The efficiency of income versus consumption taxes

Colby Cosh, in his Macleans gig, examines the pro and con arguments for Stephen Harper's plan to reduce the GST:

Stephen Harper's proposed GST cut has been one of the most fascinating alchemical elements of this election campaign. It is normally a habit of Conservative leaders to pay close attention to the informed advice of economists and to comply remorselessly with the laws of the market that the other parties deem "savage and uncaring." Yet here we have a Conservative leader quarterbacking a tax proposal against near-uniform objections from economists. Liberals and New Democrats are taking the side of those economists, even though one of the chief economic objections to a GST cut is that it is a welcome regressive element in a tax system that is too progressive for their margin-obsessed tastes. (This is something you are not going to hear Jack Layton say out loud.) And there have been further strange sideshows, like that of the National Post's Terence Corcoran getting into a scrape with the Fraser Institute. Not something you see every day.

The caveat that most economists like all tax cuts cannot be repeated often enough: they aren't opposed to trimming the GST in isolation — they would merely prefer that the same amount of revenue came out of the income-tax system. Most of them, I daresay, will be voting Conservative anyway. Personally, I regard the thumbnail political argument that Harper presents for his GST cut — it's a highly visible form of tax relief that will, practically, be much harder to reverse later — as a knockout blow.

I'm not an economist, although I do sometimes read economics articles for entertainment value. I had to give Colby credit . . . it's not often you find the concepts of uncounted deadweight loss and inefficiencies of allocation worked into a typical election blog post.