[andyt]

No, that's just the wankers spouting their idiocity. It makes them feel better. Just the servants supporting their masters.

[OnTheIce]

andyt andyt:

Well to be fair, higher taxes would hit the rich harder. It's like the guy who was asked why he robbed banks, said "that's where the money is." Since the rich game the system to that they get by far the largest share of the profits, seems only right they pay the most in taxes. They still have way more left over than ordinary working people do. And I wouldn't raise the tax rate on the working poor, or actually I would increase the personal deduction significantly, so low income earners pay no tax at all.

In the case of income splitting, it helps well off people. Doesn't do much for the rich, since it's capped at $2000, chump change for them.

But for actually paying for the things we need in Canada, we would have to do more than just increase taxes for the top earners - we would all have to chip in, except the lowest group. No sense taking any of their money to make their life even harder, it just costs more in health and crime to be worth it.

They don't just pay the most, the wealthy pay a disproportionate amount of tax compared to everyone else.

Lots of talk about fairness and equality but that fairness and equality doesn't seem to apply if you've done well for yourself.

Considering the well-off people pay far more than their fair share of taxes, what's the problem allowing them to keep some more of their earned money?

[andyt]

Why is it unfair that the people who earn a disproportionate amount of money pay a disproportionate amount of taxes? As I said, they still have way more left over than we do. Guess I'm just pitiless.

[BeaverFever]

Is it fair that they get privileged direct access to all kinds of public policy makers and decision makers that are inaccessible to the general public? Is it fair that they use the civil courts at will to advance their own interests and bully others with threats of lawsuits when the average citizen can barely afford a lawyer to defend their rights at all? Is it fair that when their children cross paths with police officers they get driven home and let go with a warning instead of arrested, beaten to a pulp and/or shot 41 times while reaching for their ID? Is it fair that when these kids rarely face criminal charges, the judge can use family wealth and social status to hand out a reduced sentence (on the basis that the family wealth means a has high potential for a bright future). Sounds to me like membership has it privileges for the high tax club.

[OnTheIce]

andyt andyt:

Why is it unfair that the people who earn a disproportionate amount of money pay a disproportionate amount of taxes? As I said, they still have way more left over than we do. Guess I'm just pitiless.

People shouldn't be punished for being successful.

They earned that money. You don't get to judge how much is too much.

[andyt]

Sounds like you think you do. Why you but not me?

[OnTheIce]

andyt andyt:

Sounds like you think you do. Why you but not me?

nope. Just you setting the bar for how much success is too much.

[BeaverFever]

Income Tax Act is a law like any other, no less legitimate than the Criminal Code. In fact has a longer history since tax collection predates ancient criminal law.

[JaredMilne]

Lots of people love to talk about cutting taxes...

...but when the time comes to discuss what kinds of services we should give up to keep the books balanced, they become strangely mute.

We expect governments at all levels to do various kinds of things-provide Internet service to rural communities; provide court systems to punish criminals and allow people and businesses to resolve their disputes fairly; maintain our national parks; equip our military and provide support to soldiers when they return to civilian life; and subsidize everything from horse racing to recreational facilities to resource development through various grants, royalty relief programs, and so forth.

And the benefits are often very tangible. People who get medical care can return to work that much sooner, and people and businesses are both saved from having to eat those medical costs the way they often are in the U.S.; tax breaks for TV and other artistic productions can generate various economic spin-offs, while smaller businesses in some competitive industries like oil and gas can thrive and create more jobs than they would otherwise; a reliable highway system allows for the efficient transportation of people and goods, and so forth.

Unfortunately, politicians like Stephen Harper have tried to pretend that we can cut taxes as much as we like without ever having to give up any kind of services or subsidies. The late Jim Flaherty bragged that the Conservatives did not balance the budget on the backs of Canadians or the programs they relied on, while Rob Ford assured Torontonians that there would be "no service cuts, guaranteed."

Unfortunately, despite their lies and bullshit, this is exactly what happened. I've written before about the many different ways in which the Harper government balanced the budget on the backs of Canadians and harmed frontline services. Now, more recently we have reports about morale at Veterans Affairs being in the toilet alongside reduced staffing levels, and reports of people having to call multiple times to reach the Canada Revenue Agency, and getting wrong information when they manage to get through. Anecdotally, I can also cite the multiple times I had to call before I could get through to Service Canada when I was looking for work a couple of years ago and I needed to talk to someone about my EI claims.

