What's going on Canada?
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Instead of tax cuts to help the middle class, what they should really do is:
Reduce privatization.
So much of our country is owned privately for the sake of profit.
This is why everything is so expensive, itβs because we let rent seekers own our infrastructure.
I want my government to start making money without further relying on middle class income.
Yea but that's the Liberal party you're talking about. If you want that, you should vote NDP.
Yeah, private ownership concentration is a huge problem leading to monopolies, lack of innovation, and worsening treatment of both customers and employees in general. As I understand it, all funds have increasingly gone to parasitic shareholders more than ever since CEO pay has shifted more and more to pay in company stock.
Iβd love more publicly-run utility and transportation networks as you said, but in other less critical areas we could probably benefit from a more competitive system of small-to-medium-sized cooperatives that could (ideally, in a perfect world) replace corporations entirely. I would love to see support for worker groups with solid business plans to receive government grants (or at least forgiving loans) to help them buy their private sector workplaces for conversion to a democratic business model where employee-owners donβt get treated like serfs and businesses have to win over customers to survive, rather than trapping them and getting complacent.
*edited to add that last bit in italics
Do you think that's something they could easily do? It's a nice idea, but it's much more complicated to do anything about that
What if the government just started running crown corporations again? They could price things a lot lower and take business away from the private entities. It'll take some initial investment, but that's money well spent I think.
Maybe start with insurance and undercut that entire industry. Then use the profit to fund the establishment of other crown corps. Since they don't have to appease shareholders, all of the profit can go towards this.
I'd add transportation, utilities and natural ressources to that.
I am very happy with the crown Corp car insurance we have in Manitoba.
Sweet now let's raise it on foreign billionaires who try to defraud our EV rebates
Let's also do domestic billionaires (yea we have some).
Why have an EV rebate at all. Im sure the poor are overjoyed to gift their landlord a rebate for their new EV sports car. Meanwhile we are the only country in the G7 without high speed rail, while many of our highways were built in the 1960s.
I'm kind of hoping they will. The government does not have too much money right now. I see no reason not to add a few percent to the top or second-to-top tax bracket.
I'll repeat again, I don't need a fucking tax cut. I need the price of housing to start going down.
Increase taxes on property significantly, and use 100% of that money to give everyone a basic income.
This incentivizes both people and developers to be efficient with their housing choices. Using too much housing for the area you live in? You pay extra to help out everyone. Using the right amount? No harm to you. Using less than the average? Here's a payout, thank you.
Prices overall will drop, because it's no longer profitable to simply own a home due to the taxes, and especially not if there's no people in it because the taxes won't be offset by the basic income.
All they need to do is make it so you can only own one residence, if you own a second as income property it should be taxed to the point that you want to sell it.
I was in the rental stream before and at least 1 landlord was foreign owners from mainland China--the property had sat empty for six months before us because owner was rich and didn't care about the 2k month they were losing. Another was an unlocatable landlord, the strara paperwork showed China owner, but correspondence was coming from Korean contact info. It started to look more like shell company ownership. Also have two friends who's Vancouver places are Asian owned. Owners moved back to China and main house was vacant for 2+ years, just single basement tennant paying utilities to make place "occupied".
This is a red herring.
I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That's only 1-2 years of new building stock.
It won't hurt to do it, but it's simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.
We definitely need more housing across canada, but BC has been notorious for vacant homes and airbnb units, thus the ban on airbnb and the added vacancy tax out here.
I have a much more clear cut policy:
Occasionally someone has a big place and someone has a small place, but this would solve way more issues.
It really wouldn't.
A) It prevents renting at all except for basement suites. So no more rental buildings, which make up the majority of rentals available. Renting is an important housing option, as not everyone wants to own, nor should they have to. Move to a city to go to university, and you have to buy a house just to live in for 2-4 years before you have to sell it to move elsewhere for a job? Have a job that requires you go somewhere else for a few months while you , too bad hotel for 6 months instead of being able to rent an apartment.
B) If you do the math and even take out dedicated rental buildings, there really aren't that many homes that are owned as a second place. It's about 15% of the total market, and a large chunk of that are cottages and lake houses away from the cities where people actually want to live.
The big place/small place issue is actually more of a problem than the the double ownership you're talking about. There are more total bedrooms in Canada than there are people, and once you account for couples usually sharing a bedroom, there's actually a ton of extra bedrooms across the country. The problem is that they're not distributed properly across the population, 4+ bedroom family homes that were bought to raise children are being kept for decades by empty-nest couples who don't want to downsize.
Yes but what about the profits of investors? Have you thought of them? You meany.
There's an idea I hadn't thought of before. I wonder if there's any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable. And how that'd change base on how many others are in the same space. Could be interesting idea to tax people based on their space to people ratio π€
There are studies on that, but they're not super relevant because the appropriate amount of space is determined by how many people want to live somewhere, not based on the specific size.
