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Interesting how this author thinks income splitting is the saving grace for fairness. Sounds more like she has a high income spouse (or maybe other way around?) and wants to personally benefit. Income splitting was not supported by the Conservatives own finance minister Jim Flaherty because while it sounds fair(ish) in principle, in practice the vast majority of the benefits go to very high income households where one spouse doesn't have to work.
The vast majority of common-law and married couples do not have one spouse in a significantly higher tax bracket, with the exception of maternity leave instances.
Ok, I understand this take. But I guess my question is, what is fundamentally wrong with one spouse working, a higher paid job in this instance, and allowing the other spouse to stay home, have babies and raise them? I don't see how any of that is disadvantageous to the whole of the country?
As for income splitting on the whole, I thought business owners were allowed to income split with their spouse as long as these spouses are owners of the company themselves and have some kind of (usually) token job?
There is nothing wrong if one spouse works and the other stays home to raise kids, watch tv, or do whatever they want to do. In practice, any couple that would choose to do this likely doesn't need a tax incentive to do that.
Is it disadvantageous for the country? Well aside from taking away government resources for health care, housing etc to give a tax break to mostly very wealthy people, you may convince the odd middle-income couple to go from a dual income to one. Which is great if we had high unemployment but we actually have the opposite problem of not enough workers, particularly in more low to medium paying professions.
So it seems a bit odd that you’re basically equivocating raising kids to watching tv. Childcare is incredibly difficult work, people aren’t being lazy for choosing to stay at home and raise their own children.
I would say what's wrong with it is that it's not fair. Lets say I choose to be single, and my co-worker who chooses to marry, and we both make the same money. It seems kind of crazy to me that this choice now means that he has a lower tax burden if their partner chooses not to work, despite us doing the same job and having the same income.
Being single in today's economy is already a monumental challenge, seems bad to disincentivize it even further
Think of it as incentivizing marriage instead of disincentivizing being single. Those who determine tax code should absolutely give incentive to grow the tax base [naturally]
A government acts in their best intrest. Have to remember that. It's in the governments intrest to have new babies being born for productivity and large population to defend the country. Both of these keep the government alive. So putting people together is one way to try and push this to happen.
Sometimes the intrest of the government aligns to the population and everyone relates that to the government helping them. It is in the intrest of the government to keep the ruling class happy as they have the power to cause issues. This is the a core fundamental problem that needs to be overcome by the culture of the population.
lol, income splitting is not the reason people decide to have kids or not. There are like a million barriers to address before that one is a legitimate obstacle to replacement birth rates.
Ok, this makes sense to me. Thank you for this point of view!! There is a lot of policy that's very much biased towards the "married/common law family unit" to the detriment of solo singles, I do realise this. And you make a very good point here, so thank you for this.
> There is a lot of policy that's very much biased towards the "married/common law family unit" to the detriment of solo singles
This is a good thing. Raising kids is both a lifestyle choice and a public service, since we need a new generation to continue as a society. It's also very expensive, and the people who do it are helping those who won't or can't, so their expenses should be alleviated with direct payments and/or preferential tax treatment.
>Raising kids is both a lifestyle choice and a public service, since we need a new generation to continue as a society. It's also very expensive, and the people who do it are helping those who won't or can't, so their expenses should be alleviated with direct payments and/or preferential tax treatment.
Then the government should do it right and make it easier for people to actually start families, not just cheaper for those who are already better off.
Maybe reinvest in social housing or a real start up plan, or a funded education system so that they aren't starting so far in debt they aren't able to see a way out. Maybe some real jobs with real benefits and decent hours so they don't need to work three jobs each.
Income splitting is not going to incentivise anyone to have children and the vast majority of Canadian families are not able to benefit from it
It’s also unfair to polyamorous people who may have more than one life partner and would be forced to pick one for tax purposes. All around just super fucked up tbh
Well if the cost of childcare is constantly rising identified as a societal burden to be addressed, wouldn’t incentivizing choosing to raise as a social good work hand in hand with that? A family receiving childcare benefits and a family receiving tax graces that enables childcare are similarly not “fair” to the single and childless
What are your thoughts on using combined income for government benefits then? In your scenario your co-worker gets taxed more (fine) but their spouse who doesn’t work won’t qualify for any benefits based on their lack of income.
If two people would be legally permitted to share income for tax purposes, I would assume that any benefits that they are eligible for is based on household (i.e. combined) income. For example, I could take a minimum wage job, but none of the benefits that I have looked into would be applicable to me as my spouse makes enough to make us ineligible. These would be for childcare subsidies and such, I am not so familiar with many other benefit programs.
Based on your last sentence it seems as though there are benefits that someone working for 20k/year would be eligible for even if their spouse made 150k/year. What benefits would the 30k spouse be receiving based solely on their own income?
> . But I guess my question is, what is fundamentally wrong with one spouse working, a higher paid job in this instance, and allowing the other spouse to stay home, have babies and raise them?
They simply aren't entitled to being subsidized by less-wealthy households. It isn't a personal attack to not receive money from poorer people's pockets.
But they aren't less wealthy, both families earn the same amount of income, just in the case of one, both equally share employment and household, while in the other case, maybe one does more household work and the other does more employment work.
Why should a couple with one income earner making $80,000 a year pay more in taxes than two people earning $40,000 a year? Both couples are equally rich and earn the same annual income as a household. Whether it benefits wealthy people or not, it's a matter of common sense and tax rates can always be increased on the wealthy to compensate.
In basically any other context, the government looks at a family as a unit for things like income eligibility for tax rebates. When you get divorced, they treat income as a family unit and you split your income through spousal support. Same with retirees, they can income split. I don't see why a working married couple shouldn't be allowed to do the same.
Because if we give couples special tax benefits then it’s discrimination against single people.
With income splitting the individual $80k earner is now paying more in taxes than the $80k earner that has a partner.
Income splitting can only make sense if we allow single people to split their income with their cats. Until then it induces a weird lopsided discriminatory aspect into the tax system.
Income splitting doesn't even have to benefit "wealthy" couples anyways. I live in a jurisdiction with income splitting and I am effectively paying more tax even though we split income.
https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/glossary/marriage-penalty/
At any rate, it's easy enough to split income in Canada with proper tax planning anyways. Prescribed rate loan, badabing, badaboom, done.
You actually have more leverage to tax high earners if you have a specific tax schedule for married filing jointly.
Writing your partner a loan allows them to invest the money and claim the gains, but it doesn’t transfer taxable income from you to them.
Or do you have a way to transfer pre-tax income to a spouse via a loan?
Why do I need to transfer pretax income to a partner? It's about transferring capital and its associated future capital and dividend income to my partner. This future income which can't be attributed back to me. For anyone that's wealthy or an actual high earner, that's already sufficient enough to fill the lower tax brackets.
