I thought of Thane's taxes because an income of five million is so obviously excessive. We live in a society where increases in capital are unsurprising at that scale - it happens all the time when companies go public - but income at that scale is another matter. (When one thinks about it, a return of 2% on 250,000,000 would get there, but the wealthy rarely structure their investments in that way; most of that would likely take the form of capital gains.). I had considered a pun on capitation and decapitation, but capitation as a concept is not close enough to taxation for it to work.
Median household income in Canada is about seventy thousand dollars, 93,000 for non-senior families; at a guess median individual income would be a bit higher higher than half that, and the mean would definitely be higher; mean household income is a harder figure to find but is about 104,000 in the Toronto area.
That's after tax; median market income is higher.
If we look at deciles, the top decile in Canada for individual incomes begins at 93,000 or so. The middle two deciles are from 40,500 to 53,700. Again, that aggregates mean values, and so would be higher than a typical median.
So on that basis taxes would top out at maybe about 500,000, and changes would affect only a smallish subset of the top decile. (That is a gross oversimplification; my tax professor would have said (did say, IIRC) that while income taxes get the bulk of the attention the most efficient taxes tend to be value added taxes. To avoid making them regressive, though, you have to exempt some goods or provide rebates.)
Taxes over 100 % are pointless; anybody receiving money above that line would literally just turn it down. You'd pessimize enough of your investments to avoid the hit from any such bracket, donate money at source to charities, and CEO contracts would shift to non-monetary ways of marking status above that magic line.
The right wing likes to talk about reward for productivity; in practice you have to make a lot at what you do and already do a lot before you get into those areas above, say, 200,000. (Some medical specialists do, but that also gets into questions of the costs to get there.) Above that point there's a decoupling between what people make and any form of merit. Most really high earners just lucked out. (I went to school with Jim Balsillie's brother David; Jim was a couple of years behind me. Both myself and the Dean of Men at Trinity at the time (which is where he went to study Business) have agreed that a more unlikely success story in terms of personal potential would be hard to find. Balsillie was very lucky where he happened to latch on to a possibility in a startup.)
And the bulk of money raised by taxes has to come from the relatively well off no matter what: the top quintile of the population has over 37 per cent of the share of income in Canada. As Dillinger said when asked why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is.".
It's not an obviously impractical idea, but you'd have to have a large-scale shift in thought first.
One is not quite inclined to go about discussing lampposts and hangings, but one almost has to ask when it becomes evident to enough people that the system is badly out of whack for something to happen. Unfortunately the evidence of the past five years or so suggests that when people do express their resentments, they blame those outside the system (immigrants) or on the lowest rung (with race and other proxies standing in as markers of the other, instead of blaming the people who own the country.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2021-09-15 02:04 am (UTC)Median household income in Canada is about seventy thousand dollars, 93,000 for non-senior families; at a guess median individual income would be a bit higher higher than half that, and the mean would definitely be higher; mean household income is a harder figure to find but is about 104,000 in the Toronto area.
That's after tax; median market income is higher.
If we look at deciles, the top decile in Canada for individual incomes begins at 93,000 or so. The middle two deciles are from 40,500 to 53,700. Again, that aggregates mean values, and so would be higher than a typical median.
So on that basis taxes would top out at maybe about 500,000, and changes would affect only a smallish subset of the top decile. (That is a gross oversimplification; my tax professor would have said (did say, IIRC) that while income taxes get the bulk of the attention the most efficient taxes tend to be value added taxes. To avoid making them regressive, though, you have to exempt some goods or provide rebates.)
Taxes over 100 % are pointless; anybody receiving money above that line would literally just turn it down. You'd pessimize enough of your investments to avoid the hit from any such bracket, donate money at source to charities, and CEO contracts would shift to non-monetary ways of marking status above that magic line.
The right wing likes to talk about reward for productivity; in practice you have to make a lot at what you do and already do a lot before you get into those areas above, say, 200,000. (Some medical specialists do, but that also gets into questions of the costs to get there.) Above that point there's a decoupling between what people make and any form of merit. Most really high earners just lucked out. (I went to school with Jim Balsillie's brother David; Jim was a couple of years behind me. Both myself and the Dean of Men at Trinity at the time (which is where he went to study Business) have agreed that a more unlikely success story in terms of personal potential would be hard to find. Balsillie was very lucky where he happened to latch on to a possibility in a startup.)
And the bulk of money raised by taxes has to come from the relatively well off no matter what: the top quintile of the population has over 37 per cent of the share of income in Canada. As Dillinger said when asked why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is.".
It's not an obviously impractical idea, but you'd have to have a large-scale shift in thought first.
One is not quite inclined to go about discussing lampposts and hangings, but one almost has to ask when it becomes evident to enough people that the system is badly out of whack for something to happen. Unfortunately the evidence of the past five years or so suggests that when people do express their resentments, they blame those outside the system (immigrants) or on the lowest rung (with race and other proxies standing in as markers of the other, instead of blaming the people who own the country.