joe posts

It’s that time of year again. The upside of being poor is that you get a nice refund from the government. Hopefully. It’s the rich that have to pay! Or is it?

In 1990, Canada’s overall tax system was more progressive, meaning families with higher income contributed relatively more through higher tax rates, to help pay for the things that benefit all of us: health care, education, roads, buses and subways.

Truth be told, things flattened out from the middle of the income distribution to the top – families at the top paid about the same share of their income in taxes as families in the middle.

But by 2005, the system has become far less progressive at the bottom of the distribution, and at the very top it has become regressive. Staggeringly, the top 1% pay total tax rates as much as six percentage points of income lower than families in the middle.

As a number of studies have found, the richest 1% of Canadians are getting the lion’s share of market income gains from a decade of remarkable economic growth. Yet, astonishingly, the richest 1% of families also now pay a lower tax rate than the poorest 10%. – Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Something to think about next time the boss bitches about taxes, and drives home in his Porsche.

Ah, John Baird. You tried hard with this one:

“Our government believes that the cost should be borne by those who use the service, not by Canadian taxpayers.”

That’s our minister of transportation explaining how the fifty percent increase in security fees (which we need to buy X-ray specs) are definitely not taxes. So it’s not a tax, because taxpayers won’t be paying it, ergo, people who fly aren’t taxpayers. Simple logic. Or did I get that wrong? It might just be some slimy fake-logic to trick us into thinking Canada’s New Government™ hasn’t broken yet another election promise.

True, not everyone flies. But Canada is a huge country and it’s a popular way of getting around. I guess they could use this same reasoning to introduce non-tax fees for anything – health fees are only paid by sick people, not taxpayers! Road maintenance fees for anyone who leaves their home, not the taxpayers! Policing fees for anyone who expects police help, not taxpayers! Income tax filing fees are only paid by people who file income taxes, not taxpayers! The great thing about flat fees to neoconservatives is that they are inherently regressive.

Maybe if we wanted a safer country we could stop spending billions following Americans around on their crusade against Islam. The fact is we’re at war; we should have no expectation for security. We’re killing people in Afghanistan, our government supports the Iraq war. It doesn’t matter if we’re polite people who only accidentally kill civilians. People will still fight back. That’s just a reality of war.

I thought this was a refreshing article on the ongoing Vale Inco strike up in Sudbury.

Pathetic or powerful: Can politicians put an end to the Vale Inco strike?

excerpt:

[Professor David Leadbeater]  said he thinks major mining companies donate to the governing Liberals, which makes them hesitant to intervene.

“They basically agree with what the mining companies are doing. They think this is the way to have development. They think that communities and working people are a secondary consideration,” Leadbeater said.

“This has to be challenged. They have to take a position that’s more based on democratic needs of communities, of unions and the majority of the population. I don’t think it will happen, though, without a lot of protest.”

The province’s official line is that they are ready to intervene and that they have to be impartial – not favouring the striking workers or the foreign corporations demanding concessions – because of legislation that requires MPPs not take sides between employers and employees in labour disputes. Which makes government as useful as a wet paper machete when it comes to labour disputes. No matter what party is at fault, or how wrong they are, politicians can’t do or say anything about it. No wonder neither side wants their help, Bartolucci can barely say ‘boo’ about the scabs they’ve brought in to keep the mines running without real workers. The company benefits from provincial impartiality, and mediation would almost certainly mean significant concessions on the part of the workers – something they went on strike to avoid. Meanwhile the strike gets uglier and uglier.

I’m guessing Vale will win this one – nobody can stop them. They made over five billion in 2009, even with the strike and the global economic crisis. And they make money even though they’re spending more on running the mines now (scab and security costs) than if they had just kept the same old contract with the union. At this point it looks like they just don’t want the workers to come back without severe punishment.

A strike can’t stop Vale, because they can use scabs. Violence won’t stop the scabs, because anti-scab violence is hard to defend and the province and police will protect them. Vale’s HQ is on another continent, which makes it impossible to protest against, and the distance means the corporation has no reason to care about the people of Northern Ontario. The province brags to the world that it can’t do anything but mediate, meaning it will try to hammer out a centre position between a foreign company that doesn’t give a shit about Canadians and actual Canadians who depend on the work to keep them off of welfare rolls and out of food banks.

The Libs and Tories encouraged this kind of development through tax breaks, relaxed ownership rules, regressive taxation, cuts to government agencies and their hands-off approach to labour disputes. This dispute, I think, is just ‘globalization’ coming to Northern Ontario. And globalization is not about making it easier for people to live, it’s about making it easier for the wealthy to make money and it’s about making sure power is out of reach for the working class and the poor, because they’d probably do things differently. They might be more concerned with community.

“You can only push people so far. When you can’t feed your kids, you can’t put food on the table, you can’t put clothing on them, they come home from school and they can’t participate in what’s going on, you think that’s good for a community?” Steelworker Pat Digby