Learning from history

It’s exciting to hear that we may be getting a sales tax holiday by mid-December till mid-February here in Canada.  Who likes paying taxes!  Since the recent announcement by the Federal government about their plans to suspend the GST for two months for certain goods and services, there’s been a great deal of buzz about what it means.  Of course, the stated purpose is to help with making life more affordable, though the some of the choices of items for GST exemption for the two months are somewhat curious – liquor, restaurant meals, Christmas trees.   One economist looking at this plan wrote, “I wish we’d learn from history.  Tax holidays seldom work.”  It made me curious, and sent me on a pathway of researching the history of tax holidays.  It turns out that tax holidays go back to 1980 when Michigan and Ohio legislated short term suspension of tax for automobiles.  The idea caught on, so that more and more states followed suit.  However, by 1996, governments were beginning to rethink the strategy.  Instead of helping the poor, the tax holidays hardly impacted the unaffordability that people struggled with.  The administration of such tax holidays was a nightmare for retailers who had to change systems and pricing, so much so that the extra costs were passed on to the consumer.  Further, since taxes represented the usual source of income for governments, short tax holidays of just a few days ran into millions of dollars in cost, leading to increases in taxes to make up the shortfall.

As I considered this, the passage of Scripture that came to mind was from Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church as he pointed them to the Old Testament – a largely Gentile church in the prosperous heart of the Roman empire had many things to learn from God’s dealings with a few thousand Jews leaving the slavery of Egypt.  “These things,” Paul wrote as he recounted the history of Israel, “happened to them as an example for us; they were written down for our instruction, who live at the culmination of these spiritual lessons” (1 Corinthians 10:11).  What Paul simply points us to is how God deals with our spiritual wanderings.  Times may change, but God never does.  Someone once corrected the common adage that says, “History always repeats itself” by reminding us, “People repeat themselves throughout history because we don’t learn from history.”  The results of our impending tax holiday here in Canada are a story to be told in our own history as a country.  But the greater lesson is what we ought to learn as the people of God as we read both the Old Testament and the New with an open heart that says, “Lord, teach me how to live life today.”   May we not only learn from history but from the Word of God.  Remember:  times may change, but God never does.