I am actually going to share a milestone with my blog readers that I am pretty darn proud of: my post about Syria being a proxy war got 107 views! My first post over 100! Woohoo! People read me!
Okay now on to this week's post. I was on the C-train Saturday at the 39th street station and I saw 2 guys who were fighting. I mean these guys were punching each other. IN THE FACE! Another guy on the C-train told me what they were fighting about. Seven bucks! Sunday I ordered lunch from Boston Pizza. There's a $5 delivery charge. It's just a little ways down the street. I bet I could take a pizza from there, (if I ever ordered their pizza with all the toppings that fall off), go to the top of SLP2, a 5-story building where I work, Frisbee that pie off the roof and with the right wind conditions it would fly all the way back to Boston Pizza. "I ordered NO anchovies and double cheese!" I would yell. And they would hear me! It's that close! Yet they charge my a 5 dollar delivery fee. Plus tax, the bastards! So it works out to almost 6 bucks for a drive of a few hundred yards. Almost the purse for this C-train scrap. And I PAY it! And THEN I tip the driver!
I will rarely start a sentence like this but, one of the things I loved about Korea was you could order a 5-dollar bowl of soup from half way across the very spread out city of Seoul and they would deliver it for NUTHIN'! FREE!
Floyd Mayweather made well over 41.5 million bucks for his last fight vs. Saul "Canelo" Alvarez. Manny Pacquiao is a 2-term congressman in the Philippines with a net worth of over 85 million dollars. And Vitali Klitshko is running for president of his native Ukraine. I would bet my hockey card collection that they ALL fought for 7 bucks or even less on their way up to the financial stratospheres in which they now reside. Manny was probably punching for pesos in the late 80's in the Philippines. Vitali probably scrapped with brother Vlad for borscht money during college. And maybe Mayweather fought a few fights in the early 80's to help finance his parents' coke habits.
Now when you see Floyd Mayweather he'll be toting a Nike duffel bag with a million bucks in 100's. He wears his gotch and his shoes once then throws them out. I'm not talking Fruit of the Loom and Payless either. I mean silk boxers and Prada. And if you have enough money to run for government, you HAVE to be totally out of touch with the modest roots from whence you came!
The point I am waywardly trying to make here is that the difference between caring a lot about money, maybe TOO MUCH, and frivolously blowing it just may be the difference between amateur and professional status. I'm not going to suggest that me paying a ludicrous delivery charge for a two-minute, sweatless delivery, and then tipping is the same in degree as going to a strip club and making it rain 100 dollar bills. Just in principal.
So what, (please, GOD get to the point!), am I saying? I'm a professional tipper? I'm a pro at paying bogus, tacked-on nickel and dime fees? Why, yes, that IS what I'm saying. Sort of. It's in my blood let's say. By inference, am I saying South Korea, where free delivery is ubiquitous and tipping is unheard of, is an amateur country at paying good money for nothing? Why, yes! I am saying that too! And what am I leading up to with all of this? If you know me, or if you have read every fifth post here, you could take a pretty decent guess at what this blog post will ultimately be about. There was one other mind blowingly superior thing about Korea whilst I resided in what I am not ashamed to say became my surrogate country: taxes! The BEST thing about Korea was always the taxes. To me anyway. Oh sure the food was awesome and the girls looked their best at all times but I was blown away at tax time every year when it was taken out of my regular paycheck BY OTHER PEOPLE, and it never hurt a little bit! I didn't have to meet the tax deadline, go to H&R Block, save receipts, T4's or any of that totally unnecessary crap! It was all done for me and it worked out to about 50 bucks at the height of my earning power in the Land of the Morning Calm. Can you imagine that? Of course you can't if you're Canadian! Canadians are tax paying professionals!
I recently stumbled upon some Canada Revenue Data in the Canadian newspaper, The Financial Post, (which I love), released in 2011 for the taxes collected in 2009. It is the most recent year for which we have such detailed statistics. And, yes, before I got any further I realize I have slagged statistics as some pretty easy ways to turn the truth into plastecine and mould it into the Gumby of your choice but I am just floating this out there for the Dudes who read to say, "That's interesting. That's fucking interesting...."
Where to begin....? http://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM Check that out! I know it's a bit long but you don't have to watch to the end to get the gist. It's about what the American people would like the division of capital and assets in their country to be, what they think it is, and what it ACTUALLY is. It's mind-blowing eh? After watching this I started thinking about what the same graph would be like for the world. THEN I wondered what it's like for Canada! I admit, I tend to think things aren't quite so bad in Canada as they are in the States. In a lot of ways. But then I got ahold of these stats!
Oh damn! Where to begin! Okay, in 2008, (couldn't find the 2009 population but we aren't prodigious breeders here so this should be close), the population of Canada was 33,506,000. That's men, women, children, everyone! 75% of Canadians, (who registered their taxes with Canada Revenue), (and that might actually skew these stats beyond usefulness but, we'll go on), earned less than 50,000 bucks a year. Now of course retired Canadians and Canadian babies, teens, newly patriated, aren't raking in too much cash. This is just the gainfully employed. And I am going to tell you right now I wish I were in the 25% who earned more! Can't imagine 50 grand. That's over 4 thou a month! That's pay the bills! 3 of 4 make less. And I don't know many, if any, who make more myself. But I hang out with the dregs of my home and native land. The average income in Canada for that year was $68,410! That's like almost 7 grand a month! And I apologize, I don't know if this is gross or net but to me it seems pretty gross and disgusting that 3 of 4 people in Canada make 18 thou less than what is supposed to be the average! I think I have had more years making less than the difference than more working full time. I'm saying 18 thou, is an amount of money that myself and a whole lot of Canadians work their asses off for every year. That's only the difference between what is supposed to be average and what is way beyond what most of us will ever earn. Are you following this? Are you hip to what these stats are relating? What this means is the top 25% has a good chunk that STILL aren't average! That is not MY, (or any sane person's), definition of average! It's the capitalist, corporate definition. Like when you don't make as much profit as last year you are losing money. Same sort of deal. These stats show that even if you are in the top quarter of Canada, you can still be below average! What the frig?
