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Taxes are always just taxes, dollars taken away from people by government

What about people who aren’t farmers? How much are carbon taxes going to cost them? It’s difficult to get a straight answer out of government, but reports say it will cost drivers 11.6 cents more per litre of gasoline and it will take an extra $50 per month away from people in B.C. And double that for folks in Nova Scotia who depend more on coal and oil for power and heat. Those are just preliminary estimates, of course, and it would be naïve to think that when governments get rolling, it won’t wind up costing more than expected.

For those who want to believe that these imposed carbon taxes are only meant to curb our deplorable behaviour, such as the sin of driving a fossil-fueled car, consider what’s happened in the state of Washington. There, the government cheered on environmentally conscious drivers who worked hard to reduce their use of gasoline. Citizens are car-pooling, moving to transit corridors and buying more fuel-efficient vehicles to skip paying at the pump. But then the government’s bean counters realized that all that reduced gasoline consumption could see gas tax revenues fall by 45 per cent in the next 18 years. So now the state is looking at exploring “road-usage fees,” also known as tolls, also known as taxes, to tax those who can’t be taxed for their carbon use.

The moral is this: Taxes are always just taxes, dollars taken away from people by government. The government — whether those elected or in the bureaucracy — is just a collection of well-paid people with varied political opinions and varied expertise who get to decide how to spend your money and alter your behaviour. And government will continue to grow and spread and demand more taxes — using any reason it can think of — until it is pruned back by fed-up ratepayers and voters.

Kris Sims is the B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.