Show your work, please

Re: How to close tax loopholes, Andrew Coyne, Aug 19.

Andrew Coyne applauds the reasoning behind the government’s July 18 proposals ( if not the proposals themselves) to radically expand the taxation of businesses run by family corporations. He even purports to show fallacies in the “enormous amount of caterwauling from those affected” that “the proposals have provoked.”

But the credibility of his complaints and arguments is fundamentally put into question by an assertion he makes in response to the concern expressed by many critics that the proposal to equate the tax position of a risk- taking business person and an employee ignores the reality of the economic and financial differences between the two.

He wrote, “Society does not benefit f rom paying people to take on risks they would not otherwise assume, whether the payment takes the form of a subsidy or a special tax rate.”

Does Mr. Coyne really mean to say that the jobs created by business enterprise are not of crucial benefit to society?

But separately it is helpf ul both that Mr. Coyne recognizes that a basic taxrelated reason for the use of corporations is the “current massive disparity” between personal and corporate tax rates and that he advocates that the government withdraw its radical proposals and instead reduce the incentive to incorporation by bringing “those rates more in line,” particularly if Mr. Coyne means bringing them in line by reducing the personal rates, which happen to be among the highest in the world.

Nathan Boidman, Westmount, Que.