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Canada's one per centers are a disgusting group
April 28, 2012 - 10:13am
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Taxing Ontario’s rich and the menace of creeping Nazism
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/gerald-capla...
Not only will these one per centers probably not even pay this tiny, tiny, additional tax, but their analogies are so off the wall they should not be provided with any media platforms, particularly the CBC to spew their venom.
Taxing the "income" of the rich is kind of irrelevant, as Gerry Caplan's article (and common sense) make amply evident. Income is too narrowly defined and too easy to tweak.
Why don't we just tax the capital property of the rich (or of everyone, to make it "fair")? You know, the same way we tax, every single year, the homes of people lucky enough to own one, even when they're heavily mortgaged??
I'm sure smart people have thought of this and maybe even seen the fatal flaws...
Why not just add up everyone's appropriately-defined non-"personal" property (i.e. exclude direct consumer goods, personal benefit and pension plans, but include anything else that makes money, i.e. a physicial or monetary investment), and assess tax on a progressive basis?
Taxing capital is even easier to dodge than income taxes.
Guess what taxes are the hardest for the wealty to dodge?
Consumption taxes.
Which is why social democratic governments, as well as the liberal and neo-con governments that follow them, like going for high consumption taxes with verily easy income trasnfers to deal with their inherent regressive nature if left in their straight up form.
Consumption taxes are far easy to collect and enforce because of their administrative simplicity.
But this is quibbling away from Caplan's main point: the stunning audacity of the wealthy.
Which makes it very attractive to entertain fantasies of giving buddy the "ethnic cleansing" of his own fantasies.