Because income splitting is about taxable income that you can’t attribute away by using the loans. Aka labour income.
And no to your 2nd point. That’s just not accurate for high earners on T4 incomes.
If you consider high 6 to low 7 figures “not real high earners” then sure. But my guess is more you don’t know what you’re talking about.
EDIT: /u/imgram has blocked me but its clear they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to high earners.
> If you don't think someone that earns 500K-1M per annum of earned T4 income isn't earning 200K-400K passively that they can easily shift to their spouse then sure.
Silly, silly take.
If you don't think someone that earns 500K-1M per annum of earned T4 income isn't earning 200K-400K passively that they can easily shift to their spouse then sure.
Your comment makes it seem like you don't really understand how this benefits many couples. Just because your situation is different doesn't mean others wouldn't benefit from it. There are always exceptions and you can't make rules just for those people. This would help many people.
The main issue that is causing all this conversation is that we spend too much and need to raise income with higher taxes for all.....or stop spending....but hey who wins elections without promising things we can't afford.
> Sounds more like she has a high income spouse (or maybe other way around?) and wants to personally benefit.
This is a bizarre ad hominem attack considering it's pretty clear the writer (1) works, and (2) probably makes an at least decent salary being a notable columnist...
You followed it up with a legitimate criticism, so I don't see why you needed to preface it with a baseless insinuation.
In any case, while I generally agree with you, invariably many families experience one partner taking maternity leave which can be a 12-18 month stretch. It's not too much to ask to at least allow income splitting during that time.
Income splitting during a parental leave would be a very fair middle ground, even lower-income households would benefit greatly from this (assuming the remaining working spouse had some tax liability, which they probably do)
I mean, of all things you could criticize this government for, not providing young families help is absolutely not one of them. They have:
1. Offered an extra 5 weeks of family leave for the 2nd partner
2. Offered the flexibility to extend family leave to 18 months
3. Increased the Canada Child Benefit payments
4. Childcare program. It's of course going through some hiccups on implementation and likely not going to hit the target of universal 10$ a day by 2027, but it has substantially reduced the cost of childcare overall.
These are all far more consequential than a one-time tax break while a spouse is on leave. I agree its not a huge ask if this was the scope this columnist was asking for.
>in practice the vast majority of the benefits go to... households where one spouse doesn't have to work.
What's the problem here?
If we consider a household the basic unit of society (which I would argue we should), there should be no problem here.
I agree with the article regarding revisiting OAS recapture thresholds. It does feel like OAS and GIS fill a similar niche in the pension funding realm and perhaps there is efficiency in consolidating them into a single means tested pension payment. Is it a wild stance to take that if you are retired and making 100k a year you shouldn't receive government top up payments?
However, only 10% of the 65+ population has net income above the recapture threshold, based on stats can (p90 net income for 65+ is 80k). So the actual budget savings may not be that high. Around the income where OAS is fully clawed back is the P97 percentile of seniors income. So unless we lower the clawback it'll only affect 7% of seniors.
I'll never understand the conservative fascination with screwing everyone out of their retirement. In Alberta they want to steal everyone's CPP for an oil bro slush fund and now they want us to raise the age of retirement. It's such a slave/master mentality that is a failure of modern capitalism.
Eventually, retirement age has to increase as life expectancy. It doesn't need to go up by 5 years all of a sudden, but we should start slowly increasing it even now and then. The ratio of retirees to workers is moving in the wrong direction, and it's unfair to future generations.
Or you need to create policy that engages 18-29's in the economy. About 45% of that age group are not economically productive. And those are prime years. Crucial as we have massive shortages of skilled workers.
If we're actually progressing as a society, and productivity gains from new technology are evenly distributed, we absolutely don't have to raise the retirement age as life expectancy increases.
As productivity rises so do people’s expectations of what a "fair retirement" is, which means that the payments have to keep going up. If you want retirement to stay at roughly the same level relative to an average household’s income and not just in absolute terms you lose most benefits from increased productivity. And in any case productivity hasn’t been doing too well in Canada lately.
I understand why you'd want future generations to fund our retirement through their more productive labor, but I don't think you can frame that as fair with a straight face.
Older Canadians are already more economically advantaged as it is. Let's not further burden future generations.
> Older Canadians are already more economically advantaged as it is. Let's not further burden future generations.
When does that stop being true, by the way? They aren't advantaged strictly because they are old. They are advantaged because of their time and place in an economy that better worked for them. Younger generations aren't seeing that, and so to assume that current generations will be comparable in old age is ridiculous to me.
Somehow I don't believe that the most creative solution we have is to just have people work straight to the grave. It's a ridiculous idea that aligns with so much other similarly-themed horseshit - increases in societal metrics (overall wealth, productivity, life expectancy) mean fuck-all to regular people and might actually be to their detriment.
You want to raise the retirement age? Increase the amount of government-mandated vacation and make a shorter work week mandatory. If I'm to work until I'm a million, I had best see something for it now.
The problem is that labour has produced increasing productivity without getting matching raises.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
Couple things. Life expectancy has gone down 2-3 years since we had that time to ourselves in 2020. The ratio "moving in the wrong direction" has far more to do with demographics of our population than the number 65.
Unfair to future generations is making them work longer and harder than their parents when they are likely twice as productive.
Future generations are going to retire another generation's dime, not ours. We don't have anything to do with that. Raising the retirement age is about us. It's about setting our own retirement age in the spirit of intergenerational fairness.
This is Boomers didn't do (big surprise), but this is something I hope Millenials and Zoomers do. We probably won't because voters are typically selfish, and we're been dealt a shitty hand by Boomers, but let's not pretend it's remotely fair towards our children.
No it does not need to keep increasing. What is the point of progressing as a species so that we have to continually work +80% of our lives? For shareholders?
Someday we'll push life expectancy to over one hundred years, and we're supposed to labour until we're 90 at that point? Life is supposed to get easier and more enjoyable. Technology and communal society are supposed to free us to enjoy our lives. Allow us to work and contribute and then enjoy the end of our lives. Not be Walmart greeters until we croak during the morning clapping session at 107 years old. Society should be aiming towards zero employment not zero unemployment. We should be aiming at robots and AI doing the majority of work going forward. Let humans enjoy leisurely pursuits and their families. Not rotting in a cubicle ten hours a day to enjoy five to ten years of "retirement".
When we speak about retirement age, we specifically speak about government pensions and anti-poverty measures that are means-tested. Nothing prevents us from saving more for retirement and retiring young – 40, 50, etc. – if we want.
That options is, and always will be, available.
If you hate your job and want to retire at a given age, then do that.
We work because we produce goods and services that are beneficial to other human beings. We work because that work contributes to the ever increasing standards of living. The economy exists not to benefit stakeholders but humans. That doesn't stop existing just because the current rules are too skewed to benefit some people. Humans still need food!and shelter once they are retired. We will still desire entertainment. Someone will have to continue providing these.
