yeah...nice try AF. Trying to tie my comment to the NDP to try to discredit me is not fooling anyone. My data comes from Statscan and has been quoted in every major newspaper in the country. It is no secret who has benefited from the Liberal's "economic turnaround." If business owners reinvested their profits into their workforce (in terms of better wages and benefits) then their would be more disposable income for the purchase of the product or service they are selling, further stimulating the economy. THAT is simple economics. However, the individual greed of the wealthy businessman to hoard as much of the profit as possible, has proven time and time again to outweigh any logical and reasonable economic incentive to redistribute that wealth. This is why we need governments to tax the wealthy in the first place, since the rich are clearly not about to do so themselves, even though it would make economic sense to do so. The bottom line is that the wealthy are only interested in making more wealth for themselves and any "economic" benefit to the poor is minimized to ensure they make as much as possible while keeping the system going. This is not sustainable and is doom to fail. When 4% of the population controls 96% of the wealth, revolution is inevitable.
The problem with your whole premise of blaming the rich is you totally absolve the "poor" of any responsibility. There has always been rich and poor and there always will be rich and poor. The more you try and legislate a "sharing" of the wealth the more you will remove the incentive for all of society to excel. The end result is an over all poorer society. Human nature will always gravitate to the lowest common denominator.
There all all sorts of examples of this. Take a very controversial (to some) example of a union shop. Because of the "negotiated" contracts there is no incentive for an employee to excel because there is no reward for doing so. Peer pressure from the lowest producers causes the highest producers to cut back on their efforts so as to not show up the average or poor producers. Union rules usually prevent one class of employees from performing the duties of another class of employee. This creates a need for more employees and reduces efficiency of the organization. Productivity suffers and the business becomes mediocre.
We are all to a very large extent masters of our own destiny. Especially in a country like ours, everyone has a relatively equal opportunity to excel. Rather than focusing on the rich and how you can take away their hard earned and well deserved wealth to give to the poor, focus instead on why the poor are poor and the rich got rich?
Why don't the poor put the same effort into getting an education like the rich did? They have the same access. Student loans are more available to the poor than to the rich.
Why don't the poor save their money rather than spending every penny they earn. This would give them a pool of capital that they could invest and they could become rich as well.
Why don't the poor make sacrifices and invest their pool of capital into a start up business? Yes it could fail, but it could also be successful and make them rich.
There is no economic sense whatsoever to redistribute wealth! All that does is create a poorer society by moving it closer to the lowest common denominator (poverty). It doesn't make any sense whatsoever for the rich to be taxed higher in order to give to the poor. The poor will just squander the money, they will not invest it. They won't create any jobs. Through their spending they may help the retail business sector in the short term, but over time the policy of redistributing wealth will make the rich poorer, resulting in fewer opportunities to tax them. There will be less investment, fewer jobs. etc, etc. Society as a whole will become poorer.
As Bavarian Raven so succinctly wrote: "Basically, its a way for the less well off to steal from the more well off." That's all we need; a society with more thieves!
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Topic: The HST vote - making a decision (Read 125063 times)