Essential Policy Intelligence | Conseils indispensables sur les politiques FISCAL AND TAX COMPETITIVENESS The 8 Percent Solution: A Sensible Tax Compromise for Albertans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alberta’s long-term fiscal troubles stem from rapidly growing expenses; a trend that existed long before the recent onset of flood-related recovery costs. Financial trouble has led to calls for a broad-based sales tax in Alberta, and strong opposition to that proposal. Most proponents favour a revenue-neutral tax swap that would see a sales tax introduced alongside a decrease in income taxes. Such a switch, they say, would lead to greater saving, investment, and result in less volatile government revenues. Those opposed are concerned about shifting costs onto lower- and middle-income Albertans, and the loss of Alberta’s identity as the only province without a sales tax. We propose a solution that would break the deadlock between the two sides of the debate. We recommend Alberta introduce an 8 percent HST and lower its personal income tax rate to 8 percent, which would be revenue neutral. By introducing a generous HST credit for low- and middle-income earners, our proposal would also minimize the adverse distributional effects of the HST, while creating a more tax-competitive economy. On January 24, 2013, the Government of Alberta brought together a group of experts to debate potential fiscal solutions to plunging resource revenues and a growing budget deficit.1 A divide formed among panelists between those who were in favour of introducing a provincial sales tax and those who were against it. The authors thank members of the C.D. Howe Institute’s Fiscal and Tax Competitiveness Council, Robert D. Brown, Stuart Landon, Constance Smith, colleagues at the C.D. Howe Institute, and anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback and suggestions. The opinions in this E-brief are those of the authors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".