If you want to vote for a liberal or conservative party in the upcoming Canadian federal election, you must really enjoy being raped and pillaged

If you’re planning to vote in the upcoming Canadian federal election, I’d appreciate it if you would read the following. In fact, if you live pretty well anywhere in the Western World you should likely check this out….I’m going to be talking about liberals and conservatives in this week’s blog. And I’m going to be writing about the massive inequity in our societies and how that’s been very deliberately created by our so-called liberal and conservative governments over the last 75 years – since the end of the Second World War – back in the days when the rich and large corporations were asked to pay their fair share of the tax bill. Since that time, successive governments, both liberal and conservative – and notice I’m writing about all parties that lean left as liberal and all parties that lean right as conservative – have radically reduced taxes on the big guys, while, at the same time, radically increasing taxes on the so-called middle class.

We currently have a society in Canada, and I would suggest other parts of the world, where what’s left of the middle class is holding up the whole system. The majority of our working people these days are fighting for $15 per hour, when that really still leaves people well below the poverty line. When I moved to the community of Wallaceburg 36 years ago, the community was a real manufacturing hub. There were over 8,000 great jobs here and even labourers in most factories were making $15-20 an hour. And they’re struggling to make that same amount of money now – only it’s over 30 years later. While the wealthy have gotten drastically wealthier over the last any decades, the rest of us have been brutalized by both liberal and conservative governments

When I was a kid growing up in the small Ontario town of Hanover back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the town was known as the “Furniture Capital of Canada”, and boasted maybe 8-10 factories that produced some of the best furniture in the world. And the guys who built that furniture – and it was mostly guys in those days – got paid enough money to get married, buy a house and car, raise a family – sometimes with eight kids – and even take vacations – and they did it all on the salary of one furniture factory employee. Also in those days, a small retailer, like Louis’ Men’s Wear in Hanover, could not only provide a really good living for the folks who owned the store, but also usually a couple of fulltime employees – who were also busy buying houses and raising families – also usually on one salary in the household.

So, clearly, something has changed rather dramatically since the glory days of the middle class back in the 50’s and 60’s…..and it’s been primarily the system of taxation our governments have foisted on us. At one time, back in the late 1940’s, rich people were taxed at a rate of about 90%....today, that has dropped to about 30%. Guess who’s picking up the difference….Back in the late 1940’s, the middle class was paying about 18% in income tax….today with a wide variety of taxes now hitting the middle class, it’s paying something in the neighbourhood of 55%, which means middle class people are working for over half the year just to pay the government.

This is so wrong it’s really difficult for me to get my head around. And we have let it happen by electing successive liberal and conservative governments (Republican and Democrat in the States) which have taken turns raping and pillaging us. We need hefty wealth taxes and estate taxes and capital gains taxes and nearly every other tax we can hit the rich with. The libs and cons will tell you it really hurts the economy if you put too many taxes on the rich. They’ll move somewhere else and take their money with them. And I say let them move. Even rich people have to know how upside-down our tax system is – or they’re idiots. Don’t really want to share the country with folks who don’t want to pay their fair share so that everyone in the country can live with respect and dignity. And it would be a simple thing to do – to fix the tax system. All we need is a little political will and the knowledge our governments won’t just waste any extra money they get. But that’s our fault too if we let it happen.

If you want to vote for a liberal or conservative party in the upcoming Canadian federal election, you must really enjoy being raped and pillaged. That’s all I’ve got to say.