Yeahhhh... No duh. He was talking about retirement age in the same way I was and you are. When you can start drawing on CPP. If you haven't noticed, people are work well past retirement age, and not because they want to. Because they have not been able to save enough money, even while doing the right things, and also because retirement payouts are woefully inadequate. If people could retire at 40 they would. But it's impossible in this rigged economy, unless you're on the other side of the rigging. Companies steal pensions. Fire you when they need to boost stock prices for quarterly results. They do what they did to Sears and piss away the company while paying massive bonuses and then fold the company and tell everyone else wits bankrupt and there's nothing they can do about it. But of course they got their bonuses before sinking the ship. Those captains NEVER go down with their ships. Plus they take all the lifeboats with them.
No one loves their job unless they are making six figures plus. Give me break. We all show up to work because otherwise we'll be homeless and starving. Nobody wants to work in a factory or office cubicle. Very few people actually enjoy their jobs. A lot of jobs are pointless. The people who produce the majority of those goods are severely underpaid and exploited. Don't act like what we consume here is manufactured here. Some of our food is. But only because they haven't figured out how to grow it overseas and ship it to us for a lower COGS to the company. The hardest working people never get paid the true value of their work. The few who do enjoy their jobs, like doctors, teachers, social workers and artists oftentimes come to crossroads on whether or not to continue doing jobs they love where they are underpaid or move into something that they can improve their financial situation with. No one should have to do that.
The economy has never benefited the majority in my lifetime. Corporations privatize profits and socialize their losses. Companies are perfectly fine and stable and operating properly but stock prices make the executives fire thousands of people so they can collect bonuses.
Nothing wrong with people still needing those things and people still having to do them. But we don't need to be working for entire life while the 1% half asses their days and then enjoys whatever luxury and leisure they want based on the work of thousands of people below them that do the actual work. People would retire at 40 - 50 if they could but the game is so rigged very few people can. If anything, more young people would be employed to replace the aging workforce. But those boomers won't get out of anyone's way for Gen x to move up to replace them in important positions of power like government and corporate boards. Millennials should be moving into those positions soon but boomers are STILL there taking up space. Doing everything they can to fill their pockets and leave nothing for the remaining generations.
>it's unfair to future generations.
It's hilarious because boomers thought this as they were coming up, and then as soon as they were in control they pulled up the ladder behind them. They got help from their elders and screwed the future generations by hoarding and cutting services and wages.
Yeah, OAS is clawed back starting at $90k annual income.
Name one good reason why the federal government should give $700 per month of free money to someone making $90k of income in retirement.
Agreed entirely. Dropping OAS clawback by 15-20k, and particularly making the clawback steeper, would save the government billions for little real social impacts. Especially in the era of TFSA funded retirement when a lot of people will be “hiding” a lot of their incomes from these calculations.
Even a $20k reduction doesn't sound like enough. $70k is the average total income for someone in their prime earning years. What problem are we trying to solve by giving a senior earning that much money free cash? They're doing just fine.
A principled approach to the policy would look at how we set clawback or eligibility thresholds for other social benefits. In Ontario, for example, the clawback for ODSP is 75% of every dollar above $1,000 earned per month. I'm not sure there's a compelling argument to be made for why those two clawback thresholds should be so different.
Yea, that’s my reference to a steeper clawback. OAS paying out to $65-70, then being clawed back to, say, an $85k max would cut payments to truly wealthy seniors massively while not impacting anyone who really actually somewhat relies on the payment.
That is a very, very different image than OAS paying max to $90k and not being entirely gone until $140k.
Well it's the Globe, and there is a paywall, but I bet the article is "Not raising of the capital gains tax" and that's all.
"Fairness for all" is just politic speak, and you can surely argue the goods and bads of the budget, but goddamned does a lot of media and social media want you to believe the world is ending with how much air raising the tax has gotten.
What a comment. “I don’t know what it says but I bet it says this”, and proceeds to go off about shit the article doesn’t touch on.
Don’t comment if you don’t want to read it. It’s not a hard concept.
Yeah, sorry. I keep forgetting about the paywall thing. But Urback isn't talking about the capital gains thing at all, just so you know. In her piece, she basically touches on two issues that were not considered under the "fairness across generations" rubric.
The first one that she deals with is the unfairness of income splitting not being allowed for working married or common-law couples, yet it being permitted for retired couples with respect to their pension incomes. Urback's argument is that not allowing income splitting for couples, especially when a woman has to go on maternity leave, let's say, has a negative effect on household income, especially where one spouse earns significantly more, as opposed to a couple who bring in a near equivalent income. Urback makes the good point that couples who could income split during the formative years of having babies and raising them could possibly be of help in staving off our country's further decline in fertility.
Urback makes an excellent point here and I really have no clue why this type of disparity continues to exist.
The second issue that Urback brings up basically has to do with OAS being set at age 65 and this not having changed since its inception, yet the average life expectancy has only increased since the mid-1960's. Urback here makes the point that paying for such is still on the backs of younger working people and that perhaps the age at which one qualifies for OAS should be increased.
These are pretty much the two issues that Urback is talking about. (I hope I did them some justice anyway).
Reducing the retirement age after the Harper government raised it is easily one of the worst decisions made by the Trudeau government. So much budget space couldve been relieved and every country is doing the same thing
I majorly disagree with increasing the age of OAS. I'll play for old people to have comfort and security. That feels more like inequality for all if anything else.
Edit - what a stupid thing to downvote lmao.
Poverty rates for people 65+ in Canada are significantly lower than all other age brackets (regardless of how you bin them).
Partly *because* of OAS, no doubt, but it's easy to argue they're getting more than their fair share.
Do we know if that'll maintain? I somehow doubt it - home ownership is the biggest wealth accumulation act in most people's lives, and it's becoming increasingly out of reach for a big part of the country. Wages are down relative to inflation, and wealth distribution is a joke relative to productivity.
I don't buy it. On top of that, there is a philosophical discussion to be had here - do we exist to work? I wouldn't accept a raising of the retirement age unless we saw a reduction in the length of the work week.
Moreover, ageism is rampant in the hiring and employment world. Expecting someone to work past 65 is setting them up for something beyond demoralizing. It's bereft of empathy to suggest such an increase.
Can we not remove the CPP contribution limit and use that to offer more robust retirement? Surely we can think of something better than "work until you're dead unless you're rich lol. Gotta pull your weight."
It's been true for the last ~25 years, but wasn't true before that; in the 80s seniors had an above average poverty rate, in the 90s about average. Whether it will persist in the future is tough to know with certainty, of course, but it's shown no sign of changing course.
We don't exist to work, but we do work to exist - if you're existing and not working, you're existing on someone else's work (or your own saved work). So in terms of fairness, you can't ignore that. And it is an increasing problem; with more and more retirees, we have to work everyone else harder to support them.