People are willing to live in smaller places the closer they are to amenities. It's a gradient, not a single value even for each location.
For sure, definitely an interesting way to think of property taxes and how to encourage people to not have frivolous space.
Average square footage of homes:
https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-decade-by-decade.html
I wonder if thereβs any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable.
Culturally dependent, I'm pretty sure. Housing in Japan can be pretty tiny. Canada's on the large side.
It also depends on the person and their habits: introverts and people who spend more time at home are likely to want more personal space.
For sure, a thorough study of what Canadians need would be helpful to something like this. Could inform what a good space to person ratio could be. Especially in Canada.
If I'm understanding this correctly, you wouldn't need to adjust any taxes based on occupancy. The property tax would be fixed based on the value, as it is now but higher. If a single person lived in a big house the new guaranteed income might be less than the tax increase, if you added a second person you'd double the income and potentially cancel out the increase. If you had a family of four in that same house, you'd potentially pay no taxes at all or even get some back.
Maybe not no taxes, but less? Could be an interesting way to tackle low occupancy rates. If it's possible to pay no taxes at all, it might cause people to sardine can a house to save on $.
I see where you're coming from, but I can't really see how that outcome would be any more or less common than it would be currently. I suppose I should've said effectively no tax, as it would simply be the new combined income being higher than the total property tax.
Some quick hypothetical math:
For illustrative purposes we can pretend every house is worth the same amount so we can deal simply with averages. At the same time we'll round the average household to 2.5 people. Let's say every house currently pays $5000/yr in property tax and that gets doubled, then we distribute the total evenly between every person in the country. We should end up with every individual person getting $2000/yr. If your household is 2 people, you'd effectively pay $6000, if your household is 5, you'd pay $0.
In the real world values obviously differ, but it would theoretically lower taxes on full houses and raise taxes on underutilized houses, with the impacts felt much less on small single occupancy houses and much more on huge mansions occupied by a small family.
I'm no expert, I'm simply a normal guy taking someone else's commented idea and running with it, so I'm sure there would be issues. In fact I see one already. This sort of sounds like how the carbon tax was supposed to work, where the average consumer breaks even, but in reality people in more rural areas felt like they were being punished because they didn't have realistic options to cut down on their fuel usage. This housing idea would have a similar issue where people in the least affordable cities would feel punished, because their shoebox sized studio might cost as much as a house fit for a multi generational family in a different province.
I think that increasing the basic personal exemption would have helped a lot more lower income Canadians
Yes, but functionally no one voted NDP this year, and that was their pitch, IIRC.
It may yet be part of things: a promised cut to middle class taxes should infer inclusion of the poorer.
One would hope so, but I won't hold my breath.
why do they say it's for "middle class" if it's for poor people?
Make it an official tax bracket too, instead just a refund everyone qualifies for. I don't know why TF it's set up that way.
So what are they defining as "middle class" for this round? gotta love the journalism of CTV that seemed OK leaving this as "will lower tax for some Canadians"... some precise reporting there
It is time for a radical change in how we progress as a society. Money sure ain't working. "Let's keep turning these money knobs and see what happens" should not be the ultimate answer for forward progress towards something resembling a utopia, which should be the goal. I have no answers but it seems that fiddling around with economy and hoping for the best is nothing more than just killing time.
Absolutely. Money is a signifier that only has meaning when integrated in material exchanges. Radical, bold restructurations are needed in order to ameliorate our country's socioeconomic reality.
How about giving us income splitting so that I don't pay more in taxes than a two income family that makes more than I do?
I don't know if I count as middle class. But I remember the first year I didn't get all my taxes back on rebate. I was SO HAPPY to be making enough money to pay taxes.
Still feeling that way even though I am getting broker over time as the rent goes up and my wage doesn't.
It would be more worthwhile to do price controls on those loblaws assholes.
Middle class is a made up term meant to separate the working class. It doesn't mean anything. The definition of middle class is vibes alone because it's a term that means nothing used by pandering politicians.
I agree that systemic solutions should be the focus but unfortunately the Liberals are incapable of challenging the system.
This is to placate people who think voting gives you instant gratification. This isn't for people who pay attention.
Step one: tax the rich.
Tax. The. Rich.
Tax them until we eliminate working poverty. Tax them until we can move away from destroying the environment. Tax them until we eliminate billionaires entirely.
Disappointing to see adoption of CPC/PP platform cluelessness policy priority. Canada needs to spend on industrial policy to fight US, and prepare for hardships. His first BS of offering US empire more weapons purchases for more force multiplier warmongering was embarassing enough. Head in the sand "negotiations" is not going to go well.
Priority needs to be to destroy US economy, to save Canada's. If plan is to do nothing, we can do without an auto industry too, but waiting until the crisis evolves is just negligent.