New tax proposals a cat-and-mouse game to win votes
November 13, 2014
Silly government decisions often make life more cumbersome for Canadians. Complicated tax incentives designed to win political votes are a misuse of time, energy and money.
The most recent case is the federal government’s proposal to give back some of the taxpayers’ money in a complicated and expensive to manage way that many Canadians will not fully understand.
The only winners are the accountants who will be paid professional fees to explain the next layer of rules in an already too complicated tax code. Shame on our politicians.
There are several new tax proposals that if passed, will be introduced for the 2014 tax year.
The Family Tax Cut will allow families with children under 18 to reduce income taxes up by to $2,000.
The Child Care Expense Deduction is an increase to existing benefits. It allows child care expenses to be deducted from income earned through employment and business, pursuing an education or performing research. The new proposal is increasing the deduction by $1,000 starting in 2015.
If you are among the few that like more complication completing your income tax, there is more.
The Universal Child Care Benefit is being expanded. It will provide those with children under age 6 a payment of up to $1,920 and a new benefit up to $720 per child age 6 to 17.
These enhancements replace the Child Tax Credit up to $335 for children under 18.
The Children’s Fitness Tax Credits double to $1,000. It is also now refundable so those not required to pay income tax because of low or no income will benefit from this credit.
These targeted groups are all meant to feel special hoping they will vote for the conservative party currently in power. We expect a federal election next year.
The federal government is not alone when using complicated measures to get votes. Ontario does this as well. Our province introduced the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan. We already have a federal Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security.
We do not need another pension plan. If Ontario wants to give us more, it should work with the federal government to make this happen within an existing program.
The word of the day is STOP. Stop trying to please every different group, retired persons or young families, with inefficient complicated and expensive ad hoc solutions.
We are strongly in favour of Canadians being well served by their governments. They should not however, tax us so they may turn around and give those dollars back to everyone through strategically allocated tax incentives.
Buying our vote is a sham and hopefully Canadians will not be fooled by this tactic. Buying our vote with splintered inefficient separate programs for every one of us is just plain silly.
Governments should just lower our taxes and stop playing this political cat and mouse game of sprinkling our money in front of us to court us at the polls.
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