mbarrick | Jan. 8th, 2002

OK, I posted this as a comment in Trish's journal but thought I'd share it generally as well:

I get nothing except a notice that $79 is being applied to my student loan, the interest on which is a 100% non-refundable tax credit. How many people are being paid to shuffle this money around?

Really, think about this: I have my consulting business, for which I have to collect GST which I then have to remit to the government. I buy things with my money and I have to pay GST. I also have this big, fat student loan that I can't really afford to pay, so I make the smallest payments I can get away with and accrue a lot of interest. But that's OK, because the interest is a 100% percent non-refundable credit, which means I get to subtract the amount I pay in interest from my income (which, you recall, I must collect GST against). This makes my taxable income lower, so I qualify for the GST credit, $79, but I don't get it, I just get a letter in the mail saying they have applied it to my outstanding student loan, and it mostly goes toward interest, so *next* year I'll subtract about $70 of that $79 from my income and round we go again. Are you confused yet? Well, you should be because it makes no sense at all. Throw in the added irksome facts that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was supposed to be a temporary measure to pay down a national debt that has long since been paid back, that income tax (in Canada) was also supposed to be a temporary measure to pay for WWI but was likewise never repealed, that the Canadian bank that screwed me over and sent my loan into remission issues credit to the government to back the money I never see and charges the government interest on that credit, which is where that national debit came from in the first place, and that once screwed over the loan defaulted to a credit bureau hired by the government that is in fact not even Canadian owned so the 20% of my principle debt that they are collecting on behalf of the government ends up in Atlanta, Georgia...