At the risk of boring you.........

.....the noisy mess surrounding the raising of the US debt ceiling has highlighted a big problem down there. Americans just don't get the whole distribution of wealth thing. You know I am going to start back in on taxes, but that's the way it has to be. Otherwise you have big, expensive jails filled with people who instead should be on welfare because it's cheaper in the long run. You have people incarcerated who should really be raising their own kids -- all because the rich don't want to re-distribute their fantastic wealth. So you have kids growing up to be criminals because their parents have been in jail, leaving them to be raised at great peril on the streets........and on and on it generationally and dangerously continues.

Simplistic? Maybe. But the re-distribution of wealth -- yes taxes -- is the only way any society can function efficiently. The problem is that Americans don't trust government -- unless it is delivered in the form of sheriffs, guns, law enforcement and jails. These trappings and apparatuses they support and pay for, but trusting government to look after the poor? No siree! They want criminals locked away -- unless, of course, the criminals work in investment banks and the like. It's OK if I rob you, but not if a street criminal commits the offence.


The irony is that philanthropy is huge in the US, but it's private. Rich Americans decide themselves who to give money to. Why? To avoid taxes, plain and simple. Full circle here. The tea-party republicans and their ilk don't want government to decide how wealth gets re-distributed. No, they want to personally decide their countrymen's fate on a dollar-by-dollar basis. Who prospers and who doesn't is up to the rich. Trust me, Brad Pitt is not building houses in New Orleans because he wants to help his beleagured fellow American. Brad Pitt is building houses in New Orleans because he wants to look good and avoid taxes. The people he is helping at the suggestion of his accountants are a serendipitous side-bar. And that goes for Roger Federer, who lives in Dubai, and every other rich movie star, rock star and athlete who does the same. They don't get that the free society which allows them to make all that money -- the society that builds and maintains the roads they drive on, the water they drink and the toilets they flush -- is financed by taxes.

I can't count how many talking heads I watched on tv over the last few days who were adamant that taxes were the cause of the problem, not the solution. They forget that the Great Depression was overcome by huge government programs, in other words: taxes! I don't know where these bobble heads think the money is going to come from? Rich businessmen getting richer and not paying taxes will not do the trick. Britain realized this was the way to go. Prime Minister David Cameron has now raised goods and services taxes to 20% to get the country's fiscal house in some kind of order.

Happily, we don't operate that way in Canada. I am beginning to grasp "economics" and how it relates to our everyday lives. The underground economy is no friend to any country. As B says, participating in the underground economy is like saying, "I don't support Canada." The economy isn't "out there", with us "in here". The economy is us, taxes are us and together we all work for Canada.

This may be my last tax rant, but don't count on it.