I'm always surprised by the people I end up having to respect.
David Hasselhoff flies around the world at his own expense for Make-a-Wish. Ricky Martin runs a foundation in Thailand getting prostitution bound children in to schools.
And now, Dalton McGuinty, the guy who tried to pretend the outgoing Tory government's deficit didn't exist and put a "Health Care Levy" on us, has gone and told the banks to bugger off if they want a tax cut.
Oh, no, please don't take away the high-paying financial sector jobs!
Look, I'm going to tell you the same thing I'm telling the auto industry guys: there's only so much work to do. If you have too many people, we know you're going to lay off the extras. What does it matter how much money we give you. And mark my words, this is not like the auto industry bailout which is technically a loan. No. The banks want a four percent tax cut. That's a direct gift.
Good for you, Dalton.
Showing posts with label Taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taxes. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wondering About Waiting Times?
Do you ever wonder why we have long waiting times in our hospitals?
Do you ever wait in the E.R. for four hours?
Do you have trouble getting a G.P.?
Is one of your children in a class of more than 30?
Did you or someone you know pay eight thousand a year or more for post-secondary education?
Why, in a nation of plenty, with the people determined to have good health care and good public education, do we have problems like these?
KPMG has the answer: Canada has the third lowest business taxes.
Third lowest. Lower than the United States. According to KPMG, we should push them even lower. Because the standard of living doesn't matter. Quality of education and health care don't matter. Nah. The free market and capitalism will float those boats, right?
No, the important thing is to have the lowest taxes. That is the greatest goal any nation can ever achieve. Oh, yes, the "Canadians are overtaxed" people are a bunch of kooks. They've been telling us for years, even decades that we're overtaxed and that we're a bunch of saps for going along with it. They never concerned themselves with the fact that we care more about services than tax rates. That's not their agenda.
These people, these economists, are wealthy - wealthy well beyond the means of ordinary Canadians. Their goal is to convince you that massive tax breaks for themselves (corporate taxes, stock option taxes and capital gains taxes) are somehow good for you as well. They get millions, you get a dollar and a half.
It's time to wake up and start calling them the liars and frauds they are.
Do you ever wait in the E.R. for four hours?
Do you have trouble getting a G.P.?
Is one of your children in a class of more than 30?
Did you or someone you know pay eight thousand a year or more for post-secondary education?
Why, in a nation of plenty, with the people determined to have good health care and good public education, do we have problems like these?
KPMG has the answer: Canada has the third lowest business taxes.
Third lowest. Lower than the United States. According to KPMG, we should push them even lower. Because the standard of living doesn't matter. Quality of education and health care don't matter. Nah. The free market and capitalism will float those boats, right?
No, the important thing is to have the lowest taxes. That is the greatest goal any nation can ever achieve. Oh, yes, the "Canadians are overtaxed" people are a bunch of kooks. They've been telling us for years, even decades that we're overtaxed and that we're a bunch of saps for going along with it. They never concerned themselves with the fact that we care more about services than tax rates. That's not their agenda.
These people, these economists, are wealthy - wealthy well beyond the means of ordinary Canadians. Their goal is to convince you that massive tax breaks for themselves (corporate taxes, stock option taxes and capital gains taxes) are somehow good for you as well. They get millions, you get a dollar and a half.
It's time to wake up and start calling them the liars and frauds they are.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Tax Cuts for the Rich
Here we go again.
As if we haven't been over this point more than enough times, let's hammer it home one more time.
Remember the "trickle-down effect"? It's the completely unfounded idea that giving massive tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations will somehow, eventually, improve the quality of life of everyone. Have we seen enough evidence to discard this self-serving theory invented by wealthy economists to rationalize their greed?
If you want to fix inequality, you fix it directly. You tax wealthy people on the basis that they depend for their wealth on lots of poor people getting free education and health care. You directly "float all boats" by lifting the water level. This is the only method that has ever been shown to work.
But as long as the op-ed pages are run by wealthy people who hire wealthy economists, we will continue to hear about the benefits of free trade - basically repeated diatribes that third world workers in horrid conditions somehow aren't dragging down our labour standards and wages, as if somehow the laws of competition can't reach across an ocean or a border to force us to work in lousier conditions.
