If pretzels could feel pain I imagine they’d be in a world of hurt, contorted as they are into a double version of the Marinelli bend (into which some humans, ignoring the fatality risk inherent in that pose, still foolishly fold themselves).
Pretzels, of course, being inanimate, don’t feel any pain. But their convoluted shape has long served as metaphor for the astonishing twists of logic of which humans are uniquely capable. Like that displayed this week by Canada’s Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland.
Yesterday her government passed a hike in the capital gains tax rate, ignoring the chorus of opposition to the measure voiced by entrepreneurs, small business people, and doctors. Per Freeland, we’re wealthy, see? We need to pay our fair share!
Here’s Freeland holding court days before yesterday’s House of Commons vote:
“Do we want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their lesser privileged compatriots burns so hot?”
Yikes. That’s quite the riff.
Come to think of it, it might be my turn to patrol the fences tonight. I’d better check — just as soon as I finish polishing the Lear parked in my hangar out back. Gotta keep those angry peasants outta the ‘hood.
It’s probably only a matter of time, mind you, before we’re overrun by the seething hordes. They’re a-comin’; and it’s far too dangerous to try to stop them. It was a different Lear — the Shakespearean king — who wisely advised:
“Come not between the dragon and his wrath!
Say what you like about Freeland’s hyperbole: it was at least consistent with the nonsensical potshots she’s been lobbing at hard-working Canadians ever since her government tabled their latest tax-hiking “budget” earlier this spring. (With these Liberals, budgets are perennial exercises in squeezing more money from taxpayers; never, ever, does cutting down on spending enter their conniving minds.)
But then the Minister said this, apropos of the $11.6-billion windfall she projects her tax measure will raise for the provinces and territories:
“That’s a lot of additional money for provinces and territories. I would invite Canadians who feel that our doctors should be paid more to suggest that provinces and territories should be using some of that revenue to increase the actual salaries, the rate of compensation of doctors.”
But, but… I already have a Lear! And a very tall fence! How could I possibly need more money??
We doctors are either stupendously rich private-jet equipped grifters ensconced in gated enclaves, or we deserve a raise. Both those things can’t be true, surely.
But both those thoughts comfortably occupy the brain of our Finance Minister, apparently. Pretzel, meet Freeland. (Although I daresay the average brown pretzel would turn green with envy, if such a thing were possible, at the Minister’s astonishing capacity for contortion.)
On Wednesday, in a long and excellent article for The Hub titled “DeepDive: The capital gains tax hike will hurt the middle class too”, economist Jack Mintz shreds the Liberal narrative that the tax hit will impact a tiny fraction of Canadians. But a deep dive isn’t needed to appreciate the stupidity of the measure; one needs only a basic grasp of economic reality.
It’s a grasp possessed by neither Freeland nor her boss, Prime Minister Trudeau. And understandably, perhaps, given that neither of them ran so much as a popsicle stand prior to entering politics (pity the popsicles under their management: they’d be a melted, gooey mess, much like the state of Canadian finances today).
Freeland and Trudeau haven’t a clue as to the pressures of running a business, meeting payroll, putting capital at risk, and so on. And so they can’t possibly appreciate the damage this latest tax measure will inflict on Canadian business owners, entrepreneurs, and doctors. In this too they’re like pretzels: inanimate, incapable of feeling our pain.
The capital gains tax hike is without doubt a “deep dive” into the shallow end of the pool. But it’s Canadians who will feel the pain. It’s Canadians who will pay the price.
We’re already in a world of hurt. And it won’t take many more of these foolish Liberal plunges before the neck of the Canadian economy is irrevocably broken.
It may already be too late.
I fell into this big-L liberal way of thinking when I was younger - that the rich got off easy tax-wise. Then I actually read data. The rich pay a hugely disproportionate amount of the taxes that the government takes in. Something like 50% of Canadians now pay no net tax. Those 50% have every reason to deeply believe in tax increases. You can double taxes, and someone paying zero still pays zero.
The budgeting and procurement process in Ottawa is fraught with corruption, ala Arrivcan. Until more Canadians get involved and start engaging with their local reps, expect much more of the same.