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.
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.
And I repeat that creating groups and saying "this group pays that much and that group pays this much" is dumb. I again invite you to point out the place where you feel the marginal tax rate shifts from fair to not-fair.
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.
Well sure. I've complained many times about the wide variety of tax dodges available to the extremely wealthy.
I read an interesting idea-- from Conrad Black, of all people. He suggested taxing wealth, rather than income, in one of his rambling opinion columns.
In theory that would eliminate the case of the ultra-rich guy who can pull out his accounting ledgers and prove that he didn't make a penny this year... or actually lost money.
Of course it would instead create an equally challenging problem, in that the wealthy people would become very adept at proving they're actually not wealthy.
"There is no $12 million mansion. Show me on this ledger where you see a $12 million mansion."
"We are literally STANDING IN IT!"
"Show me on the ledger where it exists!"
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?
If I was paying virtually no income taxes, I would be voting for the party that I thought was most likely to help me obtain an income so that I would be paying income taxes.
No, I wouldn't be voting to cut back government services. Cutting back government services isn't an end in itself. If I'm a poor-person and trying to scrape by, on some combination of government services and part time income or whatever, show me how cutting back government services helps me get a full time job. Otherwise you're just making it that much harder for me to make ends meet. If course I wouldn't vote for that. "Ok, you might lose your home and have to live on a friend's couch... but well-to-do baby-boomers would be paying less taxes!" isn't a compelling argument to bring to voters.
If poor-people being able to vote is such a bad thing for rich-guys, why are rich-guys doing so well?
-k
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