Stephen Harper's unequal income splitting scheme for wealthy families explained in 3 graphs
Stephen Harper's Conservatives have a plan to reward Canada's wealthiest families and exacerbate inequality — it's called income splitting.
That's the main finding of a new report released Tuesday by the Broadbent Institute titled The Big Split: Income Splitting's Unequal Distribution of Benefits Across Canada.
"If the government set out to specifically design a policy to make inequality worse, this would be it," says Rick Smith, the Institute's Executive Director. "This policy is an inequality generating machine."
Here's how income splitting works: if a spouse makes X amount and the other spouse makes Y amount, the spouse that makes more money can transfer part of their income (if they earn a big salary) to the lower earning spouse (or stay at home spouse) for tax purposes.
To be the biggest winner in this $3 billion tax giveaway, the top earning spouse would be in the top income tax bracket (earning at least $136,270) and their spouse would be earning no money. The study found that fewer than 2% of families with children under 18 fit into this category.
Read more: http://www.pressprogress.ca/en/post/stephen-harpers-unequal-income-splitting-scheme-wealthy-families-explained-3-graphs
Two families have the same combined income. One family earns this income between the partners equally. The other family earns this income unequally, Why does it make sense that the latter family has lower net income? In both families both partners need to work, neither can afford to quit working with or without income splitting. Both of these families might be relatively well off to a lot of others, no dispute there. I am the second family and working class. I am not necessarily asking for less taxes, I am just saying there is an inequity. If they corrected this inequity and then raised tax rates on both of us so we meet halfway and have a fair/equal share of both our combined incomes going to helping out lower combined incomes and single parents, no problem there from me
ReplyDeletepoint taken. It is not the agenda of the Harper government to have a balanced program that suits all Canadians equally but rather one that benefits the haves.
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