Taxation and the middle class

[ijmorlan]

As a thought exercise, if some of the wealth that is currently parked in the 1% were sent to the public purse in some way, how much of the infrastructure and programming backlog could be fixed?

It’s not quite that simple. If you could extract $1 trillion from wealthy people, that wouldn’t magically create more trained construction workers. But if the point is that our society has lots of resources and should be able to accomplish big things, then that is definitely true.

On a similar note, the Mulroney government introduced the GST (now HST) which went a long a way towards bringing new revenue into federal coffers.  The Trudeau government introduced the carbon tax as means to pay for the desperately needed climate resiliency (and other environmental damages).  When the Chretien Liberals were elected, they promised to get rid of the GST, but here it is more than 30 years later.  Once challenge for the Polievre Conservatives will be how to replace the lost revenue if they follow through on their promise to remove the carbon tax. After 40+ years of cost-cutting and asset selling, there really isn't much left to do that won't be problematic.

The carbon tax is mostly rebated to people. So all cancelling it does is eliminate the rebate.

Well, I suppose they could keep the rebate and cut something else, but that seems more complicated. Anyway, the Liberals messed up the carbon tax implementation, specifically the part where people realize they’re getting new money from the government and why, so I think a lot of people barely if at all notice that they’re receiving a rebate related to the small tax increase they’re seeing elsewhere.