Eventually, it will get bad enough that we'll force our governments to stop it. But first look for a severe recession before people care enough to learn how the world really works.
As if we haven't been over this point more than enough times, let's hammer it home one more time.
A report last month from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development showing Canada to be one of a minority of OECD countries where tax cuts and other fiscal policies have primarily favoured upper income groups doesn't shore up the notion that inequality is a passing happenstance. Moreover, the fact that inequality and poverty have grown during booming economic growth when a rising tide was thought to lift all boats raises the question of what will happen when or if the economy slips into recession.
Remember the "trickle-down effect"? It's the completely unfounded idea that giving massive tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations will somehow, eventually, improve the quality of life of everyone. Have we seen enough evidence to discard this self-serving theory invented by wealthy economists to rationalize their greed?
If you want to fix inequality, you fix it directly. You tax wealthy people on the basis that they depend for their wealth on lots of poor people getting free education and health care. You directly "float all boats" by lifting the water level. This is the only method that has ever been shown to work.
But as long as the op-ed pages are run by wealthy people who hire wealthy economists, we will continue to hear about the benefits of free trade - basically repeated diatribes that third world workers in horrid conditions somehow aren't dragging down our labour standards and wages, as if somehow the laws of competition can't reach across an ocean or a border to force us to work in lousier conditions.
Eventually, it will get bad enough that we'll force our governments to stop it. But first look for a severe recession before people care enough to learn how the world really works.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
DTK: Flaherty and McGuinty
It’s getting difficult to see any value in our federal government these days.
They’re in Afghanistan and don’t want to leave. They throw up a veneer of “patriotism” to cover the mayhem and misery they’re using our military to create. They certainly appear to have committed war crimes in the handing over of prisoners to Afghan authorities who are – quite clearly – not signatories to the Geneva conventions.
They walk in lock step with the Bush administration: denouncing elected governments that we don’t like (and damn democracy to hell when it gives the “wrong” results).
Now they want to follow American-style super-destructive Bush economics. Namely this: reduce corporate taxes. The goal of reducing corporate taxes is to starve the government of cash so that it can’t provide services for the people. A government high in debt is at the mercy of the banks. A government high in debt can’t take care of its people. The people gradually learn to expect less and less and eventually the rich people can encourage more and more tax breaks until our entire social system falls apart. Once they make your schools and hospitals suck, they can shrug and say, “See, we might as well privatize them!”
Of course, that’s not how they sell it. They sell corporate tax breaks as a way to improve things. Don’t worry, they’ll say, we’re just lowering services like health care and education *temporarily*. After a little austerity, these corporate tax breaks will stimulate the economy like crazy and there will be so much money going around that even the reduced tax rates will yield oodles of money for everything!
This is a lie. It is a lie for which there is no evidence, not even circumstantial. It is a lie which they repeat, and the media echoes, until everyone sighs and believes it.
Well, not quite everyone.
The federal finance minister, in what I have to imagine is a very unique and rude kind of meddling, “challenged” the province of Ontario to lower its corporate tax rate, lest Ontario become a “have not” province. And, yea, we were quaking in our boots.
The Liberals didn’t budge. Yes, they said, we’re in a slowdown and we’re losing manufacturing jobs. So what we’ll do is increase spending on education, “re-skill” the laid off workers with grant money, and get things started again. The only problem with this sort of plan – educating people – is that it actually works. It will form a good example for other provinces to emulate.
And let me tell you something about the neo-conservatives in the White House and in the Canadian Conservative Party – they absolutely *hate* people setting good examples. That’s why they went so hard after Venezuela. That’s why we (with the French and Americans) invaded Haiti and overthrew its democratic government. That’s why the socialist government in Nicaragua was declared a terrorist regime and then terrorized by the Reagan Administration in to destruction.
These people *hate* good examples. Look for them to bring the hammer down on Ontario in any way they can.
They’re in Afghanistan and don’t want to leave. They throw up a veneer of “patriotism” to cover the mayhem and misery they’re using our military to create. They certainly appear to have committed war crimes in the handing over of prisoners to Afghan authorities who are – quite clearly – not signatories to the Geneva conventions.