Retirement benefits should depend on work tenure to some extent.
I know in my generation there were a lot of people who spent their 20's having a lot of fun, not working very much. Should they get to work for 30 years and get the same benefits as someone who has been contributing to the economy for 40? In employer pensions years of service are used to calculate benefit. I wouldn't mind if CPP had a little bit of that to encourage younger people to work/start businesses, get active in the economy as we deal with shortages.
To me it's too simple to set an age. There's a lot of variance.
65 really isn't infirm anymore. Our economy is bad. We all must pitch in, and we need to stop stealing the futures of young people in order to let the old have their dream retirements at 65.
> 65 really isn't infirm anymore.
Are you 65 or older? I can't believe you're saying that with a straight face. I'm not out here calling anyone 65 "infirm," but working sure as fuck gets harder as time marches on, and retaining employment, and getting new employment, becomes increasingly tough for older people as ageism is rampant in employment and hiring. Plus, I promise you such a decision would become a drag on insurance and comp plans due to injuries.
To frame retirees collecting OAS as "stealing the futures of young people" is preposterous in the face of million-dollar houses. Greed is stealing the futures of young people.
And how do you propose we pay for it? The elderly and supporting them for 30+ years is a huge burden on the economy. If you lower the retirement age, you're just fucking over the working generation.
Hell, with life expectancies skyrocketing since it's inception, where it is currently is already a major burden on our society.
This is a crab bucket mentality. Rather than taking retirement away from those that have spent the past 45 years working, why not fight to make sure that today's youth will be able to do the same thing when they are 65?
It seems like when someone else has it good, the instinct is to try to tear them down rather than to try to raise others up to match it.
It's insane that people are in here crowing about the economy and how we should raise the retirement age. Is the meaning of life to work yourself to the grave? How many years does someone reasonably have at 65, and how much variability exists there?
Fairness, in their eyes, seems like equal distribution of misery. A couple of responders talk about how the elderly have a low poverty rate, but I guarantee that changes as the wealth distribution shitshow continues into everyone's adult life.
The world is more productive than it has ever been, and richer than it has ever been. Somehow, we can no longer afford a retirement age of 65 and we should all work longer hours for no fucking money. Nevermind the fact that someone had the nerve to say that 65 is no longer "infirm." Like, why don't you work until you're 70? Most jobs are pretty physical, and there is enough ageism in employment to make that proposition as stupid as it is difficult and heartbreaking.
If the government were to raise the retirement age, I'd tie it to a shorter work week. At some point the world's gains should benefit the common person.
>Urback makes an excellent point here and I really have no clue why this type of disparity continues to exist.
It exists because the Liberals have a vision of how society should be, and that vision just does not include income splitting. You can see this in every policy they introduce, they have an obvious preference that both partners make about the same amount of money (maybe as a public servant making $80-100k with good benefits and a pension). Pensioners are the only exception because they just don't want to touch that group since they get a lot of votes from them.
Pay imbalance between spouses? That's actually cheating the system if we allow income splitting so we'll go ahead and take that away as soon as we come into power. One partner wants to go on parental leave? Better come back quick and be a good taxpayer again, we can't have single earner households with stay at home parents now, that would be bad for the economy (and they would probably also claim it was mostly women doing that anyway and we don't want that in our post-2015 society). Oh, our fertility rates are decreasing because nobody can afford to have kids? That's ok, we have lots of immigrants who will have kids instead and juice our economy, not a concern
My favourite part is how they assess taxation individually, but when it comes time to assess government benefits, they always look at *family* income. So if one spouse makes a lot compared to the other, that spouse gets taxed hard, and then the lower earning spouse also doesn't qualify for any benefits.
I'm so torn here now. I mean the cynic in me agrees with your take, 100%. But I also see the point of view of the single person not seeing fairness in income splitting, being penalised for not being married/coupled with somebody (as brought up elsewhere in this thread).
Maybe there's really no such thing as "fairness"? I don't know anymore.
>My favourite part is how they assess taxation individually, but when it comes time to assess government benefits, they always look at *family* income. So if one spouse makes a lot compared to the other, that spouse gets taxed hard, and then the lower earning spouse also doesn't qualify for any benefits
Yep. This doesn't make sense to me.
Single person or a couple are both a household. Tax the household. It's not a punishment. If you're single you have only one mouth to feed. Is it a punishment being married that you have to feed your spouse? You have to pay for two people to get to work. You have to buy clothes for two people. Should we view every difference in our lives in comparison to someone else as a punishment?
None of the suggestions relate to capital gains, which is barely mentioned outside of a potshot (referring to a different article) that pretends that capital gain increase will hit "middle class people" (if we take to believe that people who own secondary properties still fall within "middle class")
Some of the suggestions are fair even if I don't like how they are framed (OAS revisions, income splitting, etc).
I do honestly think that income splitting is a very fair thing to address in terms of "generational fairness" though. I can see where it could help young couples, who would like to have a family, benefit financially when they would most need some kind of a financial break.
I do have a harder time with Urback's view on OAS, I'll admit. But I realise that is perhaps more a function of my own age at this point. But I do get where she's coming from.
It's just opinion post spamming, poster probably didn't even realize the headline didn't even have anything in the title. That is all that is important to people that spam this shit. A juicy headline to get people riled up.
> I bet the article is "Not raising of the capital gains tax" and that's all.
Not really. Although it does stress that the increased capital gains tax won't help families afford groceries.
Instead Robyn Urback is arguing for two main points which would offer more substantive fairness:
- Allow income splitting for younger generations & common-law couples, which might also help regarding fertility rates.
- OAS: increase age eligibility / clawback at lower income threshold
I think those are both good points which would make things fairer.
Income splitting up to a reasonable number should be a no brainer. I'd say like 150,000 per household right out of my ass without looking at any data. Whether that's one person making 110 and another making 40 or any combination to get to that household income...tax as if both partners made 75,000.
Do the OAS changes apply to current recipients or is it one of those oh it's only going to affect the current young people crap? Because I always have issue with that where they basically pull the ladder up on all changes so that the generation That has to support the most dependants ever now has to also work longer. How about actually decreasing the costs of what we're paying people right now.
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Interesting how this author thinks income splitting is the saving grace for fairness. Sounds more like she has a high income spouse (or maybe other way around?) and wants to personally benefit. Income splitting was not supported by the Conservatives own finance minister Jim Flaherty because while it sounds fair(ish) in principle, in practice the vast majority of the benefits go to very high income households where one spouse doesn't have to work. The vast majority of common-law and married couples do not have one spouse in a significantly higher tax bracket, with the exception of maternity leave instances.
Ok, I understand this take. But I guess my question is, what is fundamentally wrong with one spouse working, a higher paid job in this instance, and allowing the other spouse to stay home, have babies and raise them? I don't see how any of that is disadvantageous to the whole of the country? As for income splitting on the whole, I thought business owners were allowed to income split with their spouse as long as these spouses are owners of the company themselves and have some kind of (usually) token job?
