| Stop the corporate tax cuts |
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| Wednesday, 02 February 2011 |
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Sisters and Brothers:
Time to stop the corporate giveaways.
In my recent Telegram column http://www.thetelegram.com/Opinion/Columns/2011-01-29/article-2182050/A-federal-election-about-taxes/1 I outlined why billions of dollars in tax cuts that benefit Canada's most wealthy corporations - including multinationals like Vale - don't make any economic sense if the objective is to create jobs. Now if the objective is to increase corporate bonuses or starve the federal treasury of the funds Canadians need for things like health care and other vital public services than that's another matter.
I am not the only one who thinks so. Even the Canada's top StatsCan economist questions the real benefit of another round of corporate tax cuts. Philip Cross says corporate tax cuts are such a small factor in how business shapes the Canadian economy that the agency can't reliably measure their impact.
"A couple of billion dollars (of savings from tax cuts) is a drop in the bucket of corporate income here," Cross said in an interview. "It's trivial."
Trivial to the corporations, but not so to the public purse and public services. http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/headline_news/article.jsp?content=b5814614
CAW Economist Jim Stanford's analysis of the corporate tax cuts shows that they could actually end up costing the Canadian economy 46,000 jobs rather than creating jobs as the Harper Conservatives would have us believe. http://www.caw.ca/en/9837.htm
If you are interested in debunking the corporate tax cut myths, here are a few other interesting articles or websites:
Five reasons to say no to corporate tax cuts, by Armine Yalnizyan, economist with the CCPA:
The Progressive Economic Forum: http://www.progressive-economics.ca/
And you might enjoy, like I did, this commentary by Radio host John Moore in the National Post: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/01/27/john-moore-you-can-cut-corporate-taxes-too-far/
In Solidarity Lana |