Moonbox

So your TFSA, at best, covers you for inflation (but probably hasn't since 2010). If you're getting more out of 1-2% interest than you would from Trudeau's tax cuts, that's because you're in a higher tax bracket and congratulations to you. Small problem: Someone making $88,000/year only has ~$66,000 in net income. A $10,000 contribution limit is therefore more than 15% of their take-home and I can tell you for a fact that virtually nobody is putting that sort of money away each year.

My concept is based on relative numbers and facts. Yours is based on: "...NBA players are rich, but the billionaire owner who tosses them their pennies is wealthy. Oprah is rich. Bill Gates is wealthy.." Which is more absurd? No offense intended, but what you personally consider rich or wealthy is entirely irrelevant. No doubt, but your logic suggests a whole bunch of things that simply aren't true. Among them are: 1) That taxing an extra 4% of their income annually somehow makes those MBA/LLB/CPA/Md's not worth it now (as if they wouldn't have pursued them otherwise) 2) That everyone in the top 5-10 percentiles "earned" it 3) That people in the middle and lower income classes all have the same opportunity

You've done enough humble-bragging about your tax bracket etc over the years that you'll have to excuse us if we might have believed you. Let's get real for a second Argus. Even you know that's a hack article. "Of the over 28 million Canadians over 18 according to StatCan, 7% of Canadians eligible for TFSAs have maxed out their room." So at a $5500 limit, only 7% of Canadians were using it. As the limit increases to $10,000, that percentage will drop dramatically.

I wouldn't normally. I still hold that Trudeau Senior is the worst Prime Minister we've ever had (by a long shot), but Harper's done absolutely nothing to impress me over the last 4 years. What I used to think was just solid pragmatism is turning out to be total sheisterism. There's no arguing at this point that his policies aren't aiming to benefit the well-off first and everyone else second, and he drives this agenda home with sleazy political ads that appeal to the unintelligent. The interest earned in TFSA's right now is next to nothing. Old folk's aren't using their TFSA's for income either. They all had RSP's and RIF's set up long before the TFSA program started. Only the well-off elderly have 10k/year to put into TFSA's, and all they're using it for is to invest in stocks and mutal/segregated funds tax-free.

The funny thing about this is that people are decrying the Liberal tax plan as unfair, but then the TFSA contribution limit increase is just perfectly reasonable... As Harper would have it, people who can contribute $10,000/year to their TFSA's are middle-class families...Except middle-class incomes are ~$53,000/year...and these families cannot afford to put 20% of their pre-tax income to their TFSA's...so.... So who benefits from this exactly? The wealthy. It's a tax-cut for the wealthy and woe to anyone who tries to give the average guy a break. The word-mongering and optics going on here is pretty delusional.

As your article states, the "middle-class" is subject to varying definitions. Either way, you have a point, but then we also have to consider: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/middle-class-income-stagnation-made-in-canada/article12858848/ and http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/canadas-wage-gap-at-record-high-oecd/article4099041/ to get a little perspective on how awfully things have been going for Canada's wealthy and why the rest of Canadians might not be sympathetic.

Actually the cunning of the plan is that it matters to a very small few. Coincidentally that small few happens to be an increasingly well-off group that the vast majority won't feel sorry for. The widening income gap and shrinking middle class is a very real problem in Canada. The ludicrous threat of Canada's wealthy fleeing the country over a 4% tax hike is not.

Fair enough but you're still just reframing the numbers. It's a 4% drop in your marginal income. That's how it affects your wallet and that's the only number that ultimately matters.

Okay, be honest now: When you the GST was dropped 2%, were you running around telling everyone that GST was reduced by 15%?

Think of how much more cross-border shopping we would see, and how impossible it would be to keep track of purchasing online etc.

It's the definition of a useless feel-good policy. It's something that out-of-touch idealists can really get behind.

I mean no offense, but that's just a way of reframing the data to look worse. While 29/33 does indeed equal 1.13, that's not really the number that matters. The only number that matters is what the increase to your marginal rate will be...and that's still just 4%. Well that's your first mistake. I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in Toronto if they're retired. Yes they add up, and no it's not in isolation, but it's exceedingly unlikely that this 4% will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and forces Canada's wealthy to flee the country. Perhaps, but this line of thinking suggests that increasing income tax will be offset by more tax avoidance. That's completely false.