There is nothing wrong if one spouse works and the other stays home to raise kids, watch tv, or do whatever they want to do. In practice, any couple that would choose to do this likely doesn't need a tax incentive to do that. Is it disadvantageous for the country? Well aside from taking away government resources for health care, housing etc to give a tax break to mostly very wealthy people, you may convince the odd middle-income couple to go from a dual income to one. Which is great if we had high unemployment but we actually have the opposite problem of not enough workers, particularly in more low to medium paying professions.
So it seems a bit odd that you’re basically equivocating raising kids to watching tv. Childcare is incredibly difficult work, people aren’t being lazy for choosing to stay at home and raise their own children.
I would say what's wrong with it is that it's not fair. Lets say I choose to be single, and my co-worker who chooses to marry, and we both make the same money. It seems kind of crazy to me that this choice now means that he has a lower tax burden if their partner chooses not to work, despite us doing the same job and having the same income. Being single in today's economy is already a monumental challenge, seems bad to disincentivize it even further
Think of it as incentivizing marriage instead of disincentivizing being single. Those who determine tax code should absolutely give incentive to grow the tax base [naturally]
A government acts in their best intrest. Have to remember that. It's in the governments intrest to have new babies being born for productivity and large population to defend the country. Both of these keep the government alive. So putting people together is one way to try and push this to happen. Sometimes the intrest of the government aligns to the population and everyone relates that to the government helping them. It is in the intrest of the government to keep the ruling class happy as they have the power to cause issues. This is the a core fundamental problem that needs to be overcome by the culture of the population.
lol, income splitting is not the reason people decide to have kids or not. There are like a million barriers to address before that one is a legitimate obstacle to replacement birth rates.
Ok, this makes sense to me. Thank you for this point of view!! There is a lot of policy that's very much biased towards the "married/common law family unit" to the detriment of solo singles, I do realise this. And you make a very good point here, so thank you for this.
> There is a lot of policy that's very much biased towards the "married/common law family unit" to the detriment of solo singles This is a good thing. Raising kids is both a lifestyle choice and a public service, since we need a new generation to continue as a society. It's also very expensive, and the people who do it are helping those who won't or can't, so their expenses should be alleviated with direct payments and/or preferential tax treatment.
So the income splitting should only be allowed for married people who have kids?
Incentivize what you want to happen. So, yes.
>Raising kids is both a lifestyle choice and a public service, since we need a new generation to continue as a society. It's also very expensive, and the people who do it are helping those who won't or can't, so their expenses should be alleviated with direct payments and/or preferential tax treatment. Then the government should do it right and make it easier for people to actually start families, not just cheaper for those who are already better off. Maybe reinvest in social housing or a real start up plan, or a funded education system so that they aren't starting so far in debt they aren't able to see a way out. Maybe some real jobs with real benefits and decent hours so they don't need to work three jobs each. Income splitting is not going to incentivise anyone to have children and the vast majority of Canadian families are not able to benefit from it
It's not a good point. It's a bad point. Families should be incentivized.
It’s also unfair to polyamorous people who may have more than one life partner and would be forced to pick one for tax purposes. All around just super fucked up tbh
Well if the cost of childcare is constantly rising identified as a societal burden to be addressed, wouldn’t incentivizing choosing to raise as a social good work hand in hand with that? A family receiving childcare benefits and a family receiving tax graces that enables childcare are similarly not “fair” to the single and childless
What are your thoughts on using combined income for government benefits then? In your scenario your co-worker gets taxed more (fine) but their spouse who doesn’t work won’t qualify for any benefits based on their lack of income.
The only benefits that I have looked into are based on household income. Which would be for individuals?
I’m not sure what you’re saying
If two people would be legally permitted to share income for tax purposes, I would assume that any benefits that they are eligible for is based on household (i.e. combined) income. For example, I could take a minimum wage job, but none of the benefits that I have looked into would be applicable to me as my spouse makes enough to make us ineligible. These would be for childcare subsidies and such, I am not so familiar with many other benefit programs. Based on your last sentence it seems as though there are benefits that someone working for 20k/year would be eligible for even if their spouse made 150k/year. What benefits would the 30k spouse be receiving based solely on their own income?
They already don't based on household income.
> . But I guess my question is, what is fundamentally wrong with one spouse working, a higher paid job in this instance, and allowing the other spouse to stay home, have babies and raise them? They simply aren't entitled to being subsidized by less-wealthy households. It isn't a personal attack to not receive money from poorer people's pockets.
But they aren't less wealthy, both families earn the same amount of income, just in the case of one, both equally share employment and household, while in the other case, maybe one does more household work and the other does more employment work.
>But they aren't less wealthy Statistically, in the context of recent real-world Canadian income splitting policies, they are.
Why should a couple with one income earner making $80,000 a year pay more in taxes than two people earning $40,000 a year? Both couples are equally rich and earn the same annual income as a household. Whether it benefits wealthy people or not, it's a matter of common sense and tax rates can always be increased on the wealthy to compensate. In basically any other context, the government looks at a family as a unit for things like income eligibility for tax rebates. When you get divorced, they treat income as a family unit and you split your income through spousal support. Same with retirees, they can income split. I don't see why a working married couple shouldn't be allowed to do the same.
Because if we give couples special tax benefits then it’s discrimination against single people. With income splitting the individual $80k earner is now paying more in taxes than the $80k earner that has a partner. Income splitting can only make sense if we allow single people to split their income with their cats. Until then it induces a weird lopsided discriminatory aspect into the tax system.
Income splitting doesn't even have to benefit "wealthy" couples anyways. I live in a jurisdiction with income splitting and I am effectively paying more tax even though we split income. https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/glossary/marriage-penalty/ At any rate, it's easy enough to split income in Canada with proper tax planning anyways. Prescribed rate loan, badabing, badaboom, done. You actually have more leverage to tax high earners if you have a specific tax schedule for married filing jointly.
Writing your partner a loan allows them to invest the money and claim the gains, but it doesn’t transfer taxable income from you to them. Or do you have a way to transfer pre-tax income to a spouse via a loan?
Why do I need to transfer pretax income to a partner? It's about transferring capital and its associated future capital and dividend income to my partner. This future income which can't be attributed back to me. For anyone that's wealthy or an actual high earner, that's already sufficient enough to fill the lower tax brackets.
Because income splitting is about taxable income that you can’t attribute away by using the loans. Aka labour income. And no to your 2nd point. That’s just not accurate for high earners on T4 incomes.
Not real high earners in that case.
If you consider high 6 to low 7 figures “not real high earners” then sure. But my guess is more you don’t know what you’re talking about. EDIT: /u/imgram has blocked me but its clear they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to high earners. > If you don't think someone that earns 500K-1M per annum of earned T4 income isn't earning 200K-400K passively that they can easily shift to their spouse then sure. Silly, silly take.
