Canadian Politics Today

Your own claim was not that 80% of the population doesn't pay taxes.  It was that the top 20% pays 87% of taxes, in the US.

There is a world of difference between those two claims!

I don't take it as a world of difference. And I haven't denied that others pay some small measure of taxes. Wealth, btw, is not taxed. We're talking income. I also don't object to a progressive tax system. In fact, what I have been pointing out in this thread and others is not that "rich people" pay far too much but the impact this has on society with regard to voting patterns and political choices.

What I do object to is rich people complaining that poor people aren't paying enough taxes.

Let's forget about the term 'rich people' for now. The top 20% are not 'rich'. In order to get into the top 20% you needed an income of about $80,000 a year (in the US study). That's NOT rich people. The top 10% have incomes of at least $113k. That's not rich, either. In Canada, the top 20% make about $70k plus. Which puts most teachers, cops, firefighters, municipal bus drivers, nurses and tons of other public servants in that zone, along with doctors, software engineers, architects, etc. To say 'these are the rich people so they should pay for everything' is naïve.

Mind you, the liberals at all levels have done their best to equate 'the rich' with limosine types puffing away at big cigars in their 90th floor corner offices. But THAT class has hardly been touched at all by increased taxes. Most of those in the 20% group pay far higher rates of taxes than the likes of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Buffet basically said his tax rate was half what his secretary pays. And it's the same in Canada. The tax changes the liberals bring in against 'the rich' have little impact on the 0.01% that everyone seems to feel isn't paying what it should be.

But again, the focus of my posts has been on the likely political results of such an unbalanced tax system. If you pay little or nothing in taxes, then taxes simply are not of interest to you in terms of a politician who talks about increasing or decreasing them. Hey, no skin off your nose. THAT was what I basically said. It wasn't an attack on 'poor people' but a realistic assesment of the motivation for supporting parties like the Liberals and NDP who offer ever more government services (along with ever higher taxes) because they know taxes are very little issue to at least half the population, and reasonable for most of the next twenty or thirty percent.

Realistically, if you pay no or virtually no income taxes, why would you want to vote for a conservative party which is likely to cut back government services in any way? That would be against your own interests. You'd instead vote for the party that offered more stuff. It's free, after all.

And yes, there's a degree of unfairness and injustice in people who pay nothing or almost nothing voting for parties that will tax OTHER people more to pay for stuff they want.