Getting to keep your hard-earned cash is not a gift

Instead of imagining (as I do) the government as a crazed firefighter, lugging around some massive financial water hose and spraying money about with reckless abandon, try thinking of it as a mugger.

Each week, this mugger goes out and relieves some poor individual of a thousand bucks until there comes a time when he only nabs $900 from the unfortunate soul. Do we then profess that this perpetual criminal has given the individual a gift of $100?

Keeping this somewhat odd allegory in mind, consider the reaction to the move by Jason Kenney’s government in reducing the corporate income tax in stages from 12 per cent to eight (the latest drop to 10 per cent taking place a few days ago), so as to make Alberta more attractive to prospective businesses.

The caterwauling hasn’t stopped about this “giveaway” since it was announced. And it’s unlikely to stop any time soon.

But even before considering if this strategy is either the right one for these turbulent times or if it’s actually going to make a jot of difference in lifting the economic black clouds from over our collective heads, let’s ponder the wider implications of such knee-jerk protestations.

Have we reached a point where we instinctively believe every single penny belongs to government and it is therefore only through their largesse or occasional kind-hearted benevolence that anyone gets to keep a dime or two of what’s actually been earned?

Sadly, that seems to be where we’ve ended up. When a government takes slightly less from business or shaves a sliver off marginal individual tax rates, there are screams that immediately ring out. Opponents suggest this constitutes an unconscionable giveaway to the rich because

The government does not have some automatic right to every penny

those making the most get to save a tad more from such reductions.

Yet, that’s simply because they were shelling out much more in the first place and — knock, knock, knock on wood — it’s their own money they’re managing to cling onto slightly more successfully. No one, least of all any government, is giving them a darned thing — just like our poor mugging victim wasn’t receiving some nefarious gift by coughing up only $900 instead of the usual grand.

Now, this isn’t to say we should live in a society where no one pays taxes to any government and it’s therefore a free-for-all, with the weakest and poorest going to the wall. We’ve chosen, through the decades, to ceaselessly grow a safety net for those who might need a helping hand or were dealt a poor lot in life.

For the most part this has been a blessed thing — one that’s brought benefits to this city, province and country.

But somewhere along this diligent path we developed a myopic vision, one that can no longer see that the money used to provide this progressive, caring society actually belongs to the companies and individuals that earned it in the first place. The government does not have some automatic right to every penny of this collective bounty.

However, such a view is likely a minority one these days. And that makes Kenney’s move to drop corporate rates to among the lowest in North America a huge gamble, especially while making some fledgling cuts to Alberta’s massive spending on public services at the exact same time.

Such correlation plays well at those earnest protest rallies: Gifts to the rich at the expense of the rest of us. It’s simplistic and nonsensical, but nevertheless undoubtedly effective. Maybe those protest sound bites provide clues to why the provincial government’s popularity dropped significantly in a recent poll.

So, there’s a lot riding on this move geared to help attract new investment and jobs. If it fails, and we’re stuck at the current level of unemployment, the screams about giveaways to the affluent will reach crescendo level.

It’s a gamble, probably more of one than Kenney imagined when his government introduced Bill 3 in the summer. In fact, his political future’s in play.