Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Tax cutting not right solution
(January 13) - You can’t build your happiness on the unhappiness of others. This is a frequently repeated line in a video we rented over the holidays. Married Life is sort of a Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock hybrid. It takes the best of both and melds them into a pretty good movie. The sentiment is a bit ironic in the context of the story. A man plans to leave his wife for a younger woman, but doesn’t want her to be sad and lonely afterwards. He decides to murder her rather than make her life a misery.
Think about this while we get back into tax-cutting season. The federal government is threatening to bring down the mother of all budgets. It will run a deficit while cutting taxes again. Barack Obama hasn’t moved into the White House yet, but he is already signalling more of the same down there. He projects a budget with a deficit in the gazillions of dollars and tax cuts of about $300 billion.
The world economy is a mess. The crisis was not caused by high taxes, and it will not be fixed by lowering them. If cutting taxes was key to a healthy economy, ours would be as fit as a fiddle. Governments across the world have been doing it for so long they forget how to do anything else.
What is the result? We have seen it over and over and over again. As revenue goes down, programs and services are cut. Without the money to do its job properly, the role of government itself is reduced. There is less regulation of important economic sectors such as banking, communications and transportation. Without effective oversight, the greedy become greedier. They are not held accountable for the consequences of their avarice.
We’re on a runaway train. Our leaders should have seen the precipice rushing at us. Maybe they did. They didn’t do anything about it. They simply cut more taxes and gave millions to the people who drive the train. Now they are going to do it again. It has been said that a mark of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. If that is the case, our economic system has gone well and truly nuts.
Tax cuts benefit people who can easily afford to pay them. They hurt those who can least afford it. Those who think their lives will be better if they pay as little as possible into the public purse should remember one thing. They can’t build their happiness on the unhappiness of others.
At the municipal level, there is nowhere left to go. Tax cutting is not an option. Deficit budgeting is not an option. To maintain services at the levels we need, taxes have to increase. When expected sources of revenue dry up, there is no room to manoeuvre.
We saw this happen when the city learned it would no longer qualify for an annual provincial government grant. The money was to help cover the cost of services downloaded from the province. When it dried up, there were only two options left. Raise property taxes even more or cut services.
Coun. Bob Bell was quick off the mark with a call to cut services. This type of knee-jerk reaction just keeps us going on the same calamitous journey. It will not help bring the runaway train under control.
What we need is politicians at all levels of government to step forward with the courage and vision to say enough is enough. We have taken the easy way out for far too long and it’s not doing us any good. It is time we got back to a level where our government has the resources needed to run the country properly.
We like to whine about them, but taxes are not evil. They are the price of admission to civil society. If we value our community, we must be willing to pay the cost of keeping it together. To make it strong, we have to protect the weak. We must look after those who were damaged in the rush to the bottom.
None of us will be happy if we’re all casualties of the train wreck.
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