"In the months to come, our government will undertake major transformations to position Canada for growth over the next generation" -- with these words, Stephen Harper has thown down the gauntlet. On Friday, in a grand, sweeping, blustering speech (see Aalya Ahmad on the new swagger), Harper has laid out his vision for the future. It is imperative that we understand it, to fight it.

South of the border we have the strange phenomenon of the "true conservative" Gingrich attacking his opponent Mitt Romney as a predator capitalist.

"You are using the arguments of the left," Romney tells the former House Speaker.

Indeed, it is a peculiar meeting of minds: the Occupy Movement and Newt Gingrich agreeing that folks like Mitt Romney are self-interested profit-takers and predators, not job creators.

Here in Canada we have a similar meeting of the minds on the impact of corporate tax cuts.

The late Mitchell Sharp, who came of age during the great depression and served in the cabinets of Pearson and Trudeau, once said that while his generation most feared the spectre of another catastrophic economic slump on the scale of the 1930s', subsequent generations were spooked by other spectres -- the spectres of run-away inflation during the 1970s and early '80s, and of uncontrolled public debt in the 1990s.

As we begin a New Year it is as good a time as any to contemplate the spectres for our time. Others will differ, but Hill Dispatches thinks the spectres that haunt us, or that should be haunting us in 2012, are: the spectres of growing inequality and of unsustainable development.

In a policy paper released on November 28th, Brian Topp shares his views on the Canadian tax system, and proposals for improving it. Read the proposal below, or download the full version (including footnotes) by clicking here.

Part 1: Back to basics: why do we have taxes anyway?

Taxation has become the third rail in Canadian politics. The only time we ever hear our current political leaders utter the word "tax," it's immediately followed with "cut." That has to change.