Taxes and tax cuts
At the risk of insulting a generation of 4-year-olds, it's time we had an adult conversation in Canada about taxes and public services.
Most 4-year-olds have figured out that when you go to the store to get something you want, you have to be prepared to pay for it. Yet Canada's political leaders and business interest lobbyists would rather spit nickels than admit this basic fact. It's a problem with all political leaders and parties – not just those I disagree with.
Imagine a low-income family working hard day after day to make ends meet. Both the parents in the family have full-time, full-year jobs, although they are the low-wage jobs that are all too common in Canada.
Both parents get raises that boost their gross family earnings by $6,370 a year. And the final result of their efforts to succeed? A loss of $213 in disposable income.
One of the scariest aspects of the current economic crisis is that its perpetrators have been by far its chief beneficiaries. Their barbaric neoliberal policies, disastrous financial practices, and subservient governments, far from being discredited, are being rewarded -- both financially and politically.
U.S. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously declared: “I don’t mind paying taxes. They buy me civilization.” I completely agree. But in the last 28 years, tax policies have been ever more biased in favour of powerful special interests which dominate our society and dispossess the poor: the unearned income of the rich, tax-evading corporations with teams of tax lawyers, and high-on-the hog business expenses.
The Conservative itch to cut government can't stay repressed for too
long, even when they are in government and in charge of a full-blown
economic crisis.
In mid-June, Finance Minister Flaherty went
off to meetings with the G8 talking up the idea that it was "time to
have a discussion on how to disengage from the fiscal stimulus." Last
week in Italy, Prime Minister Harper reluctantly agreed with other
world leaders that things were still too shaky to start cutting back on
government help.
On the surface, Enterprise Saskatchewan’s call for a 10 percent flat tax seems straightforward. Saskatchewan must engage in a “race-to-the-bottom” in order to compete with Alberta.
However, a cursory glance at other countries that have instituted their own flat tax proposals should be cause for concern.