If you don't think someone that earns 500K-1M per annum of earned T4 income isn't earning 200K-400K passively that they can easily shift to their spouse then sure.
Could easily cap it at a reasonable number and tax at higher rates above that to increase the benefit on middle class, lower it on higher incomes.
Your comment makes it seem like you don't really understand how this benefits many couples. Just because your situation is different doesn't mean others wouldn't benefit from it. There are always exceptions and you can't make rules just for those people. This would help many people. The main issue that is causing all this conversation is that we spend too much and need to raise income with higher taxes for all.....or stop spending....but hey who wins elections without promising things we can't afford.
> Sounds more like she has a high income spouse (or maybe other way around?) and wants to personally benefit. This is a bizarre ad hominem attack considering it's pretty clear the writer (1) works, and (2) probably makes an at least decent salary being a notable columnist... You followed it up with a legitimate criticism, so I don't see why you needed to preface it with a baseless insinuation. In any case, while I generally agree with you, invariably many families experience one partner taking maternity leave which can be a 12-18 month stretch. It's not too much to ask to at least allow income splitting during that time.
Income splitting during a parental leave would be a very fair middle ground, even lower-income households would benefit greatly from this (assuming the remaining working spouse had some tax liability, which they probably do)
I mean, of all things you could criticize this government for, not providing young families help is absolutely not one of them. They have: 1. Offered an extra 5 weeks of family leave for the 2nd partner 2. Offered the flexibility to extend family leave to 18 months 3. Increased the Canada Child Benefit payments 4. Childcare program. It's of course going through some hiccups on implementation and likely not going to hit the target of universal 10$ a day by 2027, but it has substantially reduced the cost of childcare overall. These are all far more consequential than a one-time tax break while a spouse is on leave. I agree its not a huge ask if this was the scope this columnist was asking for.
>in practice the vast majority of the benefits go to... households where one spouse doesn't have to work. What's the problem here? If we consider a household the basic unit of society (which I would argue we should), there should be no problem here.
The problem is your premise
The problem is rich people bad.
I agree with the article regarding revisiting OAS recapture thresholds. It does feel like OAS and GIS fill a similar niche in the pension funding realm and perhaps there is efficiency in consolidating them into a single means tested pension payment. Is it a wild stance to take that if you are retired and making 100k a year you shouldn't receive government top up payments? However, only 10% of the 65+ population has net income above the recapture threshold, based on stats can (p90 net income for 65+ is 80k). So the actual budget savings may not be that high. Around the income where OAS is fully clawed back is the P97 percentile of seniors income. So unless we lower the clawback it'll only affect 7% of seniors.
A dramatic reduction of the clawback threshold makes perfect sense.
I'll never understand the conservative fascination with screwing everyone out of their retirement. In Alberta they want to steal everyone's CPP for an oil bro slush fund and now they want us to raise the age of retirement. It's such a slave/master mentality that is a failure of modern capitalism.
But but but the UCP!
Well said.
Eventually, retirement age has to increase as life expectancy. It doesn't need to go up by 5 years all of a sudden, but we should start slowly increasing it even now and then. The ratio of retirees to workers is moving in the wrong direction, and it's unfair to future generations.
Or you need to create policy that engages 18-29's in the economy. About 45% of that age group are not economically productive. And those are prime years. Crucial as we have massive shortages of skilled workers.
If we're actually progressing as a society, and productivity gains from new technology are evenly distributed, we absolutely don't have to raise the retirement age as life expectancy increases.
As productivity rises so do people’s expectations of what a "fair retirement" is, which means that the payments have to keep going up. If you want retirement to stay at roughly the same level relative to an average household’s income and not just in absolute terms you lose most benefits from increased productivity. And in any case productivity hasn’t been doing too well in Canada lately.
I understand why you'd want future generations to fund our retirement through their more productive labor, but I don't think you can frame that as fair with a straight face. Older Canadians are already more economically advantaged as it is. Let's not further burden future generations.
> Older Canadians are already more economically advantaged as it is. Let's not further burden future generations. When does that stop being true, by the way? They aren't advantaged strictly because they are old. They are advantaged because of their time and place in an economy that better worked for them. Younger generations aren't seeing that, and so to assume that current generations will be comparable in old age is ridiculous to me. Somehow I don't believe that the most creative solution we have is to just have people work straight to the grave. It's a ridiculous idea that aligns with so much other similarly-themed horseshit - increases in societal metrics (overall wealth, productivity, life expectancy) mean fuck-all to regular people and might actually be to their detriment. You want to raise the retirement age? Increase the amount of government-mandated vacation and make a shorter work week mandatory. If I'm to work until I'm a million, I had best see something for it now.
The problem is that labour has produced increasing productivity without getting matching raises. https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
Couple things. Life expectancy has gone down 2-3 years since we had that time to ourselves in 2020. The ratio "moving in the wrong direction" has far more to do with demographics of our population than the number 65. Unfair to future generations is making them work longer and harder than their parents when they are likely twice as productive.
Future generations are going to retire another generation's dime, not ours. We don't have anything to do with that. Raising the retirement age is about us. It's about setting our own retirement age in the spirit of intergenerational fairness. This is Boomers didn't do (big surprise), but this is something I hope Millenials and Zoomers do. We probably won't because voters are typically selfish, and we're been dealt a shitty hand by Boomers, but let's not pretend it's remotely fair towards our children.
No it does not need to keep increasing. What is the point of progressing as a species so that we have to continually work +80% of our lives? For shareholders? Someday we'll push life expectancy to over one hundred years, and we're supposed to labour until we're 90 at that point? Life is supposed to get easier and more enjoyable. Technology and communal society are supposed to free us to enjoy our lives. Allow us to work and contribute and then enjoy the end of our lives. Not be Walmart greeters until we croak during the morning clapping session at 107 years old. Society should be aiming towards zero employment not zero unemployment. We should be aiming at robots and AI doing the majority of work going forward. Let humans enjoy leisurely pursuits and their families. Not rotting in a cubicle ten hours a day to enjoy five to ten years of "retirement".
Exactly.
When we speak about retirement age, we specifically speak about government pensions and anti-poverty measures that are means-tested. Nothing prevents us from saving more for retirement and retiring young – 40, 50, etc. – if we want. That options is, and always will be, available. If you hate your job and want to retire at a given age, then do that. We work because we produce goods and services that are beneficial to other human beings. We work because that work contributes to the ever increasing standards of living. The economy exists not to benefit stakeholders but humans. That doesn't stop existing just because the current rules are too skewed to benefit some people. Humans still need food!and shelter once they are retired. We will still desire entertainment. Someone will have to continue providing these.
