Blessed by the Potato

Good idea: Set up a battery deposit-return system to ensure that the ubiquitous toxic devils are returned and recycled properly, rather than going into a landfill. Particularly handy when properly recycling them is a major pain in the ass (no blue box collection; return depot is not technically in the city where I live, nor open at convenient times) — thankfully some retailers (e.g.: Best Buy) are starting to accept batteries and electronics for recycling. While we’re at it, let’s bump that beer bottle deposit up by an order of magnitude.

Bad idea: Set up a battery deposit-return system for Toronto only. This isn’t like driving hours to take your giant load of pop cans to Quebec for a nickel each: there are a lot of people who live really close to Toronto. And while Toronto is a big city, I don’t think it’s quite big enough to warrant making the battery manufacturers stamp “return for refund in Toronto” on the batteries destined for the Toronto market, but not the 905 market. As if Toronto didn’t have enough budget troubles…

As a grad student with an eclectic science background, I get asked a lot of random science questions. Today, John said that I should have a whole website where I just answer them. Already having a website, I instead decided to just add a category to my already prolific array of post categories where I can give them a go. If you have any questions you’d like me to take a stab at, feel free to ask in the comments or fire me off an email. So, here’s John P’s question:

“So, you know those experiments where you can split water with a high magnetic field of 11 Tesla or so, the Moses effect, how high a field would you need to just totally rip apart your body?”

Well, that effect of magnetic fields on the diamagnetic water molecules in your body is actually fairly weak. Even at those very high field strengths the force of the effect was just enough to counter balance gravity (likewise for the levitating frog experiment). Since our bodies are well equipped to handle forces on the same order of magnitude as gravity, it’s really not a concern. (After all, we don’t fall apart when we flip around and stand on our heads, or get some G-forces on a rollercoaster!)

The GST cut was perhaps one of the worst ways to cut taxes for a large number of reasons. Consumption taxes are, to my thinking, better than income taxes, especially mild ones like our sales taxes (to try to fund the entire government budget from consumption taxes would get ridiculous). Plus, the GST was actually pretty progressive: essentials like rent, some groceries, and drugs don’t have GST applied to them. People with low incomes can file for a GST rebate to cover what GST they might pay on other items. And cutting the GST, especially in two separate small cuts, was a waste of effort as countless retail transactions and software had to be retuned.

A paltry gift to Canadians to begin with (especially in low-to-middle class), a recent report by CBC Marketplace shows that for many things we buy there is no savings to be had from the GST cut. At least, not for consumers. When the GST was cut, many retailers instead opted to keep the old prices and pocket the difference in the GST. Some of that was out of the convenience of round numbers: vending machines and parking meters don’t deal with pennies, and movie/concert tickets do tend to come out to round numbers (not that it really matters since so many of them go on plastic)…

All that talk about saving pennies though, and I’m reminded of recent discussions about the merit of continuing to mint the one-cent coins. I don’t even think many transactions would need to be rounded to the nearest nickel for quite a while — the half-life of pennies seems to be quite long, so we could probably count on a fairly healthy supply of them for another decade or two after they stop minting them (assuming the copper thieves don’t get them all).

Recently the opposition parties passed a bill from the Liberals making RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan) contributions tax-deductable, as RRSP contributions are. This was a huge gift to parents of kids who are college/university-bound, so much so that it threatened to overshadow the recent TFSA gift unveiled by the cons. In full-on “pay attention to meeeee” pre-election kitty mode, the cons couldn’t just seem to let that stand. So now they’ve threatened to turn it into yet another confidence motion. These kids are seriously itching for an election, and have been for some time now.

Under current rules, there is no immediate tax reduction for RESP contributions, which are allowed to compound free of capital-gains levies. Instead, the government matches a small percentage of parents’ contributions up to a maximum of $7,200 over the lifetime of the plan.

I’m actually a little torn on this issue. On the one hand, this is a really nice tax gift to parents and something that will help further the affordability of higher education for people that… well… could probably afford it anyway. On the other hand, this is getting to be too generous. The RESP already allows money put away for education to compound tax-free, and when withdrawn are taxed in the hands of the student (who is often in a lower tax bracket than the parent) and contributions get some matching money tossed in by the government to boot. Adding a tax deduction on top of that makes it hands-down the best place to put your money if you have a university-bound child.

I feel dirty for potentially agreeing with something the dirty, crooked, heartless cons might say, but I think that this tax break for RESPs might have gone too far. Of course, I’m not all that concerned with Flaherty putting the blame for losing the surplus on it — he’s blown far more money on far less worthy causes — but rather because I fear for the future of higher education, especially if the cons get another term. This improvement to the RESP (and lost tax revenue from the deductions) would give them just the sort of flimsy cause they need to proclaim that getting a university education is more affordable now, and cut back on government support, letting tuitions rise. This would of course hurt the low-income students who don’t have RESPs the most (for the rest, it may be zero-sum), and be a serious bummer to those who get advanced degrees and have to pay for extra years of tuition beyond what their parents might have saved for…

On the gripping hand, “Canada’s New Government” is being ridiculously juvenile by making yet another piece of legislation a matter of confidence. I can only hope that when the election eventually happens (we’ve had so many false starts in the last two years that I’ve stopped expecting anything) that the cons get soundly trounced.

Edit: What I’m trying to say here is that the tax relief for the RESP is really only going to help those families that already could save for their children’s education, it’s not really going to make higher education more affordable for everyone. Since this is going to cost the government in lost tax revenue, I think that money would be better spent in direct tuition relief or in a straightforward beefing up of the matching grants for RESP contributions.

While I don’t usually like to hit things just to try to shake them up into working, I’ve found percussive maintenance to be particularly handy of late. Both my computers at work and at home have some fans that are getting buzzy and annoying, particularly at start up. A couple of quick bangs on the case and they seem to settle back onto their bearings and quiet down. And the security light, which has given us no end of grief, has gone on the fritz and is now only turning on a few nights a month seemingly at random. I gave the light detector box a good bang after sliding my way through the icy parking lot in the dark tonight, and what do you know: the light comes on.

In other news, someone tried to hack the blog here today. Thankfully, they were unsuccessful (through no effort of my own), though I have no idea why someone would want to bother with a little old site like mine.