I’m annoyed they uncritically quoted the Frasier institute guy. We could raise the upper tax brackets to pay for it, that’s an option too, just saying.
Rich people don’t have “income” to tax like that.
Tax their wealth.
That’s right. If I remember right, one of the top ways that the 1% earn their wealth is by taking bank loans with things like stocks as collateral. Since they never cash in the stocks, they technically have zero income.
If you don’t directly tax assets, or otherwise broaden the definition of income to include assets (though that’ll take some serious lawerying to make ironclad), no amount of taxing the wealthy will make a serious difference. Only those that have shitty accountants.
Even then, you’ll always have to watch out for those wealthy just fleeing the country selling off any asset they can’t take with them, screwing over the entire country.
Wealth cap is actually my preferred policy. You can’t move your wealth to a lower-tax jurisdiction if you don’t have it. For the sake of simplicity I just used the most familiar approach here, though.
Income should include asset income, of course. It looks like we actually do have a lower rate for dividends than employment income right now, which is basically criminal.
“They have not fixed the procurement processes,” Carleton University Prof. Stephen Saideman told The Canadian Press. “They have a personnel shortage. Together, those two things make it hard, just simply hard, to spend money. Even if you allocate a lot of money, the actual spending of it is hard.”
I mean, raising wages is something you can do with a stroke of a pen, and would go a fair towards helping with that personnel shortage. I’m just saying.
Yeah, I feel like those are issues we’ve created for ourselves.
Making the work environment not openly toxic would be great, too.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!
Yeah, Trudeau has already said that Canada will never do 2% GDP in defense spending. And while Canada has been under increasing pressure to meet the 2% target since the invasion of Ukraine, all they’ve actually been doing is trying to change the definition of what counts toward “defence spending”: oh, can we count research into artificial intelligence as ‘defense spending’? what about space research? we’re already including pensions, so that’s good …
How about putting out wild fires. It’s that a defense expense?
Only if we start calling it the War on Climate Change and I just can’t see our government taking such a hard stance on the environment.
Yes, no.
I’d say yes, yes and a big part of that is to stop handing out billions in corporate welfare to oil and gas companies.