Exactly; increasing the GST would be downright regressive, harming the most vulnerable and will fail to stimulate the economy in any way, shape or form.

Doing so just to pass a tax cut for high-income earners will just further exacerbate the wealth divide we are currently experiencing; wealthy people need to be taxed more, not less - to cover our budgetary deficits, broaden our safety nets and invest in public infrastructure like housing, renewable energy, and faster public transport.

Giving those that have enough even more, is just going to have them park those funds in property, rent-seeking and extracting more wealth from the under-class.

It is so counter-intuitive, I can only think that this was proposed by someone with a fetish for public self-destruction.

I unfortunately can’t find the article that discussed the idea, but someone (an economist? a think tank?) brought up the idea of raising/broadening GST, but then then just giving everyone a flat amount back. In their modeling it halved the net revenue from the GST change (though it was still a good chunk of money), but made it financially neutral for people at lower incomes.

Edit: Again drawing from uni-assignment-land, I really like the PBO’s discussion of Australia’s tax mix: https://www.pbo.gov.au/about-budgets/budget-insights/budget-explainers/tax-mix/characteristics-different-taxes

Chapter 3 in the PDF has a great discussion about tradeoffs of different taxes, with both Figure 3-1 (near the start) and Table 3-1 (at the end) having some great insights if you’re not well-versed in those design tradeoffs (i.e., almost everyone). Here’s a copy of that first chart for easier reference: https://fedia.io/media/a9/3c/a93ca8c1bc7fea26f47b9063d55a175d04c0a846d69a4a66d240808675841e34.webp

Of course efficiency (which this figure shows) doesn’t mean equity (which the chapter also discusses), hence ideas like the flat offset to balance it out.