Less (sic) taxes is, for On the Bay‘s publisher David Loopstra, a “solution” for the problems of inflation. It’s certainly not the solution for correct grammar, where he should have written fewer taxes or the phrase “less in taxes.” You can only get away with saying less if the noun is singular (tax). Perhaps I expected too much of a former newspaper reporter and editor. But regardless of his foray into the bad vernacular, his opinion piece in the magazine is merely poorly-informed libertarian piffle. And, given that the magazine receives the “Special Measures for Journalism” federal grant money, he’s certainly biting the hand that helps feed him.*
“An average Canadian household has an income of $106,000 and pays more than a whopping $48,000 in combined taxes every year,” Looptstra claims. He bases this on a report from the Fraser Institute, a rightwing thinktank-cum-mouthpiece funded by corporations and extremist rightwing billionaires like the libertarian, anti-government (and American) Koch brothers. Media Bias Factcheck says their “primary focus is on a limited government and Libertarian policy.” So, of course, they’re against taxes because the elites who keep them in business are, and they pay the FI to spread their ideology. Their factual reporting score is generously called “mixed” and their credibility rating is optimistically labelled medium. In other words, caveat emptor: they have an ideology to promote.**
Let’s go back to that claim, shall we? First, Loopstra should always provide a link to the source document so others can examine the data themselves. But he didn’t (not even the report’s actual name or date), and that’s sloppy. Here is the report I think Loopstra is referring to: Taxes versus the Necessities of Life: The Canadian Consumer Tax Index 2023 edition, published in August, 2023. In that report it states “In 2022, the average Canadian family earned an income of $106,430 and paid total taxes equaling $48,199 (45.3%). In 1961, the average family had an income of $5,000 and paid a total tax bill of $1,675 (33.5%)”
In the usual rightwing Chicken-Little-the-sky-is-falling manner, the ideologically hidebound FI claims, “The Canadian Consumer Tax Index tracks the total tax bill of the average Canadian family from 1961 to 2022. Including all types of taxes, that bill has increased by 2,778% since 1961.” Scary, although not actually true.***
But, like similar statements from the FI, it’s misleading in many ways, and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) debunks a good part of it. Loopstra should have checked for responses or challenges to the FI report, which a good journalist would have done before parroting their claims (aka sharing propaganda).
To start with, there is no single agency taking taxes. We pay federal, provincial, and municipal taxes and each has its own budgets, needs, and levies. Plus there are taxes charged on many consumer purchases (GST), as well as on specific products like tobacco, alcohol, and gasoline but how much depends on usage. And since 1961, several social programs have been implemented, not least of all our national healthcare system, that affect taxation.
The CCPA reported:
…the Fraser Institute released their Consumer Tax Index report, which claims to show that the average Canadian family’s tax bill has increased by a whopping 1,624% since 1961. There are a lot of things wrong with Fraser Institute’s math. Here are just a few of them.
To begin with, the numbers should be adjusted for inflation — something the Fraser Institute did not do. A dollar in 1961 bought a lot more than a dollar today buys, so is it doesn’t make sense to compare the tax bill in 1961 dollars to the tax bill in 2009 dollars. Once adjusted for inflation, that 1,624% increase shrinks to just 137%.
On top of inflation, we need to consider that incomes also grew over the last half a century, so the tax bill would have grown even if we paid the same proportion of our income in taxes in 2009 as in 1961.
As the CCPA notes, “the effective tax rate as a share of average family income has been stable over the past quarter century” and “The Fraser Institute’s conclusion … is clearly not supported by their own graph.” But Loopstra is singing the libertarian song:
It’s time for reduced taxes, and less reckless government spending overall. Government could surely afford to receive less of our money if they spent it more carefully (the CBC alone costs you and I more than $1.2 billion annually).
Well, the CBC comment is gratuitous and hypocritical, especially given his own publication is sucking on the public tit, too. But CBC-bashing is par for the course: CONservatives despise public broadcasters and want all media to be privately owned, so they can be like the PostMedia network: shilling for the extremists and far-right and rage-farming against Liberals.
What Loopstra fails (egregiously) to explain is that cutting taxes also means cutting services and support programs; funding for public facilities, agencies, and organizations; funding for maintaining and repairing public infrastructure; funding for healthcare, schools, libraries, museums, daycare, parks, legal services, police, the military, environmental protection, airports… pretty much everything that makes us Canada. And that will make us a lot more like the USA, with privatized healthcare, jails, utilities… which, of course, is a libertarian goal: have private corporations provide all the services and support. For a profit, of course.
