Evening Star

Come on, section 1 was the section on social programmes! Section 2 is the section on job creation. Even there, I agree that it's a little bit slim, even compared to the Liberal platform, but I do think there is much more to it than your post gives credit for.

The Quebec provincial Liberal party and the federal NDP are not two opposing parties. This is complete BS.

I would never call Harper a bully. An angry, calculating nerd, maybe.

You guys realize that Mulcair's family background is as Irish-Canadian as the name "Thomas Mulcair" would suggest, right? He only acquired French citizenship because his wife is French. Edit: OK, I checked Wikipedia. His Mum is French Canadian and his Dad is Irish-Canadian. Still wouldn't call him a Frenchman.

I still wasn't sure this morning!

I'll believe that when I see it, ha.

Punked is right in this case though. The NDP dropped small business taxes all the way to 0 in MB and have been reducing them in NS too, while they increased corporate taxes and high-end income taxes. This is a matter of record. It might be the case that on the whole, they did increase total tax take/revenue. In fact, I would hope that this is the case. Still, it is true that the tax burden was shifted.

No.

Huh? Canadian voters unleashed the Tory majority on Canada.

MB and SK do have the highest income tax rates on high earners in English Canada though and have relatively high corporate taxes. I don't think there's any reason to deny that social democrats favour higher income taxes than neoliberals.

"Heard more"? I didn't hear anything from Cullen about anything before this leadership race. Mulcair has a record we can look at.

Duncan is an environmentalist, mainly, as is Mulcair.

Topp is still not an MP. He'd be great as a top strategist or advisor though.

Again, if they're going for Martin-style financial policy, they are trying to be something different from even the more centrist NDP governments.

I'm pretty sure they mean "fiscally conservative" in the sense of "neoliberal", Paul Martin-style, with privatization, lower taxes, etc.

PET was not a fiscal conservative. But, yeah, if the LPC wants to have a reason to exist, this seems like a strategy that makes sense.

I may not need to practise empathy here since to an extent, I'm living the '(hopefully) initial struggle' part of this (after more than a decade years of post-secondary education). (Caveat: I have had help. Many have it worse. I realize this.) The thing is: no one wants high income earners to give up the majority of their income. I do think e.g. doctors should live well. But I've seen them and they do. I'm not sure it would be that harsh to ask them to only keep, say, 68% of the portion of their income that is over 300K instead of 71%.

So the issue is not necessarily the tax rate: your expenses have changed.

Disproves this:

Well, tbh, I would tend to favour scrapping recent boutique tax breaks and TFSAs first before adding tax brackets. Maybe income splitting too. I think the GST cut was probably unnecessary but it might be political suicide to bring it back up. Things like capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes should perhaps be looked at too. Having said that, the highest current tax bracket begins at about 132K. I'm guessing we could stand to see another bracket start at around 250K or 300K. That's just throwing numbers out though. It's really a fool's errand for me to try to answer this question without actually looking closely at hard economics. (And even then, I'm no economist!) It might even be the case that adding a tax bracket would be counterproductive. I was, however, questioning the claim that it is self-evident that taxing the rich would fail and that only someone driven by emotion over reason would consider that policy.

This isn't obvious to me though. From any figures I've seen, a small percentage of people do hold a majority of the wealth in the country. So taxing that at a higher rate would seem to generate substantial revenue (leaving aside methods of dodging taxes, legal or otherwise - I'm just trying to deal with this model now). In any case, as cybercoma noted, no one is talking about balancing a tax raise on the rich with a tax cut somewhere else. Also, it seems fallacious to frame this as a 'head person' vs 'heart person' issue: I have to assume that e.g. Paul Krugman is drawing on actual economics and not just weepy bleeding-heart sentiment when he advocates for progressive taxation.

I'm quite sure I never suggested this especially since I don't use a binary "conservative"/"liberal" classification system to classify people's political values.

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Oh God, if this becomes reality, I don't know who I'd vote for. Maybe the Marijuana Party.

His point is that it's just as arbitrary to require a simple majority as to require 60% or 2/3 or 50%+1 of all eligible voters, especially when many democratic jurisdictions do require more than a simple majority for fundamental changes, examples of which he has given. (Why require a referendum at all? Why should a QC provincial government not be able to simply unilaterally declare independence if they desire to? Seems arbitrary.)