Admittedly the wealthy generally don't utilize their capital in pro-social ways. Canada's wealthy prefers to prop up housing bubbles and invest in foreign assets rather than invest in Canadian entrepreneurship. Because generally speaking people prefer to invest in whatever gives them the highest return on investment. They don't invest in what produces the greater good. Even the TSX has a APY of like 1.05% in the past 12.5 years. So I can understand the resentment towards the wealthy. If they used their capital to create Canadian jobs, if they created affordable housing, Canada's poor would hate them less.
So naturally the left thinks that if the wealthy are not using their capital in a pro-social way, we might as well tax that capital to spend it on pro-social initiatives.
But what if I told you that when my dad came to Canada over 50+ years ago, taxes were even lower than they are today and housing was a lot more affordable back then? My dad was a poor European immigrant fresh off the boat. He said there was no minimum wage back then. At least that's what he thought anyways. He might have been getting taken advantage of by his employers working cash jobs. Who the fuck knows. He was basically the equivalent of a Pajeet (cheap foreign labour) in the 1960s. But he was able to scrimp and save along with my mom and buy a fucking house in the early 1970s for like fucking $20,000 in fucking downtown Toronto.
The Pajeet of today shares a room with fucking 6 other Pajeets in fucking Brampton. And taxes are higher than before. How does that make any sense? Where are our tax dollars going? And we are running up a huge deficit too. Even before COVID we had deficits.
If you're going to raise taxes on the wealthy, can you trust your government to spend that money wisely? How is it that we are taxed more yet the problems are worse, not better? And then the CRA turns a blind eye to the foreign holdings of friends, family and colleagues of politicians.
Yeah if I was Supreme Leader, you can call me a leftist sure. I'm totally fine with the likes of Bill Morneau having 9 yachts instead of 10. But would I trust NDP with the chequebook? Would I trust AOC with the chequebook? No.
Ouch. Hurts because it sounds like it could be true.
This is why the COVID response was flat out retarded. My NDP-supporting friend ghosted me, hasn't replied to my texts, because I said that the government ballooned the national debt, borrowed from the young to pay for the old over a virus that killed only fucking 0.0284% of Canadians. He said that it's cruel to prioritize money over lives (that's rich considering that the poverty and delayed biopsies, surgeries, treatments, etc. created by the lockdowns are going to claim a lot of lives in the future if they haven't already). He literally believes that the national debt is not a problem and that we are not personally responsible for the national debt. I have read the Modern Monetary Theory books. I understand it. But nowhere in MMT does it say you can print money without consequences. A lot of leftist proponents of MMT don't even understand MMT. As if we can just print Maple Bucks like it's Monopoly money and suffer no consequences for this. The left wants to talk about how the right are bad faith actors. Yet I don't even consider myself a Tory or a right-libertarian. And I see the bad-faith coming from their side. Like ghosting me over having a difference of opinion on public health and economic policy.
The idea from leftists citing MMT is that because the Bank of Canada issues Canadian currency, running a $400 billion+ deficit (the deficit is definitely more than $400 billion now) isn't a problem. Since you can just print the money needed. The debt is denominated in CAD. Thing is if you have more money floating in circulation but the Canadian goods, services and assets available to purchase don't proportionately increase, you get inflation and devaluation of the national currency. This is the problem that Venezuela, Argentina and Cuba found themselves in. Would you accept a Cuban peso as payment for goods and services? No. Only Cubans would accept their own money. And many Cubans only want pesos for immediate needs. For cash that they don't intend to spend right away (ie. savings account) they prefer to hold US Dollars. In fact many Cubans accept US Dollars directly for payment anyways and try to avoid using the peso as much as possible.
Helping people used to be community based. You helped you family, your neighbours, people in your church that you knew personally. You knew there was a real need, and figured out how to support them best. Maybe you fed them. Maybe you gave them clothes. Maybe you helped build a house for them.
Now, we rely on the government to help people. And the help isn't what the individuals actually need. Or it doesn't arrive. Or people who don't need help leech off the system.
And people stop caring, because "the government is using my money to fix it."
It's impossible to go back to the way things used to be. People say it's "unfair" to reduce or privatize things, but the current system is so bad it's unfair to everyone. There's many possible ways to improve things, but I have no hope of ever seeing it in Canada.
Fundamentally government (like any committee) is inefficient. Government also has an element of cronyism and corruption, including lobbyist bias.
Red tape problems: you can't live in a tiny home in most of Ontario, even if you wanted to. Why? Government thinks it's abusive.
Someone in my county built a cob house (clay&straw) and the government fined them 5,000$ for it (lack of permits or something was what they said).
There's tons of red tape in subdivision development and housing development. Most of it is good in principle but some of it is just excessive.
There's also tons of wasted money spent on things like asset management but that's mostly incompetence, laziness, and poor management.
Drop the capital gains inclusion rate on Canadian investments, and maybe the wealthy will keep their money here.
Capital gains tax should definitely be lower on Canadian investments vs foreign for sure. 100%
It's not the government's job to redistribute wealth. Period.
A social safety net is needed and is the only obligation.
Most non profits and charities get donations, including from the wealthy. Whole wings of hospitals, scouts Canada, and more. Charities based on secular and religion, without any government grants donate to the poor. St Vincent de Paul, for examoke.
Most non profits and communit organizations even welcome those that can't afford to join out of a sense of egalitarianism.
A lot of these community gardens have zero funding from governments.
Government isn't the solution to the problem. It is the problem!
Did you know that each level of government has a staff team campaigning for the United way. So tac money is being used to pay people a salary, to then collect donations and take time from other staff being paid with tax money.
The one trend in housing you will notice is that it was provincially run by a leftist government got years. Times are changing.
And yet we have so many homeless people in urban metropolitan areas. Opioid addictions. Pajeets crammed into rentals to make ends meet. The unemployment rate is not as useful of an indicator as the not in labourforce metric and the full-time employment rate figures. NDP had their chance in BC. And you go to Downtown Vancouver Eastside, tons of homeless people, opioid overdoses. Crazy housing bubble in BC. Chink criminals money laundering dirty fentanyl money into real estate, collecting large rents off the working class. Dirty fentanyl money they made off destroying peoples' lives in BC. Those addicts in BC, they are someone's son, daughter, brother, sister, sadly many of them are fathers, mothers! And they die for our Chink overlords. We talk about COVID deaths of 85 year olds but won't talk about the opioid deaths and suicides of 30-somethings from the lockdown. Horgan, Bonnie Henry and the NDP are a disgrace. And the progressives on r/onguardforthee just keep voting for this shit. When a "progressive" gets elected, progressives go to sleep. You're gonna see the same shit with Joe Biden. We're seeing it with Justin Trudeau now. We're seeing it with Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom now.