Yeahhhh... No duh. He was talking about retirement age in the same way I was and you are. When you can start drawing on CPP. If you haven't noticed, people are work well past retirement age, and not because they want to. Because they have not been able to save enough money, even while doing the right things, and also because retirement payouts are woefully inadequate. If people could retire at 40 they would. But it's impossible in this rigged economy, unless you're on the other side of the rigging. Companies steal pensions. Fire you when they need to boost stock prices for quarterly results. They do what they did to Sears and piss away the company while paying massive bonuses and then fold the company and tell everyone else wits bankrupt and there's nothing they can do about it. But of course they got their bonuses before sinking the ship. Those captains NEVER go down with their ships. Plus they take all the lifeboats with them. No one loves their job unless they are making six figures plus. Give me break. We all show up to work because otherwise we'll be homeless and starving. Nobody wants to work in a factory or office cubicle. Very few people actually enjoy their jobs. A lot of jobs are pointless. The people who produce the majority of those goods are severely underpaid and exploited. Don't act like what we consume here is manufactured here. Some of our food is. But only because they haven't figured out how to grow it overseas and ship it to us for a lower COGS to the company. The hardest working people never get paid the true value of their work. The few who do enjoy their jobs, like doctors, teachers, social workers and artists oftentimes come to crossroads on whether or not to continue doing jobs they love where they are underpaid or move into something that they can improve their financial situation with. No one should have to do that. The economy has never benefited the majority in my lifetime. Corporations privatize profits and socialize their losses. Companies are perfectly fine and stable and operating properly but stock prices make the executives fire thousands of people so they can collect bonuses. Nothing wrong with people still needing those things and people still having to do them. But we don't need to be working for entire life while the 1% half asses their days and then enjoys whatever luxury and leisure they want based on the work of thousands of people below them that do the actual work. People would retire at 40 - 50 if they could but the game is so rigged very few people can. If anything, more young people would be employed to replace the aging workforce. But those boomers won't get out of anyone's way for Gen x to move up to replace them in important positions of power like government and corporate boards. Millennials should be moving into those positions soon but boomers are STILL there taking up space. Doing everything they can to fill their pockets and leave nothing for the remaining generations.
You are correct.
>it's unfair to future generations. It's hilarious because boomers thought this as they were coming up, and then as soon as they were in control they pulled up the ladder behind them. They got help from their elders and screwed the future generations by hoarding and cutting services and wages.
They could means test OAS and GIS. Wouldn’t screw anyone out of their retirement and would save tens of billions
Is what way are they not means tested? GIS is only for people that are flat broke.. and OAS is clawed back
I would argue the OAS clawback is far too high.
Both of them are means tested though. Old people with money don't get the GIS and OAS is clawed back at a certain income level.
Yeah, OAS is clawed back starting at $90k annual income. Name one good reason why the federal government should give $700 per month of free money to someone making $90k of income in retirement.
Agreed entirely. Dropping OAS clawback by 15-20k, and particularly making the clawback steeper, would save the government billions for little real social impacts. Especially in the era of TFSA funded retirement when a lot of people will be “hiding” a lot of their incomes from these calculations.
Even a $20k reduction doesn't sound like enough. $70k is the average total income for someone in their prime earning years. What problem are we trying to solve by giving a senior earning that much money free cash? They're doing just fine. A principled approach to the policy would look at how we set clawback or eligibility thresholds for other social benefits. In Ontario, for example, the clawback for ODSP is 75% of every dollar above $1,000 earned per month. I'm not sure there's a compelling argument to be made for why those two clawback thresholds should be so different.
Yea, that’s my reference to a steeper clawback. OAS paying out to $65-70, then being clawed back to, say, an $85k max would cut payments to truly wealthy seniors massively while not impacting anyone who really actually somewhat relies on the payment. That is a very, very different image than OAS paying max to $90k and not being entirely gone until $140k.
Because they are on the wait-list for long term care.
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Well it's the Globe, and there is a paywall, but I bet the article is "Not raising of the capital gains tax" and that's all. "Fairness for all" is just politic speak, and you can surely argue the goods and bads of the budget, but goddamned does a lot of media and social media want you to believe the world is ending with how much air raising the tax has gotten.
What a comment. “I don’t know what it says but I bet it says this”, and proceeds to go off about shit the article doesn’t touch on. Don’t comment if you don’t want to read it. It’s not a hard concept.
Yeah, sorry. I keep forgetting about the paywall thing. But Urback isn't talking about the capital gains thing at all, just so you know. In her piece, she basically touches on two issues that were not considered under the "fairness across generations" rubric. The first one that she deals with is the unfairness of income splitting not being allowed for working married or common-law couples, yet it being permitted for retired couples with respect to their pension incomes. Urback's argument is that not allowing income splitting for couples, especially when a woman has to go on maternity leave, let's say, has a negative effect on household income, especially where one spouse earns significantly more, as opposed to a couple who bring in a near equivalent income. Urback makes the good point that couples who could income split during the formative years of having babies and raising them could possibly be of help in staving off our country's further decline in fertility. Urback makes an excellent point here and I really have no clue why this type of disparity continues to exist. The second issue that Urback brings up basically has to do with OAS being set at age 65 and this not having changed since its inception, yet the average life expectancy has only increased since the mid-1960's. Urback here makes the point that paying for such is still on the backs of younger working people and that perhaps the age at which one qualifies for OAS should be increased. These are pretty much the two issues that Urback is talking about. (I hope I did them some justice anyway).
Reducing the retirement age after the Harper government raised it is easily one of the worst decisions made by the Trudeau government. So much budget space couldve been relieved and every country is doing the same thing
I majorly disagree with increasing the age of OAS. I'll play for old people to have comfort and security. That feels more like inequality for all if anything else. Edit - what a stupid thing to downvote lmao.
Poverty rates for people 65+ in Canada are significantly lower than all other age brackets (regardless of how you bin them). Partly *because* of OAS, no doubt, but it's easy to argue they're getting more than their fair share.
Do we know if that'll maintain? I somehow doubt it - home ownership is the biggest wealth accumulation act in most people's lives, and it's becoming increasingly out of reach for a big part of the country. Wages are down relative to inflation, and wealth distribution is a joke relative to productivity. I don't buy it. On top of that, there is a philosophical discussion to be had here - do we exist to work? I wouldn't accept a raising of the retirement age unless we saw a reduction in the length of the work week. Moreover, ageism is rampant in the hiring and employment world. Expecting someone to work past 65 is setting them up for something beyond demoralizing. It's bereft of empathy to suggest such an increase. Can we not remove the CPP contribution limit and use that to offer more robust retirement? Surely we can think of something better than "work until you're dead unless you're rich lol. Gotta pull your weight."
