‘Luxury tax’ falls short of ‘wealth tax’

It’s not yachts and sports cars that throw our economy out of balance — it’s the billions of dollars that are siphoned off and squirrelled away in offshore tax havens.

It’s just as well to be honest, I suppose — I’m not a good money-manager.

The Hon. Chrystia Freeland, like my dear wife, seems to have the common sense needed to face today’s challenges. It’s hard to find anything in Monday’s federal budget that wasn’t necessary, or that could have been put off until some future economic reassessment, and I can’t imagine what alternative suggestions Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition might have offered.

Going ever deeper into the hole in an effort to survive a pandemic? That’s a “nobrainer,” as my grandchildren would say, not just as a vote-winner but from a basic humanitarian angle. I’m fairly sure neither Erin O’toole nor Jagmeet Singh would want to oppose that measure, no matter how expensive.

Minimum wage reset? Not much room for dissent there, either. A little bit of Green, for garnish? Why not? In general, my response to the whole 700-and-something-page-long document is “What else could they have done?”

Now, I will admit that the “luxury tax” on expensive but unnecessary purchases falls far short of the “wealth tax” I was hoping for. It’s not yachts and sports cars that throw our economy out of balance — it’s the billions of dollars that are siphoned off and squirrelled away in offshore tax havens. One of the problems of taxing the rich is that politicians hate taxing themselves. Are we electing millionaires, or do they become millionaires after being elected? That’s a rhetorical question and I don’t expect to find an answer to it.

Some think that expression, “desperate times call for desperate measures” was one of the ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates’ aphorisms, and others suggest a more recent source, but the federal budget of April 19th, 2021 will surely be remembered as a classic example of its application. It’s probably true to say that it was a simple budget to put together — nothing that wasn’t essential to meet the nation’s immediate needs. Ed Healy Marystown