They walk in lock step with the Bush administration: denouncing elected governments that we don’t like (and damn democracy to hell when it gives the “wrong” results).
Now they want to follow American-style super-destructive Bush economics. Namely this: reduce corporate taxes. The goal of reducing corporate taxes is to starve the government of cash so that it can’t provide services for the people. A government high in debt is at the mercy of the banks. A government high in debt can’t take care of its people. The people gradually learn to expect less and less and eventually the rich people can encourage more and more tax breaks until our entire social system falls apart. Once they make your schools and hospitals suck, they can shrug and say, “See, we might as well privatize them!”
Of course, that’s not how they sell it. They sell corporate tax breaks as a way to improve things. Don’t worry, they’ll say, we’re just lowering services like health care and education *temporarily*. After a little austerity, these corporate tax breaks will stimulate the economy like crazy and there will be so much money going around that even the reduced tax rates will yield oodles of money for everything!
This is a lie. It is a lie for which there is no evidence, not even circumstantial. It is a lie which they repeat, and the media echoes, until everyone sighs and believes it.
Well, not quite everyone.
The federal finance minister, in what I have to imagine is a very unique and rude kind of meddling, “challenged” the province of Ontario to lower its corporate tax rate, lest Ontario become a “have not” province. And, yea, we were quaking in our boots.
The Liberals didn’t budge. Yes, they said, we’re in a slowdown and we’re losing manufacturing jobs. So what we’ll do is increase spending on education, “re-skill” the laid off workers with grant money, and get things started again. The only problem with this sort of plan – educating people – is that it actually works. It will form a good example for other provinces to emulate.
And let me tell you something about the neo-conservatives in the White House and in the Canadian Conservative Party – they absolutely *hate* people setting good examples. That’s why they went so hard after Venezuela. That’s why we (with the French and Americans) invaded Haiti and overthrew its democratic government. That’s why the socialist government in Nicaragua was declared a terrorist regime and then terrorized by the Reagan Administration in to destruction.
These people *hate* good examples. Look for them to bring the hammer down on Ontario in any way they can.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Public Buildings
I bring you a story of a huge rip off about to happen and I only hope that it can be prevented.
The minority Conservative government is beginning to play the same games that Mike Harris, Ernie Eves and their PC brothers played in Ontario. The first step is to convince you that you pay too much in taxes. They will give you a small tax break and then give huge tax breaks to corporations. At this point they have a problem: how can they balance the budget? In Ontario, the answer came easy. They simply lied about being financially responsible and let the provincial debt balloon out of control. To make it less than completely obvious that they were bankrupting us and our children, however, they also sold off a lot of our property.
Yes, you heard me say it: our property.
You see, the government doesn't actually own anything. If you think about it for a moment, whenever we say that the government owns something, we really mean that it owned by we, the people. Communally, it belongs to all of us. The parks, the buildings, the police cars and the hospitals are all owned by all of us. What the PCs did in Ontario was to sell off our assets - highways, crown corporations, you name it - in order to give the appearance that the budget wasn't grossly underfunded. Of course, they never once balanced a budget anyway, but somehow the supposedly left-wing media failed to mention this to us.
Moving along, Harper's federal Conservatives (no "Progressive" prefix here), are going to do the same thing with our federal buildings. Should this succeed, be ready for more. They're going to sell off $1.5B worth of buildings to private companies and then lease the buildings back using 10 to 25 year contracts. Now riddle me this: how are these private companies going to make money? Well, they're going to have to maintain the buildings and make a profit. The profit, of course, is locked in by the lease agreement. Somehow, I should believe that a private company is so efficient that it can do all of the maintenance, make a profit and have the total cost come out cheaper than if the government did the maintenance itself.
I've worked for private companies. I've never found any of them to be miraculously efficient. What they are good at, though, is giving people lower pay, breaking unions, cutting benefits and such. Is that where our savings comes from? A race to the bottom in quality of life?
Why else is this a rip off? The Conservative government will report this $1.5B sale in the budget as part of the "surplus", thus looking like good stewards of our treasury. The real cost won't be realized until the leases we're paying on these buildings vastly exceed the maintenance costs. By then the Conservatives will be out of government and someone will look bad raising taxes to cover the lease.
