Not laughing at the column. It was a timely, succinct and well-sketched discussion of the think tank’s study, Tax Payers and Tax Takers.
Nope, what punched the funny bone was the irony of the Fraser Institute, which is registered as a tax-exempt organization, wagging its finger over too many, um, tax-exemptions.
Disclosure: I pay taxes. I’ve paid taxes every single year since I earned enough to do so, which reaches back almost five decades. And I don’t mind paying taxes.
Taxes and income redistribution foster social stability and community well-being, which translate into consumer confidence, which yields buoyant economies, which increases business profits. So the Fraser Institute wonks got that right, at least.
But I think they got it right for the wrong reasons.
The problem with people not paying taxes does not lie with those whose incomes fall at the low end of the spectrum. It lies with people at the other end who feel entitled to use loopholes, lobby for special concessions, tax exemptions and the like.
I never joined the so-called tax revolt a decade or so ago because I knew that if there is no free lunch, there is no such thing as a tax cut, either. Politicians play shell games with revenue streams and shift the broadly based burden for services from the many onto the few by raising fees, tolls, fares and whatever.
I also know that a culture of special breaks, concessions and tax exemptions for the well-heeled is deeply entrenched with Canada’s political and financial elites. The sense of entitlement ranges from wealthy owners of sports franchises demanding tax breaks on facilities to elected officials at the very top of the income scale.
Tax exemptions for the well-heeled is a first order of business for government and, it seems, for everybody else who professes to be an enemy of special interests, death on subsidies and all the other hollow rubrics of free market cant and conservative dogma. They want them gone for everybody else, not themselves.
Let’s see ... our members of parliament, whose incomes start at $157,000 per year — this puts them in the top two per cent of Canadian income earners — reward themselves with a tax-free expense exemption of up to $25,500 a year. Last year, MPs spent more than $11 million on travel, hospitality and events — tax exempt, of course — for which they were indemnified from the public purse.
But back to the Fraser Institute’s concern about the near-40 per cent of Canadians whose incomes are either too low to reach the threshold at which income tax kicks in, or whose incomes are so high they can afford the cream of the tax lawyers and financial planners.
The Fraser Institute is a registered charitable organization, which means that under federal tax rules it is exempt from paying tax on its income and can issue tax receipts for the gifts that it receives, which means that its donors get a tax reduction, too.
In 2011, the most recent year for which Fraser Institute financials are listed on the Canada Revenue Agency website for registered charity information returns, it handed out tax receipts on $3.2 million in donations, and its revenue report records $3.7 million in gifts from other charities.
The Fraser Institute has 51 full-time employees, and paid a total of $5.6 million in compensation. Twenty per cent of its full-time staff members earned salaries that put them in the top 10 per cent of all Canadian income earners. About 10 per cent earned incomes in the top one per cent.
So here we have charitable organizations which are exempt from paying taxes on their revenue paying themselves generous salary scales while giving each other tax-exempt gifts so they can produce reports complaining that too many single moms and minimum-wage dads don’t pay sufficient taxes and are a threat to our democratic way of life.
Who wrote this script? The ghost of Jack Benny?
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Stephen Hume
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