Keep it simple stupid

To no one's great surprise after the media reports of the last couple of days, the Ontario budget brought down by the McGuinty government today instituted a health care premium to raise revenue for, you guessed it, the health care system.

I'm not going to bother getting excited about the overall increase in taxes this represents along with the increase to sin taxes and user fees for things like driver's licence renewals. Aside from the fact that it wouldn't do me any good to complain, I expected to get hit one way or another. Even if the tax cuts made by the previous Tory governments were feasible in the long run, they were implemented too quickly at the same time that those governments mismanaged in other ways. Something had to give somewhere.

But I am going to chime in alongside Andrew Spicer and ask why McGuinty didn't just raise income taxes rather than creating a separate premium for health care. It's not like the money doesn't come from the same source: the taxpayer. He's just made things more complicated not only for government, but for employers who have to deduct the thing from employees' pay cheques. Had he just tweaked the income tax rate up, he could have reduced it again if the opportunity presented itself.

Of course I know the answer: during the election campaign McGuinty made an ill-advised commitment not to raise income taxes and I suppose he feels he can play games with semantics when it comes time to try and find a promise he did keep in the next election campaign. But it's not like he's really fooling anyone here and it's not like he'll avoid any political fallout for the approach he's taken. He's just made life more complicated for everyone without any real gain for anyone, including himself.