I know. So I wanted to find out approximately how many people in Canada are laughing their ways to the bank. Economics. All this means is there are a VERY few Canadians who are skewing the stats so that the average is far beyond what any TRULY average person has a right to hope for. The Stats Canada stats told me. I was gobsmacked when I read that only about 174,000 of us make $250,000 a year or more. As a percentage that's 0.7%. And these are only people who are doing their taxes! I have it on good authority from my reading of the Globe and Mail that a former economist who is now teaching at St. Mary's or some university in Halifax said, and I quote, (and on one of my previous posts gave his name and everything more accurately), "Anyone in Canada who makes half a million a year doesn't have to pay taxes. A million or more, they are NOT paying taxes."
So you can imagine how the graph would look for Canada. It would probably be WORSE than that of the States. And I admit to being one of the patriotic fools who always think things here in Canada just can't be as bad as things in the States. I think it just might be worse! The 0.7% of Canadians who are declaring their taxes may ALL be on the level for all we know! If that's the case there is a miniscule number of SUPER rich in our country who are paying no taxes and making the more average citizens, who are trying to be honest and do their part for the country pay THROUGH THE ASS at tax time to support our country!
Well there were stats to back that up too! There are two kinds of tax rates that these stats were based on. One is called the "average tax rate." This is the tax you pay divided by your total income. So if you pay 3000 in tax and your income is 30,000 a year you pay 10%. That's what we all can understand. Then there's this thing they call the "marginal tax rate." The definition is the amount of tax you pay on an additional dollar of income above a certain amount." Whatever the hell THAT means! It's one of those clever phrases that populate our 1500 page tax code.
But in Alberta, where I live the average tax rate is about 20%. I'd say that's pie in the sky but let's use that. The marginal rate is 32%. So if 20% of 250,000 is 83,000, which it is, and all the 174,000 people who made 250 thou or more all just made exactly 250 thou, the total tax collected by Revenue Canada would be 8.7 billion bucks. If you figure the mysterious "marginal" tax rate, the total would be 14.44 billion. That's a LOT of money! SO these super rich must be really doing their share of the tax payment in Canada, right? Now I know there are lots who made more than the 250 but as our economist tells us, they aren't paying taxes so they can be discounted.
Well in 2009 the personal income tax collected was 189.2 billion. This does not include sales tax, lottery, parking tickets, girl guide cookies, excise taxes, beer, parking tickets, insurance, estate tax, gift tax, and any number of other taxes we pay upon our other taxes. Just income tax. If you declare it. So the rest of us poor shmucks are paying 180 billion of the 189 bil. collected when the super rich are paying just less than 9 bil. Not including the myriad of not-so-in-your-face taxes.
Wait! It gets worse! The employment aged people, which I have on my own accord decided to be those between ages 15 and 64 in Canada, (and unfortunately I had to use stats from 2012, which will be favourable to the assholes I'm trying to point out here), only total 24,028,000. And just hold on a sec! It gets worse! The employment rate is between 61 and 62% as reported by our overly exaggerating stats team in Canada. That boils it down to 14,897,360 people. Now do the math with THOSE numbers!
Canadians are absolute PROFESSIONAL tax payers. That is payers of bullshit costs for ethereal, and abstractly outlined taxes by the mafia who run our country. And let's not forget, now that it's nearing November 11th, that there are people who fought hard and died and were wounded physically and mentally to ensure that their descendants had something like that bogus average of 68 grand a year so they can have a good home, a good job, a nice car and good life for them and their families. What we have here is the polar opposite of what those heroes had envisioned if you ask me.
Now consider, if you will, the stories of those who we so easily call crackpots and crazies like the "freemen" who will occupy your house and declare it an embassy for an autonomous person or whatever. Yeah it's a scant argument. However, they are against paying taxes and if you consider all I've told you statistically and couple that with the fact that we've been paying "income tax" for an awful long time when it was implemented as a war support effort, it gets to the point of a(n) hilarious comedy! I think we've fully covered our war expenses for the Great War and WWII quite nicely, how bout we just stop paying now?
But, (at long last), my point is, sometimes we spend money that we know we are totally wasting and for some unknown reason don't give a shit. It might be inherent to our privileged places in the planet where we have considerably more than average, or it might be just osmosisly sucked into our brains through television and internet. But Canadians believe ourselves to be in good positions to grab that golden carousel ring and get that comfortable life we all desire, yet we, (most of us), spend our entire lives going round and round and round and round and round paying the carnie for every revolution and never reaching that ring. I have gone this long without waxing Eastern on your asses but this seems to me to be the Maya to the Dharma we are all seeking Buddhist or not. Look it up. I will, in true Buddhist fashion, not elabourate.
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