For almost two decades, the very idea of raising personal taxes — on rich or poor — has been politically toxic.
Federally, successive Liberal and Conservative governments tried to outdo one another in tax-cutting.
Former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin is still lionized by his party for gutting the welfare state in the mid-’90s and then slashing taxes to ensure that it could never be reconstituted.
That recipe helped the Liberals win three consecutive elections.
In Ontario during the same period, NDP premier Bob Rae attempted what he called a balanced approach to deficit reduction, one that included tax hikes as well as spending cuts.
His party’s reward was to be turfed from office.
So perhaps it’s no wonder that New Democrats stayed away from personal income taxes after that.
They did argue for higher corporate taxes. But politically, that was easy. Corporations don’t vote.
True, federal NDP leadership contender Brian Topp broke the silence this year with his call for higher taxes on the well-to-do.
But tellingly, Topp lost. The winner, Tom Mulcair, opposed his scheme, arguing that any such tax talk would turn off centrist voters.
And then along came Andrea.
Horwath is very much a leader in the new NDP mould. Following the lead of Jack Layton, the party’s late federal leader, she downplays the NDP’s union ties, doesn’t dwell overmuch on the plight of the poor, supports targeted tax cuts and focuses on the middle class.
If Horwath talked about raising taxes on the ultra-rich during last fall’s election campaign, I certainly missed it.
But now she is. She wants a new surtax on Ontarians earning more than $500,000 annually as part of her maybe-yes-maybe-no price for supporting Premier Dalton McGuinty’s minority Liberal government.
Who knows whether Horwath will get her tax? Neither she nor McGuinty wants the government to fall, an event that would precipitate another election. So I suppose the question is which will blink first.
But the fate of the Horwath tax hike is less interesting than the fact that she talked about it at all.
Tax fairness is back as a mainstream topic of conversation. For years, it was consigned to the margins, championed by a few advocates such as author Linda McQuaig or economist Armine Yalnizyan, but pretty much ignored by everyone else — including the NDP.
Now it’s back in style.
The Occupy Movement, with its talk of the richest one per cent, has made tax fairness cool. Rumblings from the U.S., where even billionaire Warren Buffet argues that the rich pay too little, has given it a new air of respectability.
Here in Ontario, a campaign by a group called Doctors for Fair Taxation has gained a surprising amount of attention. A poll commissioned by the left-leaning Broadbent Institute argues that almost two-thirds of Canadians would pay “slightly higher taxes” to protect social programs.
I’d take that poll with a grain of salt since it never specified what was meant by “slightly higher.”
Still, there is something going on here. If even the ultra-cautious NDP is willing to talk about higher taxes, the public mood must be shifting. Perhaps more understand the simple truth of government finance — that we can’t have public services without paying for them.
Or, as conservative economist Milton Friedman liked to say: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Thomas Walkom
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