Anything else? Well, there's this trick you can play while you're in government. You give a sweet, cherry, no-bid contract to some company that will make tens or hundreds of millions from it. Then, when you leave government, you get a nice 6-figure "consultant's job" for the rest of your life. You can probably ask the Right Honourable Gordon O'Connor, our current Minister of Defence, about it. He used to be a lobbyist for several aerospace and defence companies.
So, yeah, this is a big rip off. They're selling our property, mortgaging our future, and lining their own beds with our ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, they'll try to bill it all as prudent fiscal management when they show us the temporary "surplus" in the budget.
Shenanigans!
The minority Conservative government is beginning to play the same games that Mike Harris, Ernie Eves and their PC brothers played in Ontario. The first step is to convince you that you pay too much in taxes. They will give you a small tax break and then give huge tax breaks to corporations. At this point they have a problem: how can they balance the budget? In Ontario, the answer came easy. They simply lied about being financially responsible and let the provincial debt balloon out of control. To make it less than completely obvious that they were bankrupting us and our children, however, they also sold off a lot of our property.
Yes, you heard me say it: our property.
You see, the government doesn't actually own anything. If you think about it for a moment, whenever we say that the government owns something, we really mean that it owned by we, the people. Communally, it belongs to all of us. The parks, the buildings, the police cars and the hospitals are all owned by all of us. What the PCs did in Ontario was to sell off our assets - highways, crown corporations, you name it - in order to give the appearance that the budget wasn't grossly underfunded. Of course, they never once balanced a budget anyway, but somehow the supposedly left-wing media failed to mention this to us.
Moving along, Harper's federal Conservatives (no "Progressive" prefix here), are going to do the same thing with our federal buildings. Should this succeed, be ready for more. They're going to sell off $1.5B worth of buildings to private companies and then lease the buildings back using 10 to 25 year contracts. Now riddle me this: how are these private companies going to make money? Well, they're going to have to maintain the buildings and make a profit. The profit, of course, is locked in by the lease agreement. Somehow, I should believe that a private company is so efficient that it can do all of the maintenance, make a profit and have the total cost come out cheaper than if the government did the maintenance itself.
I've worked for private companies. I've never found any of them to be miraculously efficient. What they are good at, though, is giving people lower pay, breaking unions, cutting benefits and such. Is that where our savings comes from? A race to the bottom in quality of life?
Why else is this a rip off? The Conservative government will report this $1.5B sale in the budget as part of the "surplus", thus looking like good stewards of our treasury. The real cost won't be realized until the leases we're paying on these buildings vastly exceed the maintenance costs. By then the Conservatives will be out of government and someone will look bad raising taxes to cover the lease.
Anything else? Well, there's this trick you can play while you're in government. You give a sweet, cherry, no-bid contract to some company that will make tens or hundreds of millions from it. Then, when you leave government, you get a nice 6-figure "consultant's job" for the rest of your life. You can probably ask the Right Honourable Gordon O'Connor, our current Minister of Defence, about it. He used to be a lobbyist for several aerospace and defence companies.
So, yeah, this is a big rip off. They're selling our property, mortgaging our future, and lining their own beds with our ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, they'll try to bill it all as prudent fiscal management when they show us the temporary "surplus" in the budget.
Shenanigans!
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Overtaxation, Blair and Ignatieff
DTK
It's funny how a man's definition of luxury can change over time. At one point, it involved liquor, a tiled dance floor and the phrase "every night is ladies' night". These days, two consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep clocks in at pretty much the peak of my Epicurean fantasies.
Admittedly, I'm having trouble figuring out what to rant about. Our federal finance minister has declared that "Canadians are taxed too much" and plans to cut our taxes. He claims that people stay on welfare because they pay too much taxes if they go back to work. I'd like to see him substantiate that somehow. It seems to me that people who earn small amounts of money pay very little tax at all. Then he switches to talking about how important it is to cut capital gains taxes and corporate taxes.
