No Reward For Hard Work in Canada - Part II

I kinda blogged about this before. But I've been riding through Forest Hill these days, and I see houses like this:

And, I gotta say, it's frustrating. And it isn't class envy. Up into my late-thirties I didn't care that some people were really, really rich. Personally, I don't want a mansion, but I'd like to have a nice 2-1/2 storey detached home and be able to keep it up. And I want to say before I go any further that the people who own these homes might be really nice people who voted Liberal and wouldn't begrudge paying some more in taxes because they recognize that public services and programs are necessary for a healthy, stable society. They might also be hard-working immigrant success stories (or non-immigrant success stories even) who epitomize the "rags-to-riches" dream and who think they deserve the rewards for having played the game properly.

I don't know anything about the people who live in them. All I know is that these are really lovely houses. I moved to Toronto a few years ago and I'm still staggered by the wealth on display here. There's block after block of these mansions and hundreds of other blocks of other homes that are themselves worth anywhere from $1-2 million and that are nicely maintained. And they all give the lie to the right-wing whine about how there's no reward for hard work in this country. The level of taxation on the "producers" in this country is evidently not so crushing that the producers can't enjoy the fruits of their labour.

And what makes it all so frustrating is that this idiotic lie has been used to justify tax-cut after tax-cut, depriving governments of the revenues they need to fund the health care system, the education system, foreign aid, scientific research and infrastructure investment and renewal. Instead of spurring the economy and producing more revenues, we've starved our programs of funds and gone into debt to do so. To top it all off, the whole gamut of government fiscal, monetary, labour and other policies has given the wealthy more money than they know what to do with. I say this again and again because it's true and not generally admitted in the respectable press, that the Wall Street failure and corruption (which our own financial sector was deeply invested in) is incontrovertible proof that the rich have more surplus funds than they can sensibly (let alone productively) invest.

And, really, this right-wing whining nonsense about the crushing burden of taxation is just as adequately exposed for the bullshit that it is by looking at many among the middle-classes. They live in houses like this:

And you know, again, they might be nice people. I have no idea about all these millions of Canadians. It's not my point that they're all greedy and selfish and stupid. My point is that a LOT of Canadians are NOT crippled by crushing taxation in this country. Indeed, many ordinary Canadians evidently have enough extra money to fill their houses up with so much junk that there are television shows about helping them get control over their excess junk.

The reality that most Canadian households are burdened by increasing levels of debt can't really be blamed on taxes. First of all, it's ridiculous to blame taxes for your debts if you house is filled with unused exercise equipment, hundreds of VHS movies gathering dust, three closets worth of clothes and enough broken plastic toys to fill a toy-store. Secondly, the main reasons that Canadians are in debt are due to rising house prices, rising tuition rates, insecure employment and a whole bunch of other problems that non-neoliberal economic policies would help to alleviate.

It's frustrating to carry this knowledge around, day after day, and to look up and see its vindication, day after day, and to then look at some mainstream media twits or think-tank hacks babbling the same old political-economic bullshit. And then hear how the government is denying medical services to newly-arrived refugees ostensibly to save people's tax dollars.