Is that just me? Don't you think the phrase that could be tacked onto the end of almost all of them is a very Canadian, "EH?" As in, "Right?" "No?" "Aren't we?" These memes seem less "Fuckin' A, Canada!" and more, "Well, it could be worse..." like the country is nervously trying to put in a few more good years at their jobs before we fight the power. Well I'm sorry but I believe the patriotic thing to do, the thing that will be best for all Canadians, is to have that revolution and get back to "Fuckin' A, Canada!" We're not a country, in my mind, that should be settling for mediocrity or, (and I'm going to invent a word here), celebrating moronity.
How are we celebrating moronity? Well, I'm glad I asked that question. You see, this month doesn't just mark the 150th year since we became an independent country, on July 25th we will have been paying income tax for 100 years. THERE'S cause for celebration! Canada is statistically the most educated country on the planet, yet this one apotheosis of moronity keeps us grounded. I think we should be handed some sort of award by the other countries of the world on July 25th for being a smart country that has maintained one of history's most brainless behaviours for 100 years! I'll be kind and give us a few years of grace. To be fair the tax was implemented for good reason and it WAS technically fair for two or three years. But still, 97 years of vacuous surrender of hard-earned money to governments who have built up an epic list of wasteful uses of that money? We should all forfeit our degrees and get jobs at the box factory! Paying income tax is the height of moronity!
Now, for those of you, and there are many, who generously illustrate my point, and do not know the full story of Canadian personal income tax and why it's easily the least skookum thing we do, I understand. The people you are ignorantly enriching every year keep you just busy enough so that you don't have time to research things like this. Well, that's not altogether true, is it? We have the time, but we'd rather eat pancakes, watch hockey and drink beer, or Tim Horton's coffee. If you don't see how stunned this makes us all appear, surrendering about half our incomes not knowing why, or what we get for it, put down your mugs, switch off the TV, (or at least mute it so you can keep track of the score as you read), and continue reading. Don't go back to the hockey game and settle for the tired and completely false arguments those people we are annually enriching invented to appease us. You have all heard THEM. "If you don't pay taxes, you don't have the right to complain about the government." "You can't call yourself a good Canadian if you don't pay your taxes." "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." "We get free healthcare, education and roads for our tax dollar." In the beginning, these sayings were a lot more valid, possibly even true because income tax was fair, simple and I think the governments probably used a little bit of it to help the average Johnny Canuck. But for as long as most of us can remember, the Caesars in charge of governing Canada have been rendered far more than that which is rightfully theirs and they have used it to improve the lives of only the richest Canadians. Read on and see if you don't agree with my defence of that statement.
Quick anybody who hasn't read my previous post name the Prime Minister that was in charge when personal income tax was introduced. Name the reason. Lots of people know that one! I bet none can name the member of government who introduced it. His ministry or his name. For a lot of Canadians, like me, taxes are the biggest hardship we face every single year, and we know so little about it! Not any more for me, it's a very good reason why I am in China, not still in Canada. But seriously, how much can you honestly say you know about this annual burden? According to this article, which has shiny, good, two-year-old statistics, we pay more in taxes than we do in housing, food and clothing. IF these statistics are accurate, the average taxpayer pays over 10,000 bucks in income taxes. The population in '15 was 35.85 million. Roughly 80% of those people filed taxes. That's 28.68 million people who paid, on average, 10 grand. That works out to 286 BILLION, 800 million. That can't be right! EH?
Well those numbers can easily be contested because they are hard to prove. They have been MADE purposefully hard to prove. The government doesn't want us to know how much they collect from us. We'd go nuts! The original tax code was 11 pages. In 2014 it was 3,206 pages. Over a million words long. But they add more words every year. Legal words. Words that are misleading, concealing and corrupt. And we know that. It's obvious. P.J. O'Rourke once wrote, "Beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud." Ever read "War and Peace?" That's about half as long and although a challenge to most, not even close to as complicated. The fact is, there may be nobody who completely understands the entire Canadian tax code. But there are many who understand enough to find the holes. They work for the rich maintaining a zero, to below zero tax rate for them. You can do that with wildly complicated taxation in a country. It's so complicated that tax return preparation, (H & R Block mostly), is a 4 billion dollar a year industry. But it wasn't always like this...
