Renegade

Life insurance is a "tax by risk" endevour. While everyone of us has risk factors we still don't pay the same amount for life insurance because the risks are different for each. The same can apply to health insurance. The current system basically amounts to paying for health by income, which has nothing to do with consumption of healthcare or risk thereof.

Should people born with congenital disorders be required to pay more too? It would depend upon how we structured the assessment of risk. If we asked the parents to put up a health premium at the time when they found out they were pregnant, but before they were aware of any congenital defect, then no extra premium is required, as the risk and cost of treating the congenital defect is spread among all pregnanicies. OTOH, if for example, someone was immigrating to Canada and suffered from a congenital disorder and wanted Canadian healthcare coverage, then yes, they would also be required to pay more.

It shoudl not be ristricted only to food. Any activity or condition which puts the person being covered at higher risk of needing medical coverage should be required to pay more.

You can still take a libertarian view even in a public health system and penalize people for bad health choices. Simply have people pay a premium for health care, based upon their risk factors. Those risk factors can be as simple or as complex as we choose. For example, premium can be based upon weight, age, smoking status, etc. Simply put, a libertarian view would agree that those who are more at risk of using the system, should pay correspondingly more.

If what you are trying to say is that beauty is unimportant relative to other characteristics, I would say this is untrue, especially for women, but also for men. Despite how a woman may feel about herself, society values beauty highly. In many professions success depends upon being being beautiful. While as individuals, beauty may be subjective, as a collective we have already certain standards of what is "beautiful". Regardless if you agree with those standards or not, those are likely to be the standards one will be judged by.

Maybe Jerry can explain to Leona all the tax deductions she should have used because apparently she and her accountants were unaware and she was convicted of tax evasion. How unfortunate that despite Jerry and Leona's illusions, the rich do indeed have to pay taxes.

Utter nonsense Jerry!! Can you explain why the top 2% who earn more than $100,000/year pay 26% of the taxes? Is it because they and their accountants are too uninformed of all those shelters and deductions, or is it that $100,000 is not enough income to take advantage of those deductions? Or perhaps you don't really believe that they pay 26% of the income tax collected. I don't know how many tax returns you have prepared over $100,000 or how many deductions or shelters you have taken advantage of, Jerry, but I've done a few. While there are more legal ways to take advantage of tax law as the amount of disposable income increases, it is far from how you paint the picture that the rich avoid taxes altogether. As I expected, you cannot point to any evidence of your claim, you simply point to Revenue Canada and say "look at all those deductions", without understanding them or what it takes to take advantage of them. It is pointless for a minimium wage worker to take advantage of tax shelters since they pay so little income tax to begin with. In fact it may be counterproductive to try and take advantage of a shelter as the cost to use the shelter, including the accountant's time, will far outweigh any tax savings. Not necessarily true. It depends upon the circumstances. The single income family gets a tax credit for the stay at home mom which the two income household does not. In addition the single income family has lower costs as they do not need childcare or incur any of the other additional costs to keep the second person working (clothing, transportation, training, etc) Are you only looking at the last year? How about you factor all the money they sunk into reaserch and exploration in the years before they made any income? Of course, no dispute there. It is hard to take advantage of shelters when one pays little or no tax to begin with.

Care to cite any factual backup for your claim?

An interesting discussion, but it belongs in a separate thread. Happy to discuss it further if you start a new thread.

Here's a stat more in line with what you are looking for: link

Actually everyone earns exactly what they are paid. I don't think your question is on what they earned, but rather what they deserve. In my view it is easy to determine what someone deserves. They deserve what someone else is willing to pay them and they are willing to accept. Does a baseball player deserve $25Million for being able to hit a ball out of the park? I guess so, because someone is willing to pay it.

