By Klaus Rohrich
Friday, April 20, 2007
It appears that the transformation of Canada's people into tax slaves is now complete. A report issued by the Fraser Institute just last week has determined that the average Canadian family's largest expenditure involves taxes. The authors revealed that the average annual income of the typical Canadian family is just over $63,000 per year. Of that food shelter and clothing account for approximately 35% (about $22,000), while taxes eat up an astounding 44.9%, nearly $30,000 per year.
What's so remarkable is that every single level of government from the federal to the provincial, to the county to the municipal is clamoring for more money. What's wrong with this picture?
What's worse is that most Canadians seem to have accepted both the confiscatory taxation as well as the incompetence on the part of the burgeoning bureaucracy that appears to lumber from crisis to crisis.
If you think there's something amiss with our society, then chances are you're a sentient human being whose brain hasn't been poisoned by a steady diet of "Oprah" and "American Idol". The fact that providing daycare has become such an important issue, both socially and politically, is directly related to the high level of taxation with which Canadians are currently burdened. Imagine, it takes two breadwinners in a family to make ends meet. One works solely to support the crushing taxes that government has imposed on the citizens, while the other works to provide for the needs of the family.
God help you if you are a single parent, because then the game gets interesting. For openers you are absolutely dependent on some form of child care, as without it you could never make ends meet. What's worse, your decisions at the polls on election day are not driven by what's best for the country, but what's best for you, as you depend to a large degree on the largesse of the government to provide or subsidize your daycare.
Some months ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives issued an alarming report that indicated that the rich were getting richer, while the rest of us were losing ground. Somehow the report attempted to imply that the rich were getting richer on the backs of the poor. It missed the real point by a country mile. People are losing ground economically because of high taxes. In addition our tax burden is crippling us economically as it affects the overall productivity of the country.
Consider that in 1961 the average Canadian family earned around $5,000 per year. Single parents were almost unheard of and most families had a stay at home mom to raise the children. Back then that family's tax burden was $1675 per year. Today, nearly 50 years later, the average family's income has increased by a factor of 12.5, but the tax burden has increased during that same time period by a factor of 18, meaning that taxes have grown at 1.5 times the rate of income.
Want to venture a guess on where this is heading? Mathematically, with taxes continuing to rise at that rate and productivity continuing to fall, it is inevitable that someday families will be forced to pay 100% of their income in taxes in an effort to keep the bloated corpse we call a government from rotting away completely.
It seems the Liberals were looking way ahead of the curve when they enacted their gun control legislation all those years ago. If I were a Canadian politician I wouldn't be comfortable with an armed population either. Judging by the recent budget brought down by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, I'd guess that Stephen Harper will not abolish the Gun Registry any time soon.
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