Das Wohlbefinden der Unternehmen ist Kanadas teuerste Sucht
Das Wohlbefinden der Unternehmen ist Kanadas teuerste Sucht
2 Kommentare
Don’t forget the indirect subsidies like allowing all our regulatory bodies to be captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, allowing them to sue the Competition Bureau for (rarely) attempting to do its job, the toothless nature of consumer protection in general, and the low corporate tax rate.
The author here seems to think the government investment is „free money“. It isn’t. The Strategic Innovation Fund and the Canada Infrastructure Bank primarily „invests“ through below market rate loans.
I don’t have access to the loan terms here at all, but think about it like this:
You want a $20 million loan, you go to the bank and they’re offering say, 5% over 10 years. Your total interest payment would be $5.4 million. Government offers you 4% instead, thus, your total interest payment is $4.3 million.
The total subsidy is thus, not $20 million, but $1.1 million.
Besides, according to the latest SIF report:
>The government assesses the performance of the program based largely on the objectives and results presented below. As an example, one of the original objectives set for SIF targeted a 3:1 ratio of private investments leveraged through public support. The above-mentioned results suggest that the actual ratio is closer to 9:1, which is significantly greater than the original objective
So if the government loans you $20 million, and it spurs $180 million in investment. The tax revenue they’d get from the additional investment is more than enough to pay for whatever below market rate loan they offered.
Also: The Strategic Innovation Fund has invested a total of $10.4 billion across 143 projects since 2017. That’s an average of $1.3 billion a year. Even if every single cent was pissed down the drain, that’s still less than a quarter of a percent of the federal budget (last year’s budget had total expenditure of $538 billion), hardly Canada’s „most expensive addiction“.