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Canada’s Richest 1% Nearly As Wealthy As Poorest 80% (www.readthemaple.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮

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[–] 1 point 5 months ago* (1 child)

The problem is the velocity of money; by raising taxes on the wealthy and giving it to the poor they increase inflation and thereby interest rates; which interferes with the housing bubble, which they say is boomers nest eggs, and is thereby important to maintain and grow.

Its a problem with a bubble economy built on cheap debt and ever lower interest rates, you lose the ability to direct your own money supply. Look at owner-occupied housing's contribution to annual GDP growth, this bubble was fueling most of our economic growth.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Let's tax wealth to fund quality universal basic services first. Healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, social security, elder care. Social non-market housing, public utilities for electricity, water, telecommunications/Internet. None of these are increasing inflation, because they are not part of the market.

    The idea of "nest egg" is only important as a privatised form of elder care. I couldn't care less about the value of my house if I had a publicly guaranteed quality of life as a pensioner. I wouldn't even care to own a house if I had strong renter protections in non-market housing (basically if renting was not equivalent to someone holding power over my life decisions).

    And of course, of course, the capture of capital in unproductive real estate is beyond stupid. Instead of feeding a real estate bubble, it should be ingested in productive sectors of the economy, like building up renewables and the green transition.

    A social democracy is just common sense.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (1 child)

    A problem is investment is already very low in Canada, Carolyn Rogers already rang the alarm bells on productivity investment. So in some ways its not solved by high taxes, because productivity is what is causing the lack of growth according to the BoC.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    My understanding (and I'm no economist) is that (a) some of the productivity metrics are weird, because they compare with the US which counts their idiotic for-profit healthcare sector in productivity, (b) part of the low investment is caused exactly because our capital is tied in real estate, and (c ) low investment is also a result of our god-damned oligopolies in so many key sectors of the economy. High taxes is not the only tool of course. What we need is a very aggressive policy against the wealthy. That can take the form of taxes, of improving social mobility via the welfare state, and of breaking up their cartels, i.e., their stranglehold on the economy.

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