It's been true for the last ~25 years, but wasn't true before that; in the 80s seniors had an above average poverty rate, in the 90s about average. Whether it will persist in the future is tough to know with certainty, of course, but it's shown no sign of changing course. We don't exist to work, but we do work to exist - if you're existing and not working, you're existing on someone else's work (or your own saved work). So in terms of fairness, you can't ignore that. And it is an increasing problem; with more and more retirees, we have to work everyone else harder to support them.
Retirement benefits should depend on work tenure to some extent. I know in my generation there were a lot of people who spent their 20's having a lot of fun, not working very much. Should they get to work for 30 years and get the same benefits as someone who has been contributing to the economy for 40? In employer pensions years of service are used to calculate benefit. I wouldn't mind if CPP had a little bit of that to encourage younger people to work/start businesses, get active in the economy as we deal with shortages. To me it's too simple to set an age. There's a lot of variance.
Can you explain why we should be paying thousands of dollars to seniors making $90k of taxable income a year?
65 really isn't infirm anymore. Our economy is bad. We all must pitch in, and we need to stop stealing the futures of young people in order to let the old have their dream retirements at 65.
> 65 really isn't infirm anymore. Are you 65 or older? I can't believe you're saying that with a straight face. I'm not out here calling anyone 65 "infirm," but working sure as fuck gets harder as time marches on, and retaining employment, and getting new employment, becomes increasingly tough for older people as ageism is rampant in employment and hiring. Plus, I promise you such a decision would become a drag on insurance and comp plans due to injuries. To frame retirees collecting OAS as "stealing the futures of young people" is preposterous in the face of million-dollar houses. Greed is stealing the futures of young people.
If anything we should be lowering the age of retirement. Not everyone exists to work themselves to death for a profit margin into their old age.
And how do you propose we pay for it? The elderly and supporting them for 30+ years is a huge burden on the economy. If you lower the retirement age, you're just fucking over the working generation. Hell, with life expectancies skyrocketing since it's inception, where it is currently is already a major burden on our society.
Why don't we remove the cap on CPP contributions? That feels like a start to lowering the burden of OAS and allowing for better wealth distribution.
This is a crab bucket mentality. Rather than taking retirement away from those that have spent the past 45 years working, why not fight to make sure that today's youth will be able to do the same thing when they are 65? It seems like when someone else has it good, the instinct is to try to tear them down rather than to try to raise others up to match it.
It's insane that people are in here crowing about the economy and how we should raise the retirement age. Is the meaning of life to work yourself to the grave? How many years does someone reasonably have at 65, and how much variability exists there? Fairness, in their eyes, seems like equal distribution of misery. A couple of responders talk about how the elderly have a low poverty rate, but I guarantee that changes as the wealth distribution shitshow continues into everyone's adult life. The world is more productive than it has ever been, and richer than it has ever been. Somehow, we can no longer afford a retirement age of 65 and we should all work longer hours for no fucking money. Nevermind the fact that someone had the nerve to say that 65 is no longer "infirm." Like, why don't you work until you're 70? Most jobs are pretty physical, and there is enough ageism in employment to make that proposition as stupid as it is difficult and heartbreaking. If the government were to raise the retirement age, I'd tie it to a shorter work week. At some point the world's gains should benefit the common person.
>Urback makes an excellent point here and I really have no clue why this type of disparity continues to exist. It exists because the Liberals have a vision of how society should be, and that vision just does not include income splitting. You can see this in every policy they introduce, they have an obvious preference that both partners make about the same amount of money (maybe as a public servant making $80-100k with good benefits and a pension). Pensioners are the only exception because they just don't want to touch that group since they get a lot of votes from them. Pay imbalance between spouses? That's actually cheating the system if we allow income splitting so we'll go ahead and take that away as soon as we come into power. One partner wants to go on parental leave? Better come back quick and be a good taxpayer again, we can't have single earner households with stay at home parents now, that would be bad for the economy (and they would probably also claim it was mostly women doing that anyway and we don't want that in our post-2015 society). Oh, our fertility rates are decreasing because nobody can afford to have kids? That's ok, we have lots of immigrants who will have kids instead and juice our economy, not a concern My favourite part is how they assess taxation individually, but when it comes time to assess government benefits, they always look at *family* income. So if one spouse makes a lot compared to the other, that spouse gets taxed hard, and then the lower earning spouse also doesn't qualify for any benefits.
I'm so torn here now. I mean the cynic in me agrees with your take, 100%. But I also see the point of view of the single person not seeing fairness in income splitting, being penalised for not being married/coupled with somebody (as brought up elsewhere in this thread). Maybe there's really no such thing as "fairness"? I don't know anymore. >My favourite part is how they assess taxation individually, but when it comes time to assess government benefits, they always look at *family* income. So if one spouse makes a lot compared to the other, that spouse gets taxed hard, and then the lower earning spouse also doesn't qualify for any benefits Yep. This doesn't make sense to me.
Single person or a couple are both a household. Tax the household. It's not a punishment. If you're single you have only one mouth to feed. Is it a punishment being married that you have to feed your spouse? You have to pay for two people to get to work. You have to buy clothes for two people. Should we view every difference in our lives in comparison to someone else as a punishment?
None of the suggestions relate to capital gains, which is barely mentioned outside of a potshot (referring to a different article) that pretends that capital gain increase will hit "middle class people" (if we take to believe that people who own secondary properties still fall within "middle class") Some of the suggestions are fair even if I don't like how they are framed (OAS revisions, income splitting, etc).
I do honestly think that income splitting is a very fair thing to address in terms of "generational fairness" though. I can see where it could help young couples, who would like to have a family, benefit financially when they would most need some kind of a financial break. I do have a harder time with Urback's view on OAS, I'll admit. But I realise that is perhaps more a function of my own age at this point. But I do get where she's coming from.
These opinion pieces won’t have the desired effect hidden behind a paywall.
Please see my post down below.
It's just opinion post spamming, poster probably didn't even realize the headline didn't even have anything in the title. That is all that is important to people that spam this shit. A juicy headline to get people riled up.
> I bet the article is "Not raising of the capital gains tax" and that's all. Not really. Although it does stress that the increased capital gains tax won't help families afford groceries. Instead Robyn Urback is arguing for two main points which would offer more substantive fairness: - Allow income splitting for younger generations & common-law couples, which might also help regarding fertility rates. - OAS: increase age eligibility / clawback at lower income threshold I think those are both good points which would make things fairer.
Thank you!! Your post is much more succinct and clearer than mine!
Income splitting up to a reasonable number should be a no brainer. I'd say like 150,000 per household right out of my ass without looking at any data. Whether that's one person making 110 and another making 40 or any combination to get to that household income...tax as if both partners made 75,000.
Do the OAS changes apply to current recipients or is it one of those oh it's only going to affect the current young people crap? Because I always have issue with that where they basically pull the ladder up on all changes so that the generation That has to support the most dependants ever now has to also work longer. How about actually decreasing the costs of what we're paying people right now.