker, if we applied the logic that we’ve heard from members opposite and others...if we applied the same logic that these tax grants are good because of the spinoffs that occur, we’d have them in every other industry. There would be an infinite amount of benefit. And people say, well they’re cost-neutral. If they’re cost-neutral, and they create a 6 to 1 benefit in the economy, why aren’t they applied to every other sector?"

People have said, well there’s incentives in the potash industry. Well there may be if they do certain things like they expand in the province, but there’s still a net tax paid to the people of this province for their resource. And by the way, it’s sunsetted. That tax incentive ends by definition. And when it ends, they pay the highest royalties in the world, and billions of dollars have been invested and thousands of jobs have been created, and this subsidy or the tax incentive — a real credit, not a grant — ends. I asked the industry when we met with them with the minister, when could we stop this tax credit, this grant thing?

When is the industry going to be at the point where it doesn’t need it anymore? Because that’s the difference between this and other tax measures. Never, they said, as long as someone else is in the bidding war. Mr. Speaker, the logic of, well you should do it because it’s cost-neutral and there’s spinoffs, it doesn’t hold, Mr. Speaker. It simply doesn’t hold. We’ve seen the numbers, and it doesn’t hold, otherwise we’d apply it to every other single industry from restaurants to the service sector, to financial services, to agriculture, to manufacturing, to everything. Mr. Speaker, that argument we just fundamentally disagree with, and so we’ve made a difficult decision."

http://www.premier.gov.sk.ca/Default.aspx?DN=094dd899-a3c6-4d1e-a680-15302781470d

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SK: Wall the Subsidy Killer - Great Quote

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