Friday, November 25, 2011

Short Takes: Getting Married on the Cheap and more

The highest bid so far in the bloggers for charity auction for a post on this blog (see here for details) is now at $100. Keep those bids coming!

Squawkfox explains how she got married on the cheap (part 1 and part 2).

Jeremy Cato at the Globe and Mail rants about taxes on drivers and how Ontario may be adding a carbon tax. I'm no fan of taxes, but we need higher taxes on gasoline consumption. This will stimulate private-sector green energy solutions that we desperately need. There could be offsetting income tax deductions to make the change revenue-neutral.

Wealthy Boomer interviews Charles Ellis about the high cost of mutual funds in Canada.

Big Cajun Man has a picture showing how he is keeping critters out of his attic.

The Blunt Bean Counter asks whether Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is more deserving of being placed on a pedestal.

Retire Happy Blog doesn't think the new PRPPs are necessary.

Scott Ronalds at Steadyhand catches Investors Group sweeping some bad mutual fund results under the rug.

4 comments:

  1. Some time ago I proposed a planned, fluctuating, stepped gas tax, not sure if that was to the blog or somewhere else though. I'll try to find the link.

    Anyway, my thinking was that unpredictable gas prices were more painful than high gas prices, so the gas tax should fluctuate to counter the changes in oil prices, with a planned increase over the years (e.g., if we started at $1.20/L this year, next year we'd know the price of gas would be $1.30/L, whether that was due to the oil price increasing and the taxes decreasing, or the taxes ratcheting up to take in the slack).

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  2. The critters are still removed for now, but every once in a while there is a noise that makes me wonder if they are just "laying low".

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  3. @Potato: I'd be concerned that oil companies would be smarter than bureaucrats and could game such a system. Being able to raise prices and knowing that taxes would drop to compensate would be irresistible.

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  4. It's far from a perfect plan :)

    It also wouldn't work in a large market -- Ontario might be able to pull it off, but all of Canada couldn't. In part because you need the "free market" neighbours to help determine the tax rate, and in part because some price spikes are due to supply/demand imbalances, and you can't necessarily remove the demand buffer of higher prices (unless you also put in quotas or are willing to deal with shortages).

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