I am not sure what’s worse. The province for trying to massively exaggerate its small business tax break or the Times & Trash-script for printint it – without even thinking for a minute about the absurdity of what they are saying.
In the Times & Trash-script yesterday, there was a headline stating that Tax cuts save small business owners $17,000. The article’s first paragraph reads as follows:
N.B. small business owners should save about $17,000 a year in taxes when changes in the upcoming provincial budget are enacted.
Now, anyone with half a brain would realize that this statement is just plain stupid. There are roughly 20,000 small businesses in New Brunswick and if they all, on average, saved $17,000 per year in taxes that would take $340 million out of the tax revenues for the province (for the T&T that’s $17,000 X 20,000 or don’t you have a calculator over there?).
I read this article through several times to see if I was missing something and it seems that they are either trying to confuse people or they don’t even know what they are saying.
The bottom line is that the last small business tax cut the province made saved the average small business about the price of a cup of coffee a day and the one they are proposing now will be even less.
Later on in the article they talk about the New Brunswick Small Business Investor Tax Credit which will supposedly provide a 30 per cent non-refundable personal income tax credit of up to $15,000 per year (for investments of up to $50,000 per person) to eligible investors in N.B. small businesses.
If their $17,000 in savings includes this investment tax credit, then the Times & Transcript is just outright misleading people. If all the 20,000 small businesses invested $50,000 in their business (on average) that would mean a billion dollars in new private investment. Yeah, right.
If the Times & Trash-script wants to be the propaganda arm for the provincial government, so be it. But they owe it to the viewing public to at least be honest.