http://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rjrfn/the_budget_5_b...
Amusingly this particular cut was actually a private member proposal from the NDP (the left-most mainstream party).
SR&ED is [reorganized.]
If Canada wants to encourage innovation, they should set up a system which rewards people for doing new and innovative things, not a system which rewards people for being good at filling out forms.
>The changes include a cut in 2014 to 15 per cent from 20 per in the tax credit rate and a restriction on which expenditures count toward the credit. For example, capital expenditures – buildings, equipment and product prototypes – will no longer be eligible. The amount of eligible overhead expenses and subcontracted R&D will also be reduced.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/gr...
Bad news for Canada's tech innovators.
Not being up on Canadian politics, I won't take a position on whether or not that is correct, except that the US is in the same boat and I would like it if they would get rid of our penny.
I know there are people who say it's traditional and whatnot, but I don't see anyone clamoring to bring back two or three cent pieces.
So, the greatest PR windfall for the Conservatives will have come from their biggest ideological and political opponents. It's mildly entertaining.
That said, as the Conservatives have a majority (>50% of seats in the House of Commons), there's no chance that the budget would fail, triggering a vote of non-confidence and a general election. So it wasn't a vote that had any real importance politically, but it will serve to generate public goodwill, which they could use. The Conservatives currently only have a majority because of the ineptitude of the Liberals and Quebecers' fatigue with the Bloc Quebecois. Most Canadians are to the left of the Conservatives, have only warily entrusted them with power, and only then because the center-left liberals couldn't get their shit together at election time.
Maybe an example something like Ralph Nader suggesting something and Nixon doing it.
Or more modern George W Bush following the advice of Jon Stewart.
Anyway (the far?) right agreeing with the left is odd.
But do you think no one notices the other changes because they're ditching the penny? That is preposterous.
> It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?
It's an extremely common practice to release unpopular information, or pass unpopular bills when something else is bound to hit the front page.
A tenth of a dollar is enough precision for any realistic transaction in the United States.
The transition was straight forward and I didn't hear any complaints.
Something just feels wrong about rounding. The customer would always get screwed. They should solve this problem by using the federal sales tax to round up/down. $1.25 + 5% = 5¢ of tax instead of 6.25¢.
That said, it would make sense for merchants to round down for cash purchases. It would be a tiny incentive to use cash rather than credit cards (which cost the merchant 2-4%)
The only people who could really try to steal pennies from everyone would be supermarkets, and they would face the problem that it's too broadly peaked -- people going to the supermarket will buy between two and twenty things, and modulo 5 that sum is not easy to predict or steer.
I see nothing but confusion there.
$1.25 + $0.05 = $1.30. After rounding, $1.30.
$1.25 + $0.0625 = $1.3125. After rounding, $1.30.
> It would be a tiny incentive to use cash rather than credit cards (which cost the merchant 2-4%)
Dealing with cash instead of credit cards is also a similarly percentaged inconvenience - that's why they're getting rid of the penny in the first place!
Wouldn't work except in Alberta, NWT, the Yukon, and Nunavut. Anywhere else, the provincial sales tax would knock it back off a multiple of 5.
IIRC, some post office vending machines will take pennies, because they can sell stamps one at a time.
According to some inflation figures I quickly found on the internet, a (US dollar) penny had a hundred years ago 23 times as much buying power as a penny nowadays. That means the smallest denomination was then was worth almost as much as a quarter is now! People could get by without smaller coins then and they should be able to work perfectly fine now without worthless pennies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfpenny_(British_decimal_coin...
Until it's a legislated requirement (and boy do I wish it were), we're probably not going to see it very often other than with fungible cash-only vendors.
My very first (very primitive) public facing webpage was dedicated to abolishing the Canadian penny. Good riddance!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
(Come to think of it, doesn't the US military use a lot more metric system than the general population. If so, this would be a good reason to increase the military since it would appear to be the only way progress happens!)
I gather that's post application of sales tax.
Australia hasn't had pennies since the sixties and we still use phrases like "in for a penny, in for a pound."