Sales Tax Proposal in Alberta Will Take Money from Working People and Damage the Economy

Recently, various pundits of differing political views have called for an Alberta sales tax to increase the government’s revenue. This proposal is not in the interests of the working people or the economy. Sales taxes mean less of the social value workers produce goes to the people and more goes to the financial oligarchy.

Proponents argue that a sales tax is necessary because the province can no longer depend on fluctuating resource revenues to fund social programs and, anyway, every other province and the federal government already have sales taxes. These are not defensible or rational arguments.

In this era of the interconnected socialized economy of industrial mass production, all forms of individual taxation such as income taxes, sales taxes and home property taxes are pay-the-rich schemes to funnel money away from working people and into the coffers of the rich, generating greater inequality and damaging the economy. Modern forms of taxation require governments to claim money directly from the economy from the social value workers produce in the form of goods and services, and not indirectly from the working people and their claim on what belongs to them by right.

An Alberta sales tax would strengthen the power and destructive control of the financial oligarchy over the economy to the detriment of the working people as is the case in the rest of Canada. To argue the Alberta government needs a sales tax to fund social programs and humanize the social and natural environment because of an insecure resource-based economy is disingenuous. To argue in such a manner denies the modern principle that all people have rights by virtue of being human. Fulfillment of their rights should not, and does not, depend on taxation. Further, to argue in such a manner deflects attention away from the necessity for a new direction for the Alberta economy towards a socially responsible all-sided development of resource extraction, manufacturing, social programs, public services and infrastructure.

Social programs, public services and infrastructure to guarantee the rights of all are an integral part of the modern all-sided economy and need to be organized in a planned and socially responsible manner. Their existence should not depend on any form of taxation but flourish as necessary activity in a modern economy and society. For example, programs to guarantee the people’s right to education and health care should not depend on or be funded from taxes but directly from revenue collected from all the other enterprises in the economy that employ and need a continuous supply of healthy and educated working people.

The issue is political and depends on who decides and who controls the direction of the economy and society: the working people in ways that favour them or the financial oligarchy in ways that favour their narrow private interests.

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This article was published in:

Renewal Update No. 26, October 4, 2019

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Sales Tax Proposal in Alberta Will Take Money from Working People and Damage the Economy