And how will lowering taxes affect the cost of housing? Cars? Gasoline? Groceries? Appliances? Furniture? Pet food? Clothes? Answer: it won’t. These are all provided by for-profit corporations who set prices according to their ROI for shareholders, and raised accordingly to cover what they pay in salaries and bonuses to their CEOs and executives.
Cutting taxes will not stifle corporate greed. Look at what has happened in Ontario and Alberta (aka Albertabama) with healthcare: CONservative governments both underfunded the public system and allowed privatization to come in. The result is an unmitigated disaster for users who now have to pay hefty annual “subscription” fees to be a client of a medical clinic. Those who can’t afford to pay have to wait many hours, sometimes days, in hospital emergency departments to get treatment they had previously through family doctors.
Responding to a similarly lame argument for cutting taxes, one Xitter user wrote:
The basic libertarian ideology is that government should be small, but better if non-existent. Tribal overlords and oligarchs will take over the job of supplying services, utilities, and facilities. The Mad Max films show the libertarian dream at its most desired state: independent, quarrelling fiefdoms with no central authority, no nationwide services, no nationwide justice, police, army, or support network.
No, David, it’s a shallow myth that lowering taxes will solve anything for the middle class. It won’t solve the inflationary problems created by corporate greed, predatory capitalism, or egregious CEO salaries and bonuses. It won’t bring down the prices of housing, rent, mortgages, or consumer goods. But it will mean federal, provincial, and municipal services, support, facilities, programs, and infrastructure suffer from cuts, underfunding, and dismantling. That, of course, is what libertarians want. But more thoughtful Canadians, I believe, don’t buy their economically simplistic, anti-democratic arguments.
Notes:
* On the Bay is a local magazine that describes itself as “A regional lifestyle magazine for the Southern Georgian Bay region, On The Bay is published four times per year. Editorially, the magazine publishes 100% original Canadian content covering local lifestyle topics, homes, food, fashion and sports and each issue addresses the major issues that challenge the fast growing yet environmentally sensitive Southern Georgian Bay region, along with local lifestyle topics, homes, food, fashion and sport.” Ayn Rand, a vocal advocate for libertarian ideas, was equally hypocritical: despite railing against government subsidies and support, and flaying the “welfare state” in her books and lectures, she accepted social security payments without complaint. For conservatives, it’s always “do as I say, not as I do.”
** The efforts of the Koch brothers and other libertarians to subvert democracy, buy politicians, create fake grassroots opposition to taxation, and influence government policies towards their ideology is well documented in the 2016 book, Dark Money by Jane Mayer, subtitled “The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” In its review, The Guardian noted, “Mayer has combined her own research with the work of scores of other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to ‘move their political ideas from the fringe to the center of American political life.'”
*** The federal tax rate is 15% on the portion of taxable income that is $55,867 or less, plus 20.5% on the portion of taxable income over $55,867 up to $111,733. The federal rate is 5.05% on the portion of taxable income that is $51,446 or less, plus 9.15% on the portion of taxable income over $51,446 up to $102,894, plus 11.16% on the portion of taxable income over $102,894 up to $150,000. The total tax payable on a single $106,000 income in Ontario would be $23,621. But on a family income of, say, $60,000 and $46,000, taxes would be $9,626 and $6,241, or $15,867 combined. And that does not take into account any deductions available for childcare, healthcare, etc. The municipal property levy for a house valued at $500,000 ranges between $9,268 (Windsor) and $3,159.67 (Toronto). A family with a split income, paying a median property tax, would pay about $20,000 in federal, provincial, and municipal taxes. How much they paid in consumer taxes would depend on what they bought in any year, but overall the amount would likely be half of what FI claims.
Words: 1,555
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/29/libertarian-ideology-natural-enemy-science
Libertarian ideology is the natural enemy of science: Whether the issue is climate change, healthcare or gun control, libertarians are on a permanent collision course with evidence.
https://prospect.org/power/libertarian-delusion/
The Libertarian Delusion: The free-market fantasy stands discredited by events. The stubborn appeal of the libertarian idea persists, despite mountains of evidence that the free market is neither efficient, nor fair, nor free from periodic catastrophe.
https://jacobin.com/2020/07/how-to-debate-libertarians-on-taxes-and-destroy-them
How to Debate Libertarians on Taxes — And Destroy Them. Libertarians deny that anyone has “positive rights” like the right to health care or education. Instead, they argue that liberty is best understood in terms of “negative rights” against interference by others… it’s worth remembering that the first federal income taxes in the United States were imposed to fund the war to break the power of the planter class and free 3.9 million slaves. This was without a doubt the deepest and most important advance in human freedom enabled by taxation thus far but it won’t be the last.
https://harrisonmeyers4.medium.com/libertarianism-debunked-7ef3b57e6b2c
Libertarianism Debunked. Libertarians seem to have a philosophy that can change drastically from whom you speak with. Thus confusing the majority of the public on the central beliefs of their ideology.