A $30 labor cost handicap makes it rather difficult to do so. No doubt it would have helped, but it would have done very little to solve the main problem the Big Three faced: a significant cpu gap for similar vehicles compared to foreign competitors. Yeah...but then that suggests that foreign auto makers haven't been guilty of the exact same mistakes. How many of these beauties did you ever see? How's has the Scion brand been faring for that matter?

Corporate taxes are a different issue altogether and not particularly relevant for a personal income tax discussion.

It would reduce emissions by driving industry out of the province and to China...as seen in Europe.

This is the standard argument against such measures, and it's echoed everywhere around the world. Realistically, however, it rings a little hollow. For the vast vast majority of people, a 4% increase to their tax burden is not going to cause them to uproot. Things like friends, children, grandchildren etc will all get in the way of such sentiments. Many of these folks also rely on their local/domestic business to continue making this sort of money. Add to it that you have to find somewhere you could relocate to permanently and happily and it's not as simple a decision as it sounds.

Yeah that's brilliant. That's like...refusing a court settlement and going to court, then losing handily in court, and then hoping you could still take the settlement.

double-post.

Sure, but we're talking about decisions made back in the 80's and early 90's, back when Honda's were still called rice-burners and you could count on your Cavalier rusting our within a few years. The Big Three and the unions got away with all of their BS because they didn't have any competition. Fast forward to the mid to late 90's and it's a completely different story. At that point GM/Ford/Chrysler were scrambling to adapt and the unions simply refused to see reality.

Dinosaur practices, yes. Unfortunately, when it was realized that the Big Three were no longer competitive with the likes of Toyota/Honda and that changes needed to be made, it wasn't management that prevented it. The UAW was the millstone around the company's neck. Nobody said that. Foreign automakers do not have unionized work forces in North America. In fact, many of them have essentially zero industrial footprint here. As for back home, they're heavily subsidized by their governments. Toyota, for instance, gets significant public subsidies to help pay for union benefits/pensions in Japan. What's even better is that it's one of the most xenophobic countries in the developed world and people buy nothing but Japanese cars there. It's kind of nice having a iron-clad home base. except that's rather difficult when your relationship with your workers constitutes dealing with idiots like Buzz Hargrove.

That's kind of my point thanks. All of these cream-puff ideas demonstrate a flabbergasting lack of world/economic perspective.

I thought this was an interesting article. I've been saying a lot of the things it says for years now, particularly the folly of imposing carbon taxes and green energy programs in the absence of trade tariffs on countries without similar measures in place. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/wynnes-green-scheme-could-deal-massive-blow-to-ontario-and-canada/article24233437/ "many factories and industrial plants, already struggling with high power costs, found it more profitable to shut down and sell their carbon credit allocation in the carbon trading market. As a result, the bulk of Europe’s emissions reductions have been achieved by the departure of energy-intensive industries to overseas locations...And since European industry was already among the world’s most energy efficient, the emissions embedded in most of those imported goods are higher than when the same goods were produced domestically." "Adding irony to this job-exporting fiasco, some European countries, including Germany, have implemented subsidies in an effort to keep the remnants of their industrial sector from shutting down. German electricity consumers paid some €20-billion ($27.2-billion) in green power subsidies last year, while at the same time their government spent billions of euros to help industrial plants survive the combination of high electricity and cap-and-trade costs that made them uncompetitive in the first place." I know lots of people disagree, but these measures don't appear to do much more than export our industry and pollution off-shore. If we're going to implement these measures ourselves, we need to be forcing the places we do business overseas to do the same.

The one thought I have is how can the City of Ottawa stop Uber, or ride-sharing websites like it, from operating? Ultimately, I see this finally being what puts an end to the utterly ridiculous system of the Taxi Driver "Guilds" we see all over North America. There will eventually be two options: 1) Make sites like Uber illegal, thus forcing people who want to use such services to do it on the low (probably not safe) or 2) Legitimize them and give up on trying to make huge cash for the cities (and cab companies) through Taxi systems that make it impossible for the people who need them to afford them.

That's a little bit oversimplified/black & white...but you have a point. That was funny well said.

Thanks for the lesson. I know what collective bargaining is. You're responding to a tongue-in-cheek comment I made mocking the process. That's my fault. It was more subtle and less clever than I'd hoped. Let's move on. Unfortunately, the bargaining process is not so cut-and-dry. In the case of the auto industry, the negotiating positions weren't even-strength. Really!? Guys like Rick Wagoner (GM's former CEO) were earning $1/year in salary leading up to/during the crisis...and then they lost their jobs altogether! Regardless, this is another argument altogether. In the framework of this discussion, it's completely irrelevant.