In my experience, whenever people talk about cutting government funding, they always seem to focus on cutting funding to things that won't benefit them personally, without ever talking about how much of their own gravy they're willing to give up. Hardly anybody seems willing to talk about whether they're willing to have less maintained roads, to wait longer to have a court date or an income tax refund, whether they're willing to have fewer police officers on patrol or less equipment for firefighters, if they're willing to have campgrounds and parks be less maintained, if they're willing to have to eat more of the costs for fixing up the local hockey rink themselves, and so forth. Are a lot of the conservative supporters here in Alberta, for instance, willing to give up the various relief and rebate programs available to oil and gas companies, for instance?

That's one side of the issue. The other, of course, is that conservative political projects need to be paid for with tax dollars as much as progressive ones do. I'm baffled, for instance, as to where Stephen Harper thinks he'll find money for re-equipping the military, expanding the prison population with his changes to the Criminal Code, and fighting ISIS while also extending support to veterans and paying down the $140 billion-plus in extra debt he's accumulated, without either breaking his promises about not cutting frontline services even more than he already has, or extending the deficit yet again. A year and a half ago, Jim Flaherty was assuring us the budget would be balanced by 2015... and now Harper is telling us we'll have a deficit of almost $2 billion this fiscal year.

I support all of these things that Harper's doing that I mentioned...but at the same time I must point out once again that conservative projects need tax money just like anything progressives ever came up with.

If you've gotten this far, you might assume that I'm a tax-and-spend NDP-style socialist. Not really-I spent several years involved with the St. Albert Taxpayers Association, including on its board of directors, and I've written various articles criticizing St. Albert's spending priorities. I also believe that the Chretien/Martin tax and spending cuts of the 1990s were the right thing to do. Just as sometimes taxes and spending might need to go up, there are also times when they need to go down.

The difference between then and now, though, is that politicians like Preston Manning, and Mike Harris and Ralph Klein at the provincial level, were up front with their constituents about what kind of sacrifices were going to have to be made to balance the books, and that the outcomes weren't going to be pretty. Back then, though, Chretien was cleaning up the mess left by Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney.

Today, Harper created his own deficit, cut spending to "balance" it, and has continually kept us in the red despite all his cuts. By my count, he's failed at least three times to balance the budget when he said he would, he doesn't seem to have any idea where the money will come from to pay for all the extra debt he's accumulated and the projects he's pursuing, and he's constantly pretended that we wouldn't have to give up any of the things we've come to expect from government.

If you're wondering how all this ties into income splitting, here's my take: Income splitting for families, in my mind, doesn't provide relief to enough Canadians to justify the cost. Like I said in a previous thread on this issue, tax credits can be a great thing when they're done right...but I would prefer that the tax code be kept as streamlined as possible, and that tax cuts, when they come, should be spread to as many people as possible.

It's one thing to talk about giving people their money back...but it's quite another when the government is only giving back money to people who meet certain specific criteria. And again, not many people seem too willing to talk about what the government might have to cut back on to keep the books balanced...and when they do, it's almost always to things that other people benefit from.

[bootlegga]

Frankly, I'm surprised that it will help that many people (I thought it would be closer to 1 in 10), so I don't really have too much of a problem with this.

Sure it's another tax cut, but at least it will largely go towards average people and not millionaires the way so many of Harper's tax cuts do.

In an ideal world, there would be another tax increase to make this revenue neutral, but deficits aren't something the supposedly fiscally responsible Conservatives have concerned themselves with over the past five or six years.

[BeaverFever]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Lots of people love to talk about cutting taxes...

...but when the time comes to discuss what kinds of services we should give up to keep the books balanced, they become strangely mute.

We expect governments at all levels to do various kinds of things-provide Internet service to rural communities; provide court systems to punish criminals and allow people and businesses to resolve their disputes fairly; maintain our national parks; equip our military and provide support to soldiers when they return to civilian life; and subsidize everything from horse racing to recreational facilities to resource development through various grants, royalty relief programs, and so forth.

And the benefits are often very tangible. People who get medical care can return to work that much sooner, and people and businesses are both saved from having to eat those medical costs the way they often are in the U.S.; tax breaks for TV and other artistic productions can generate various economic spin-offs, while smaller businesses in some competitive industries like oil and gas can thrive and create more jobs than they would otherwise; a reliable highway system allows for the efficient transportation of people and goods, and so forth.

Unfortunately, politicians like Stephen Harper have tried to pretend that we can cut taxes as much as we like without ever having to give up any kind of services or subsidies. The late Jim Flaherty bragged that the Conservatives did not balance the budget on the backs of Canadians or the programs they relied on, while Rob Ford assured Torontonians that there would be "no service cuts, guaranteed."

