Oh the left are screaming! Left wing pages are pouring out the lies and misinformation to discredit what is a pretty sound tax policy. Andrew Coyne, who at most times is quite critical of Harper, gives him his due here. But, before we get to the common sense highlights of this article, one of the main arguments against income splitting is that it leaves single parents on the sidelines. This is simply not true. In fact single parents who are the main caregiver of a single child or share custody of multiple children, already get a big tax break. A single parent making $40,000/year can claim one of their children as both a dependent and the equivalent to spouse amount, giving them nearly a $3000 tax break. income-splitting is of no benefit to households in which both spouses are in the top bracket — which is in fact more and more the norm among the very rich. Moreover, the Tories, in order to make the program more palatable, have sharply limited its scope: not only is there a ceiling of $50,000 on the amount that can be “split,” as in the original plan, but the resulting tax savings have been capped at $2,000. The NDP’s(daycare plan) would introduce an unfair preference into the system, as it would benefit only those parents who put their children into the NDP’s preferred type of care: licensed, regulated day care centres. The Tory plan, to the contrary, removes an unfair preference: between two-income and one-income families. Income-splitting isnt some sort of special tax break for one-income families. It merely put them on the same footing as two-income families. Under the present system, a family with one spouse earning, say, $80,000 pays thousands of dollars more in tax — $4,170 more, according to economist Jack Mintz — than a family with two spouses earning $40,000 each.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 11:56:38 +0000
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