You know when the government increases taxes on corporations, they are really taxing you… right? You can put lipstick on this tax pig, but it is still a pig! The Liberals have come forward today with new budget plans that aim new taxes at the corporations that profited the most during the pandemic; namely Canada’s big banks (for a start). They intend to recover billions in tax every year to apply to the national deficit they created and various social programs they dream up like govt dental for lower income earners (under $70k/year). Anybody making more than that gets to pay for it I guess. Their alliance with the NDP and pandering to their causes is another power grab by the Liberals. This is the deficit that was caused by the Liberals putting more money in circulation and creating all kinds of other huge expenses during the pandemic. Politics are like smoke and mirrors to me. The government caused this problem, and now the government will fix it, with everyone’s money and looking like saints through it all. They'll serve up these tax hikes and sprinkle them with sugar to make them more appetizing, brainwashing you into thinking you'll be immune to the effects.
When costs go up for corporations, what as consumers do we expect to happen? Sure, we’ll all reap some form of benefit from it in terms of how the government distributes it back to us. But your right to make choices begins to erode with every tax program, on top of your take-home pay eroding. The government will take your money and give it back as it sees fit, if you choose to use it. For instance, now, I can pick and choose my dental coverage and costs. In universal programs you don’t get to pick, you only get to pay the universal costs to support it. That is how universal health functions now in Canada, and you can see how that is working for us? Elective surgeries have huge wait times. Getting a family doctor is near impossible. Facilities are understaffed. And, it is difficult to get Doctors and Nurses into the profession in Canada without importing them. Even then, they are not likely to stay in the smaller centres they come to if they are any good at what they do, or even stay in Canada in that regard as they can do better in bigger cities and/or south of the border.
In the examples of banks, they will adjust their balance sheets somehow to compensate. Services and products get more expensive, dividends perhaps get cut, and we all pay somewhere, somehow, some time. You may hold bank stocks in your mutual funds that will see the effects, and it is more than likely you are using banking services and products that may get more expensive. The leftists are likely shouting from the rooftops, “tax the filthy rich”, while all along it‘s them being taxed and boiling like frogs in these Liberal/NDP programs. It’s a way of taxing everyone without them knowing they are being taxed. It's another way to cool down the economy. But it's dangerous. People may not invest in Canada any more as a result. They may rebalance their portfolios to other countries where growth and capitalism isn't stymied by government taxes.
Winston Churchill said it best, “you cannot tax a country into prosperity. The inherent share of capitalism is the unequal share of prosperity, and the inherent share of socialism is the unequal share of misery. The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other ”.
Or George Bernard Shaw, “a goverment that robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul”. And there seems to be a growing number of Pauls these days?
Adrian Rogers had another take on Churchill’s analogy. “You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealth out of prosperity. When half the people get the idea they do not have to work because the other half will take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because someone else is going to get what they worked for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving it.”
I think Canada is a great place to live and retire, … for now. And I’m not against some social assistance in our government programs. But I’m not sure I trust the government with my money, or where they are going with spending and taxes these days. They are starting to flirt on the borders of communism, and seem to be testing the populations‘ appetite for increasing socialism. I’ve been doing pretty good so far with my own money without the government's (increasing) interventions, but it always seems they are trying to get more of what we’ve all worked for all our lives?
I'm always watching for the lipstick the government puts on the tax pig!