It may be my inner Scandinavian talking, but if the government of Ontario needs more money for Education and Healthcare? I’m prepared to pay a little bit more in taxes to help. Because I’m pretty sure that’s what taxes are actually supposed to do. Pay for MRIs and ensure lower class sizes and shorter wait times in ERs and all that other “common good” shit.
Hey! I know! Seeing as Ontario is in a $13.5 billion deficit – if the 7.5 million people in the workforce all paid $1,800 more in taxes – we’d be out of debt. In one tax season. It can’t be that easy, can it? This can’t possibly be like CPA Murray Blum (Charles Grodin) going in to visit President look-alike Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) in Dave to find $650,000,000 for social programs in the Federal budget and he does. Can it?
Sure, it’s not PC to suggest that we should actually raise taxes, but what if we ACTUALLY did? And what if education and health care then ACTUALLY improved? And what if we then had educated and healthy Ontarians as far as the eye could see? And we’d all be like, “That’s right you non-tax-paying sons of bitches! Our higher taxes made us smarter AND healthier!!”
I recognize that not everyone can afford to pay that much more in taxes, but maybe those who can pay a little bit more, say with the tax refund they get back from the Feds, could offer to DO that, which would in turn, make it feasible for those with less of a tax refund to pay a little bit less in their taxes.
And if we maybe acknowledge the fact that PAYING taxes allows us ACCESS to public education and health care and if we maybe didn’t expect all those services for FREE – we the people wouldn’t have to rant so much on social media and stage walk outs and protest at Queen Park.
I’m Canadian. An Air Force brat, I split my formative years between the Maritimes and Prairies (PEI, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, back to Manitoba – with a brief anomaly in California in ’81 and ’82 – until I finished high school and then I found myself an Ontarian). I remember those winters in Nova Scotia and…
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