On July 25, 1917, Sir Thomas White, then Minister of Finance of the Borden government signed the "War Tax Income" bill into law. The U.S. and Great Britain had already introduced personal income tax schemes but White said he didn't want to. But he did. Originally it was a 4% tax on all single man's income over $2,000. Personal exemption for most was $1500, $3,000 for families. That's over 26,000 and 52,000 in today's dollars. And remember, inflation wasn't so bad so cost of living was comparatively cheap back then. In its infancy, almost nobody in Canada had to pay it. One in 50 fell into these tax brackets. There was another area of more than $6,000 a year, which is well over 100,000 dollars. This was very hard to spend in a year back then. Members of this rich tax bracket paid and ambiguous 2-29% tax rate. I wonder what THAT depended on. Still it was a LOT simpler than today. Here's a tax form.
I could fill that out on my own! Probably. But you didn't have to! If you were one of the few, you had help given, for free, when you submitted it.
As its name would indicate, it was implemented to assist in the wartime effort during WWI. It was supposed to be temporary. To quote Sir Thomas White, "We don't know how long this war will last... Therefore, I have placed no time limit upon this measure but merely have placed upon the Hansard the suggestion that, a year or two after the war is over, the measure should be reviewed by the minister of finance of the day, with a view of judging whether it is suitable to the conditions which then prevail." The cost of the war in dollars was $1.665 billion for Canada. There is no doubt the government had the money to pay that debt off. Wartime bond purchases alone exceeded 2 billion. With the bump in the economy when the soldiers returned and the late 20's, which were profitable for Canada, the minister of finance should have repealed personal income tax, but inexplicably didn't.
It's interesting to note that on May 18, 1916 the Business Profits War Tax Act was passed. This required any business making $50,000 a year or more, (again ambiguously), to file a tax return. I could find no percentages or amounts of dollars they should pay. Just file a return. THIS act was evaluated every year during annual sessions of parliament. It was extended 2 years, then repealed in 1918. So the temporary extra tax on businesses was repealed when it wasn't necessary to collect it any more, but not the one for the little guys in Canada. Anybody surprised at that?
Since its invention the taxes have snowballed and exemptions, loopholes and details have multiplied like barnacles making the tax code thicker and increasingly fraudulent. Personal income tax is now over half the federal revenues, which are mammoth. We THINK we have free health care in Canada, but because of all the abstract and intentionally obfuscated taxes, we pay. This article quantifies it at $11 thousand a year. We often say our education is free but every report I've read about this states the same thing: the taxes collected have increased every year far beyond the rate of inflation while the actual student enrollment has dropped. Every study concludes that there is a baffling over-collection then disappearance of education funds in Canada. This is for public elementary, middle and high schools. As for post secondary schools, expenses have risen by factors of from 4 to 10 across the board. MY education would cost about 10 times what it did when I got it 30 years ago.
