Housing Crisis, Packed Hospitals and Drug Overdoses: What Happened to Canada?
Housing Crisis, Packed Hospitals and Drug Overdoses: What Happened to Canada?
From Toronto to Vancouver, some residents are losing faith in a government social safety net that is central to the country’s identity.
What a mystery this is.
Corporate taxes used to cover over 30% of government revenue, it's 10% now. The top marginal income tax rate peaked in the 1960s at somewhere around 80% on income exceeding ~3M/year (today's money). We've had 4 decades of tax cuts while the cost of delivering services has increased more or less with the inflation rate. Private equity funds now have favourable tax treatment, and stock buybacks, previously considered illegal stock manipulation is a common practice. And so on and so forth.
If you want what you had, you have to do what you did.
I'm inclined to suspect the corporate taxes covering 30 percent down to ten, is more related to an increase in government spending and increasing individual's taxes, than cutting corporate, because, believe it or not, they tax the living shit out of businesses, much more and it'll start to cause failures. Often times businesses that would be quite profitable just on the other side of the border, are barely making it despite comparable sales, and taxes go up tomorrow,
Corporations aren’t your friends, they aren’t going to give you any preferential treatment that they aren’t seeing the better side of.
Capital flight is also not a thing, it’s a bogeyman set up by conservatives to avoid raising taxes.
Businesses also won’t leave. Their remarkable treatment in Canada will go down to slightly less remarkable. They moan and groan and set up a whole ad campaign about how this is going to hurt the consumer but that means it’s working. And if you mean “small business” there are so so so many way ways to create exceptions or offer grants to Canadians starting or operating small businesses, where the target is larger oligopolies and conglomerates.
they tax the living shit out of businesses
Yeah. It's how we spend on keeping Canadians healthy and happy like every other happy country does. Keep up.
And TEN IS LESS THAN THIRTY like it was in the Good Old days we seemed to survive before, in those years when we built things like bridges and railways (those are the rotting, unmaintained things we non-helicopter-owning wage-slaves use) like Sweden and Denmark do to this day.
increase in government spending
TAX AND SPEND. Keep up. It's a whole thing.
quite profitable just on the other side of the border
Unless you mean on Miquelon or Greenland, you must be talking about the border to that user-pays, fuck-the-plebes, birth-slavery, medical-bankruptcy hell to our south.
Having lived there, I fervently hope you aren't holding that nearly-fascist mess as a goal. Alberta is cruel enough for us; let's not go full American.
they tax the living shit out of businesses, much more and it'll start to cause failures.
Why?
Taxes are on revenues, not gross profits. That's why EBIT exists as a performance measure.
As a quick example of a made up corp:
Gross profits 1.1B
COGS + OpExp 1.0B
EBIT 100M
Taxes 10% (30%)
Revenues 90M (70M)
Now mom and pop barely alive
Gross profits 500k
COGS + OpExp 500k
EBIT 0
Taxes 10% (30%)
Revenues 0 (0)
Holy shit, when fucking Bloomberg says that neoliberalism is the problem, you know it's bad.
Conservative provincial policy happened.
Liberals and Conservatives have helmed provincial and federal governments over the decades that it took for these crises to gestate.
jesus christ why not just say "But Harper" outright? At least when the conservatives are in charge, they try fix everything the Liberals broke. But they break shit so bad, it's hard to come back. We'll be feeling this Trudeau for 50 years, and we still haven't recovered from his dad.
Ooh, I know this! Is it capitalism?
It's capitalism.
But spending cuts in the 1980s and 1990s, along with a move to put more responsibility for economic and social well-being on the shoulders of individuals, caused low-income Canadians to fall further behind, the report says.
So neoliberalism. Neoliberalism happened.
Who could've guessed.
It's amazing reading some of these statements. Spending increased every year but cuts are the problem holding people back, when taxes have increased dramatically since then too.
Taxes don't tend to affect you when you make less than the tax cutoff.
But not having the social services those taxes used to fund suddenly means you don't get to eat dinner tomorrow, or you can't go to a family doctor because there aren't any available.
People like to complain about taxes, but taxes never made someone destitute.
when taxes have increased dramatically since then too
No they haven't:
In 1961, families paid 33.5% of their income on taxes, but by 1969 they were paying 39% and in 1974 they paid 43.4% of their income. So, if you compare the 2009 effective family tax rate to 1961, you will find a 25% increase, but you will only report a 7% increase since 1969 and an actual decrease since 1974.
(Note this analysis is circa 2010, but things haven't changed substantially since then aside from the post COVID inflation spike that's still subsiding).
But enjoy the alternate reality brought to you by your "friends" at the Fraser Institute™️.
The biggest things that happened are media hubris and corporate consolidation. Secondary things are population increase and offshore investment.
And a continued government and societal coddling of massive corporations able to purchase naming rights to stadiums on our backs.
What happened is neoliberalism.
You got it.
Our southern neighbour has a huge lobbying campaign to turn our system in a private health care system.
It's not that they are actively working towards this that is the problem .... it's equally problematic that we citizens are more than willing to just wander around like zombies and let it all happen.
I think we're privatizing ourselves quite nicely without their help.
It's hard to (directly) blame the US when we insist on underpaying our health care staff on our own. We also reduced the number of spots for training nurses and doctors during the 1990s.
I grew up being told about how amazing and great Canada is. I'm grown now, where is this great Canada? As I've grown I've seen what Canada did to my fellow native blooded people, wages are pathetic, housing is a disaster, food prices are a joke, healthcare is covering less and less, our government only cares about foreign citizens and not their own.
Where is the greatness of Canada? Cause I sure as fuck can't see it