You are making an assumption that the corporation makes wise choices in where it invests the retained earnings. Certainly they should at least be wiser than the investor can make himself. This has not been true lately of BCE. It has invested in assets like Teleglobe, and BCE Emergis which has done nothing to enhance shareholder value, and as a result shareholders applaud the decision to stop retaining earnings and pass it on to them.

Do you have a cite for this? Does the federal government subsidize this? In my view they shouldn't. Maybe, but then the worth of those raw materials should be reflected in the price. If those raw materials fetch a high price, then the people who extract them in remote areas can demand higher labour rates and consequently use that labour premium to pay for the additional cost of infrastructure. None. I don't think corporations should be subsidized either. I think you are making broad assumptions about the views of all the citizens of Canada. I think you cannot make those generalizations and views vary greatly province by province or even municpality by muncipality. Not everyone believes in a poolled model or even that many of the currently dependant provinces will ever come out of their dependancy.

It is hard to understand why the CWB should be granted a monopoly position, however I disagree that they shoudl be muzzled in being able to make their case

An income trust avoids double-taxation by taxing income only once in the hands of the investor. We have heard suprising little debate on the justification of why double taxation should even be maintained even in a corporate structure.

The previous Liberal government did make concessions to equalize the disparity by increasing the tax advantage on dividends. Apparently it is not enough. I don't doubt that at some point the government will need to take further actions.

About the inconsistent application on legal entitities, the large hole in the corporate tax base and the less efficient use of the tax code. No I agree with most of that. In essence in tax-advantaged application on income trusts over other corporate structures is why Bell is going this route. I expect more companies to go this route until the government takes furrther steps to eliminate the disparity. Yes, as more companies adopt an income trust structure it will erode the corporate tax base. As indicated in the article an income trust is more efficient from a tax perspective than issuing dividends. None of this contradicts any of what I have said earlier.

How do you determine objectively what any person deserves? Many societies which have tried to equalize wealth have succeeded. Eveyone has become equally poor.

If you read up a bit on economics you will see that an increase or decrease in taxes can only affect the supply curve. This extent to which this is passed on to consumers depends upon the elasticity of the demand curve. Supply and Demand Let me present some numbers and quotatiion I've quoted before. The Relative Tax Burden The following is an excerpt: Well, that would really depend upon the individual wouldn't it? I would guess that most of us never reach the point at which more money would detrementally impact our standard of living.

You are quite right. When people figure out that VOIP is a disruptive technolgy, and start migrating en masse to it, Bell's revenue stream will start to collapse. For the short term enough people are either unfamiliar with the VOIP technology or don't have access to it, so the income stream is safe. I wouldn't be buying this income trust for the long term.

Actually I think conversion to income trust will benefit all shareholders via increased payouts and valuation. It is really the federal government ( and indirectly the taxpaying base) which is screwed.

Where do you get the idea the corporation do not pay tax? The federal government collects about $30B in corporate taxes. A pretty substantial sum from corporations who pay no tax, no? It makes no sense that a corporation would lower prices to customers. A corporations mandate is to maximize shareholder value. It will very much increase the payout to shareholders under the income trust structure. There is no real short term effect on consumers. The long term effect is that the company has made a decision to minimize investment in future infrastructure and in effect mine the current infrastructure for income.

True not all shareholders pay tax, becaue that is the way our tax system is designed. For example income trusts held within a RRSP or pension plan will defer paying tax but not completely avoid it. I don't know where you draw the conclusion that foreign shareholders do not pay tax to Canada. When there is a payout to non-residents there is generally a witholding tax which is applied regardless of if the non-resident files a Canadian tax return or not.

You are not reading the article correctly. BCE is expected to pay $250M (instead of $800M) WITHOUT the income trust structure becuse of tax shelters it has access to. Those shelters would be used up by 2008 leaving the entire $800M as a potential tax bill, hence the motivation to employ an income trust structure. It is not clear from the article how much tax would be generated at the hands of the individual investor.

It is a detailed assessment much of which I agree with. Which part in particular are you referring?