Social safety net has been stolen from us

Most of the voters in the current election are not aware of how corporations, and successive Liberal and Conservatives governments, have stolen our social welfare safety net. The numbers give a simple and clear answer.

First, in 1950, as we started growing the welfare net, the tax burden to pay for the net was split fairly evenly between corporate profit tax and the personal income tax. The actual numbers for the federal budget were, for both income and profit tax, just below 50 per cent.

By 1991, corporate taxes paid 10 per cent of the federal budget and personal taxes the other 90 per cent. The above shows that even by 1991 the welfare safety net was being paid for mostly by personal taxes. We are all aware of the cuts governments have made to corporate taxes since then.

Secondly, to keep the professional class of personal-income-tax-paying voters quiet, there are a multitude of tax exemptions that are geared to be most advantageous or those in the higher wage brackets. Corporations have also, and still do enjoy the benefit from a multitude of tax exemptions.

Those benefits are mostly hidden in the tax system and were called tax expenditures by Carol Goar of the Star and therefore escape the scrutiny of politicians and the media. The tax rates that are constantly quoted are mostly irrelevant.

The total exemptions amount to about one-third of the federal budget revenue available, or about $100 billion.

We can only pray that we will elect a person who can help clean up the mess that has been made in our House of Commons. Ed Goertzen, Oshawa