Why is it that people who work for a living are expected to pay taxes while people who merely live on the interest and investment of massive amounts of inheritance money somehow believe that they shouldn't have to pay taxes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't we be rewarding work and productivity over investment? But remember, for all the talk of Bob Rae amassing a deficit in Ontario, Bob Rae did it in a recession. It was our present federal finance minister, when his party was running Ontario's finances, that managed to increase that debt while in an economic boom - all while halving corporate taxes and cutting services like education and health care.
I hate to say "I told you so", but I did. Wait for the federal deficit to replace the surplus.
In other news, British PM Tony Blair was in town to tell us how Canada and the U.K. must forge a new partnership/friendship/relationship. This new association will be based on our mutual efforts in the war on terrorism and our mutual association with the United States.
Uh ... yeah. Good luck with that line of reasoning, Tony. People in Canada are beginning to disapprove of the Afghanistan mission. We find the "war on terror" quite dubious. People in your own country gave up on Iraq a long time ago. Too bad none of us are actually living in democracies. Then we might have peace, and wouldn't that be boring.
Should I mention that ridiculous big deal made over the "anti-Israeli" comments made by Liberal leadership hopeful Michael Ignatieff? Apparently he had the nerve to refer to the relentless cluster-bombing of civilian areas of Lebanon as a "war crime". Goodness. How dare he? Israel is an ally of Western powers and has white skinned, European types running its government. Those sorts of people only cause "regrettable civilian collateral damage". War crimes are committed by other people (terrorists, people we don't like, people who don't play ball with Wall Street, brownish people wearing turbans etc.).
The real crapfest is the fact that Ignatieff appears to be saying one thing to a pro-Lebanon francophone crowd in Quebec while saying something else to an anglophone crowd in Toronto. If that's really what's going on, then he deserves all the splatter off the ventilation he's getting, even if it's misdirected.
Enough ranting.
It's funny how a man's definition of luxury can change over time. At one point, it involved liquor, a tiled dance floor and the phrase "every night is ladies' night". These days, two consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep clocks in at pretty much the peak of my Epicurean fantasies.
Admittedly, I'm having trouble figuring out what to rant about. Our federal finance minister has declared that "Canadians are taxed too much" and plans to cut our taxes. He claims that people stay on welfare because they pay too much taxes if they go back to work. I'd like to see him substantiate that somehow. It seems to me that people who earn small amounts of money pay very little tax at all. Then he switches to talking about how important it is to cut capital gains taxes and corporate taxes.
Why is it that people who work for a living are expected to pay taxes while people who merely live on the interest and investment of massive amounts of inheritance money somehow believe that they shouldn't have to pay taxes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't we be rewarding work and productivity over investment? But remember, for all the talk of Bob Rae amassing a deficit in Ontario, Bob Rae did it in a recession. It was our present federal finance minister, when his party was running Ontario's finances, that managed to increase that debt while in an economic boom - all while halving corporate taxes and cutting services like education and health care.
I hate to say "I told you so", but I did. Wait for the federal deficit to replace the surplus.
In other news, British PM Tony Blair was in town to tell us how Canada and the U.K. must forge a new partnership/friendship/relationship. This new association will be based on our mutual efforts in the war on terrorism and our mutual association with the United States.
Uh ... yeah. Good luck with that line of reasoning, Tony. People in Canada are beginning to disapprove of the Afghanistan mission. We find the "war on terror" quite dubious. People in your own country gave up on Iraq a long time ago. Too bad none of us are actually living in democracies. Then we might have peace, and wouldn't that be boring.
Should I mention that ridiculous big deal made over the "anti-Israeli" comments made by Liberal leadership hopeful Michael Ignatieff? Apparently he had the nerve to refer to the relentless cluster-bombing of civilian areas of Lebanon as a "war crime". Goodness. How dare he? Israel is an ally of Western powers and has white skinned, European types running its government. Those sorts of people only cause "regrettable civilian collateral damage". War crimes are committed by other people (terrorists, people we don't like, people who don't play ball with Wall Street, brownish people wearing turbans etc.).
The real crapfest is the fact that Ignatieff appears to be saying one thing to a pro-Lebanon francophone crowd in Quebec while saying something else to an anglophone crowd in Toronto. If that's really what's going on, then he deserves all the splatter off the ventilation he's getting, even if it's misdirected.
Enough ranting.
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