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From: mason@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Mason)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: RE: Re: Baby bonuses are silly.
Message-ID: <5109@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Aug-84 14:05:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.5109
Posted: Thu Aug 30 14:05:32 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Aug-84 16:24:24 EDT
References: <1108@hcrvax.UUCP>
Organization: University of Toronto/Ryerson Polytechnic Institute
Lines: 39

I have been reading all this stuff, and feel obligated to throw in my 3
cents worth.

If the country has the wealth to provide everyone with an adequate standard
of living (I do NOT mean food and a hostel to sleep in, and I do NOT mean
3000 sq. ft. houses and 3 cars per family) which I would argue Canada does,
the obvious approach is to pay everyone a Citizenship Salary of a reasonable
level (say $10,000) in bi-weekly installments.  Then any income you made
over and above that would be taxed.  No loopholes, no exemptions.  This
way we would not even need to fill in tax forms at the end of the year
unless we were self-employed, because the tax we paid would be the tax we
owed.

This would be extremely cheap and simple to administer, as well as removing
the stigma implied by the terms Welfare, UIC, or even "negative" tax.

It would also save a lot of money as all those civil servants moved from making
30,000 a year to making 10,000 a year.  Not that it gives them the oppurtunity
and the means to decide what they can do best, and go out and provide a
service that other people are willing to pay for.  It also means that
artists and writers can do what they want, presumably also to our general
benefit.

The only real administrative costs of all this are deciding who is eligible,
and how much the amount should increase every year.  The second part is easy
to state, if not so easy to implement:  The Citizen Salary should increase
to match the increase in the wealth of the nation.  How you measure this is
probably a major problem.

The first part is trickier: do you pay only citizens, landed immigrants?
adults? children?

Comments welcome!
-- 
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