This just might be an attempt to price average Canadians back to the proper level of moronity so they will continue paying income tax. Almost everybody has heard tales of $400 hammers bought at an MP's nephew's best friend's parents' hardware store; $700 dinners; $10,000 strip bar outings; entire apartment building rented and not used; and other abuses of the massive revenue collected every year in the form of Canadian income taxes. Read Maclean's Magazine's "99 Stupid Things The Government Did With Your Money" if you want an angry laugh. We've all heard that the rich have so many loopholes, they don't have to pay any taxes, and with many advantages, some actually get what amounts to corporate welfare from our taxes. Just one example is the 200 billion bucks in tax havens held by rich Canadians. It was 170 billion in 2013, I'm guessing. Fact is, we probably don't know the half of it. Some rich dude wants some of that money, they set up a fake company, take a loan from their Cayman Island branch, TAX FREE, and bada boom bada bing, it was sent over and brought back tax free. Our highest tax rate is 33%. These funds qualify in my book. 66 billion in revenue would be a good start to fix things up in the lives of the REAL Canadians and it would bring the rich and middle classes a bit closer together. I think the people of Canada deserve this as a start. Call it reparation payments for 100 years of unfair taxation. At a time when our P.M. is saying he envies immigrants who he reckons have MORE stake in Canada because they chose to be here, needless to say people from families who have paid Canadian taxes for generations have a different opinion. But this is so typical of the people we get in government! He's from a rich family. The Trudeaus were not poor. How much do you think our P.M. has stashed overseas? And how much tax has he paid? HE's never felt the tax burden. HE doesn't get any.
And while we're on that topic, maybe the second stupidest thing about Canada is something Trudeau has made a big show of calling close to his heart. The natives of Canada. Trudeau has gotten very emotional when speaking about the terrible state of the Canadian indigenous people and he's made promises to help the situation. How's he doing so far?
But that is not what I find stupid. That's to be expected. Canadian politician would score a G if they could be given that grade on the keeping of promises. No, the document that governs the laws and how the Canadian state interacts with the 614 First Nations bands in Canada by governing reserves and defining who qualifies as an indigenous person, is called the "INDIAN ACT!" That's the second stupidest thing about Canada. First of all, Columbus was a moron. He could hardly have been farther away from India if he'd sailed the other way. And when he asked the natives if they were Indians and they said they weren't, in utter ignorance of their humanity, much less equality, he called them Indians anyway. How does that puerile term persist today? Through the celebration of moronity. I guess we're not as bad as the States who actually celebrate Columbus Day and some people get the day off. Others have to work and find something to do with their kids who aren't in school. And imagine the surprise and flattery felt by Cleveland taxi drivers and 7-11 workers when they found out the name of the local baseball club, the Cleveland Indians! But that's not what it means. Geez, I guess that comment was a little racist. There is another example of moronity. The word "racist" or "race" itself is completely moronic. J.F. Blumenbach defined the people of the area of Caucasus, which did not include India, as Caucasians. People from India are considered to belong to the Caucasian race, which is characterized by white skin colour, which people from India do not have. Natives in North America were considered to have red skin, which they don't, and they were of the American race. Nowadays most North American people are white Caucasians who are not from, and do not live in Caucasus. The natives in North America are Americans but they're called Indians. The Indians in North America, who are not governed by the Indian Act, are considered Caucasian though they're not from there, nor are they white. Most people in Caucasus today are not white. And it's all a great big celebration of moronity!
At any rate, it's high time we had that revolution in Canada and got the 1% out of politics and started getting our money's worth for our taxes. It's been done before.
I suspect it will be a bit harder in Canada after having grown accustomed to 1% rule. Even NEW politicians who promise to change Canada for the better and actually DO what the majority wants will not be trusted at first. But it can be done and I think the people of Canada, though stupid enough to have paid our Cosa Nostra government protection money for a century, have not quite diminished intelligence-wise to the point of moronity necessary to remain ignorant or apathetic to this revolution that is the obvious trajectory for our country.
Eliminate personal income tax.
Tax every dollar of hidden or tax sheltered income.
Trash the tax code and start from scratch making the rich pay their fair share of taxes.
Any agency, bank or public office that does not comply, fire the workers and re-staff it.
There will be violent resistance hired by the rich. Counteract it non-violently.
And start it all on July 25th of this year.
This is never going to happen. I have to laugh just looking at it. The people of Canada are just too complacent in their belief that our country is super wonderful. But I have to dream. And at the first signs of this revolution, I will return and join it. Until then I will avoid the celebration of our national moronity at tax time from afar.
Make me wanna holler n throw up both my hands.
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