Graham Tax Increases - The Never Ending Story

The Graham government has raised taxes again, this one with a special twist.

The executive dream team at NB Liquor, led by Dana Clendenning (currently under a cloud of a conflict-of-interest allegations), requested that the companies that sell wine to NB Liquor increase their prices.

That is correct, as loony as that sounds, NB Liquor asked to pay more. Well not really asked, they told them to pay more. We here at NB Conservative cannot understand this fact alone, but it gets worse. Much worse.

The reason they did what can only be described as an idiotic move, is that Team Graham is now selling tax-cut-mode, as opposed to the tax-increase-mode he was selling two years ago.

As Mr. Clendenning wanted to avoid being seen to increase taxes on New Brunswick consumers, to keep his rain-maker happy, the Team felt the best way to increase taxes on New Brunswickers was to share the loot with large, mainly foreign, wine companies.

This may take a pencil and some loose leaf paper (with lines), but keep with us. If you have a calculator on your phone, now is the time to get it out.


The Scenario:

You are the patronage appointment of a crown corporation in New Brunswick. You need to generate some cash to make your patron look better. And you want to travel to really, really nice wineries in beautiful countries, at no cost to yourself. Countries like Italy, where you can rent apartments to share with friends, who did not win the patronage lottery. Or France. Probably not Sweden, they do not produce much wine, and it is cold anyway.

If you just raise the mark-up like you have the past couple of years, it looks like you raised taxes, since the serfs cannot shop elsewhere for their goods. And remember, we are now in tax-cutting-mode, so increasing 'mark-up' looks quite a bit like 'taxes'.

You realize the markup on wine is 145% (really). A $10 increase in the case price NB Liquor pays turns into a $24.50 increase in the shelf price ($10 + $14.50).

Voila! an extra $24.50 per case!

But what you needed to do to accomplish this tax increase is give $10 per case to the wineries. Or 40.8% if you have the fancy calculator phone.

What is the difference you ask than just putting up the price, since people who drink wine are rich, snobby, Volvo-driving yuppies that can pay more? The difference is that if you think the Graham government can spend your money better than you (or anyone else's money for that matter) than why let them give 40.8% of the money to large wine companies in California, France, Australia, Chile and everywhere else NB Liquor buys wine.If you are a believer in higher taxes, we would guess you are not a believer in giving a large percentage to foreign multi-national corporations.

That is correct, in order to avoid looking like they raised taxes, the government of New Brunswick will give wine companies over $475,000 (based on projected annual wine revenue of $60,000,000)

So, our dream team at NB Liquor just gave almost half a million dollars to wine companies to avoid looking like they increased taxes.