The whole goal of a civilization is to insure that basic needs are met for ALL civilians. These needs include housing, food, clothing, and clean water. Without these needs being met your civilization turns into a complete aristocracy. The goal is not to create a place where only a few can live solidly. In a libertarian society who will defend the defenseless, or protect the unprotected. Even libertarians acknowledge that a free market will drive to larger wealth disparity. Some believe this will be offset by the trickling down of wealth and technology. This uneven wealth when paired with deregulation leads to a ruling one group over another group. This helps make an argument for some sort of regulation, to prevent the rich from imposing their unjust and destructively onto poor multitudes.
And another comment on Xitter, in response to the one posted in the article, above:
PoiLIEvre’s obsession with defunding the CBC has its roots in far-right American politics, and Canadian conservatives like Loopstra merely parrot those views:
https://thewalrus.ca/conservatives-obsessed-cbc/
Why Are Conservatives So Obsessed with the CBC?
Pierre Poilievre seems to be on a mission to defund the CBC. He’s not the first Tory to attack the public broadcaster.
THE CALL TO defund the CBC (Poilievre has suggested he’d preserve French services) is a cornerstone of the populist strategy of the Conservative Party. It’s nothing new. Both Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole beat this drum when they led the party. O’Toole called for both defunding the CBC as well as modernizing and reforming it, so the message was a bit confused. At its heart, the existential attack on the CBC feeds conservative dislike of public institutions. The CBC competes unfairly, goes the logic, with private for-profit media. The CBC is seen as biased by other conservatives. When CBC president and CEO Catherine Tait told the Globe and Mail that Poilievre’s “Defund the CBC” platform was a fund-raising “slogan,” Conservative MP Marty Morantz tweeted, “The head of the CBC is now publicly bashing the Conservative Party of Canada. CBC bias is now on full display.”
The roots of this thinking go back to the United States, in the 1970s, when New Right conservatives stung by Watergate appealed to what Republican senator Jesse Helms called the 62 percent of Americans who don’t vote but would be willing to support a conservative majority if they were just given a reason to do so: the idea was to set a new tone in discourse by engaging with working-class emotions and generating convenient and easy-to-paint enemies—media and cultural institutions—in the spirit of black-hat, white-hat westerns. The goal, according to former strategist Kevin Phillips, and as quoted by Rick Perlstein in his book Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980, was to self-mythologize and build “a cultural siege-engine . . . [to] then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to ideological-institutional smithereens.”
So the media was painted as part of the liberal establishment. It took a while for the New Right culture wars to come to Canada, but they did—with Preston Manning and Stephen Harper. In 2015, Harper said the budget crunch at the CBC—a $130 million shortfall and 657 job cuts—had less to do with federal funding and more with declining interest in what they put on television. Then president and CEO Hubert Lacroix denied this and said ratings were “healthy.” It was a standoff. Many online liked Harper’s explanation: this was on the CBC. In any case, it spoke to the relationship. The prime minister didn’t seem to care much if the CBC was in trouble; for him, it was their problem. The same year, he told Quebec private radio that “a lot” of Radio-Canada employees “hate” conservative values.
And, of course, PoiLIEvre has to mimic his hero, Trump:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/02/donald-trump-budget-pbs-public-media-spending-cuts
Why Are Trump and the G.O.P. So Determined to Kill PBS?
On Monday, the president unveiled a 2019 budget that, as some predicted, eliminates funding for public media.
The G.O.P.’s battle against Big Bird dates back decades; Republicans have been trying, unsuccessfully, to fully defund public-media funding since the 1970s. But younger Americans likely best remember when the yellow fowl became a central talking point during the 2012 election, thanks to a debate in which Mitt Romney vowed to cut funding to public broadcasting—despite insisting, “I like Big Bird!”
Conservatives have long argued that the free market should fund PBS and the like, not taxpayers. But it’s also worth noting that funding for these entities makes up a measly portion of the national budget—.016 percent, as of last year. Cutting them, then, offers very little practical benefit.
So, why are Trump and the G.O.P. so bent on doing it, anyway? Most likely, it’s because PBS and its ilk are perfect targets for the right. They combine two of the G.O.P.’s favorite punching bags: the media and government spending. Past research has also shown that the American public believes public media hogs a much larger share of the federal budget than it actually receives. For Republicans, antagonizing these entities is a can’t-lose situation: public media is a highly visible, tangible enemy. And even if cuts don’t actually materialize, calling for them is a way to appear like fiscally responsible governors who have been stopped in their tracks by biased liberal media and politicians, bent on spending every last penny on kiddie shows and Masterpiece Theatre.