Unfortunately, despite their lies and bullshit, this is exactly what happened. I've written before about the many different ways in which the Harper government balanced the budget on the backs of Canadians and harmed frontline services. Now, more recently we have reports about morale at Veterans Affairs being in the toilet alongside reduced staffing levels, and reports of people having to call multiple times to reach the Canada Revenue Agency, and getting wrong information when they manage to get through. Anecdotally, I can also cite the multiple times I had to call before I could get through to Service Canada when I was looking for work a couple of years ago and I needed to talk to someone about my EI claims.

In my experience, whenever people talk about cutting government funding, they always seem to focus on cutting funding to things that won't benefit them personally, without ever talking about how much of their own gravy they're willing to give up. Hardly anybody seems willing to talk about whether they're willing to have less maintained roads, to wait longer to have a court date or an income tax refund, whether they're willing to have fewer police officers on patrol or less equipment for firefighters, if they're willing to have campgrounds and parks be less maintained, if they're willing to have to eat more of the costs for fixing up the local hockey rink themselves, and so forth. Are a lot of the conservative supporters here in Alberta, for instance, willing to give up the various relief and rebate programs available to oil and gas companies, for instance?

That's one side of the issue. The other, of course, is that conservative political projects need to be paid for with tax dollars as much as progressive ones do. I'm baffled, for instance, as to where Stephen Harper thinks he'll find money for re-equipping the military, expanding the prison population with his changes to the Criminal Code, and fighting ISIS while also extending support to veterans and paying down the $140 billion-plus in extra debt he's accumulated, without either breaking his promises about not cutting frontline services even more than he already has, or extending the deficit yet again. A year and a half ago, Jim Flaherty was assuring us the budget would be balanced by 2015... and now Harper is telling us we'll have a deficit of almost $2 billion this fiscal year.

I support all of these things that Harper's doing that I mentioned...but at the same time I must point out once again that conservative projects need tax money just like anything progressives ever came up with.

If you've gotten this far, you might assume that I'm a tax-and-spend NDP-style socialist. Not really-I spent several years involved with the St. Albert Taxpayers Association, including on its board of directors, and I've written various articles criticizing St. Albert's spending priorities. I also believe that the Chretien/Martin tax and spending cuts of the 1990s were the right thing to do. Just as sometimes taxes and spending might need to go up, there are also times when they need to go down.

The difference between then and now, though, is that politicians like Preston Manning, and Mike Harris and Ralph Klein at the provincial level, were up front with their constituents about what kind of sacrifices were going to have to be made to balance the books, and that the outcomes weren't going to be pretty. Back then, though, Chretien was cleaning up the mess left by Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney.

Today, Harper created his own deficit, cut spending to "balance" it, and has continually kept us in the red despite all his cuts. By my count, he's failed at least three times to balance the budget when he said he would, he doesn't seem to have any idea where the money will come from to pay for all the extra debt he's accumulated and the projects he's pursuing, and he's constantly pretended that we wouldn't have to give up any of the things we've come to expect from government.

If you're wondering how all this ties into income splitting, here's my take: Income splitting for families, in my mind, doesn't provide relief to enough Canadians to justify the cost. Like I said in a previous thread on this issue, tax credits can be a great thing when they're done right...but I would prefer that the tax code be kept as streamlined as possible, and that tax cuts, when they come, should be spread to as many people as possible.

It's one thing to talk about giving people their money back...but it's quite another when the government is only giving back money to people who meet certain specific criteria. And again, not many people seem too willing to talk about what the government might have to cut back on to keep the books balanced...and when they do, it's almost always to things that other people benefit from.

Well argued!

[OnTheIce]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Is it fair that they get privileged direct access to all kinds of public policy makers and decision makers that are inaccessible to the general public? Is it fair that they use the civil courts at will to advance their own interests and bully others with threats of lawsuits when the average citizen can barely afford a lawyer to defend their rights at all? Is it fair that when their children cross paths with police officers they get driven home and let go with a warning instead of arrested, beaten to a pulp and/or shot 41 times while reaching for their ID? Is it fair that when these kids rarely face criminal charges, the judge can use family wealth and social status to hand out a reduced sentence (on the basis that the family wealth means a has high potential for a bright future). Sounds to me like membership has it privileges for the high tax club.

Odd, I'm in that club and I don't have all of these benefits.

Looks like you're stereotyping everyone who may be in that class. How 'unliberal' of you.

[BeaverFever]

You sure have more of those benefits than someone who's not in that club would have.

[andyt]

So OTI, you consider yourself wealthy? You should at least enjoy the benefits instead of feeling hard done by.

[BeaverFever]

I thought in another thread you claimed to be personally know several Conservative municipal and provincial politicians?