Just as Canada has begun making progress on the global tax scene, along comes Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff with a plan to shift gears and head backwards. Only last week, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney was hailing Canada’s falling corporate tax burden. “Corporate tax competitiveness — particularly for new investment — has improved markedly over the past decade and is now among the most attractive in the industrialised world.”
Not for long, if Mr. Ignatieff has his way. Looking into the rear view mirror of his economic model, a not unfamiliar driving position for Liberals, Mr. Ignatieff has decided he would like to keep Canada’s federal corporate tax rate at 18% for the next few years rather than lower it to 15%.
Ah, what an intellectual thrill it must be for a politician to be able to propose a miracle fiscal pea shufflle in which you get money for nothing, picking up billions in cash that apparently was just sitting there waiting for the right wordsmith to come along. In Mr. Ignatieff’s telling at the Liberal’s weekend Deep Thinkers Summit, by not allowing corporate tax rates to fall the Liberals would “create fiscal room” and “free up” as much as $6-billion.
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Well i agree. One only need look to Alberta where Stelmach’s Tories jacked up the royalty structure. An unmitigated disaster. Spending increases in the 10+% each year, has landed Alberta in the deficet glue. There aught to be a law… oh wait there is a law.
Iggy thinks that if you need a longer blanket you cut a foot off of one end and sew it on the other end. What he doesn’t take into account is the two foot seam he makes when sewing it back together.
It’s not just that money is taken from the private sector and spent in the public sector: Its the fact that only the private sector is generating wealth. The money you take from the private sector to spend in the public sector is the very money needed to increase the amount of money available to fund both the private and public sectors in the future.
Iggy is like the lazy man who instead of going out into the forest to gather firewood tears down the walls of his house to keep the fire going.
Iggynomics is about enabling dependency.
The progressives like Iggy are elitists who are not in favour of giving a fishing pole to folks so that they can become self-sufficient. Instead, these elitists want to redistribute the wealth and use that wealth to hand out fish to create voting blocks, thus gaining control and power.
Iggy and his Liberals would like more Canadians to be dependent upon government programs for every aspect of their lives. This creates an ever expanding “client base” of voters whose fears can be gradually manipulated by politicians who see themselves as a chosen elite who KNOW what’s best for us peasants. It’s a return to feudalism. They set up programs for us peasants, then they seek rent from us to pay for what they deem best for us. Then they take Adscam skims on the rent they collect from us to make sure they pocket enough cash to bribe us in the election.
We need to stop this insane vicious circle by recognizing that Iggynomics is really class warfare, the elite against the peasants. By calling it “taxing wealth” they are camouflaging the fact that they are taxing investment and ergo taxing jobs.
We need to change the language on Iggy. We need to tell him that what he proposes is not about taxing wealth, it is about taxing jobs. His ideas will kill jobs.