Freeland to Scrap Canada’s Capital Gains Hike If She’s Elected
Chrystia Freeland would drop the Canadian government’s policy of raising the capital gains inclusion rate if she wins the race to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister, according to a person with knowledge of her plan.
Do I smell austerity for the working class?
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I'm fine with a lower inclusion rate if we cap it at a fixed dollar threshold.
If you make $1M in a year from capital gains, just tax it 100% as income.
The real problem with this is executives getting paid primarily in stocks and paying a lower average tax rate than the middle class because 50% (currently 33%) is excluded.
Also, Freeland being the #2 in Trudeau's government, and all her policies being to undo the things they did looks bad to me. I can't shake that either she was ineffective or they were just bad ideas.
There's nobody good to vote for.
Singh it is, then.
I'm voting NDP, but after that shameful instance of childish name calling on Singh's part. Idk. I don't really have anything against him, from what I've seen and read he's not doing too bad a job in the leadership role. Would have been better if he'd been a bit more mature, and not stooped to the same shenanigans as little PP. It's a bad look. He had the chance to be the adult in the room, but flubbed it.
If anyone has any reliable sourced reporting re: Singh doing well or poorly, I'd be interested in seeing it. I would prefer to be an informed voter.
Well, it’s like this:
We’ve been flip-flopping back and forth on Conservatives and Liberals since forever. No one’s happy.
If it weren’t for the NDP agreement with the Liberals we wouldn’t be getting dental care, which comes in to effect for the rest of Canadians this year, and pharmacare which is supposed to come later.
These are real tangible benefits that every Canadian will be able to see and feel and that means more to me than a carbon tax.
You’re worried about Singh name-calling? The dude is getting our teeth fixed and he’s not even PM. Focus on the real things.
Totally fair. And this is exactly the type of thing I was asking for.
Hard to keep perspective sometimes.
While I do not want to vote for Singh, the leader, I would vote for the NDP candidate in my riding if the polls don't show them far behind.
For better or worse, in Canada we don’t vote for PM, it goes to the leader of the party.
Both the other parties are clearly in the pocket of corporations. The NDP held the Liberal’s feet to the fire and got us dental care.
That alone is reason enough to vote for them in my opinion.
No disagreement.
We’ll see. I’m interested in Carney, he’s saying the things I wanted to hear from the liberals for years.
Perhaps not good but less bad is what we look for.
Getting paid in stocks doesn't affect how much income you report though. Shares are taxed as income as soon as they vest, and options are considered income when you exercise them at the difference between fair market value and the strike price.
It is only additional capital gains after that point that are taxed at the reduced rate because it is the same starting point as if you bought the shares on the open market.
If you make $1M in a year from capital gains, just tax it 100% as income.
Capital gains don’t accrue until you actually sell your shares. If you try to tax people like this then they’ll just never sell the shares. Instead, they’ll use their shares as collateral for loans and lines of credit if they need cash.
Extremely high taxes lead to very low tax revenues since people do everything possible to avoid paying them. Conversely, lowering a tax rate can and does increase tax revenue as people start paying the tax instead of trying to get around it (often because the cost of getting around the tax makes it no longer worth it).
We tax the theoretical assessed value of houses, why not stocks?
How would that work? Stocks go up and down all the time. Sometimes people hold them for years, sometimes they trade them rapidly throughout the day.
Suppose we tax people on a percentage of the increases in their stocks when they go up. Are we going to give them a tax refund when the stocks go down? Or is it just going to be a ratchet that drains away all their money as the stock rapidly goes up and down throughout the day?
There’s a lot of different things you can do but at the end of the day the question is: will people still want to keep investing after you make the change? If the answer is no, then why not simply shut down the stock market altogether? Of course the answer to that is that everyone will start investing through a black market.
The really hard part about tax policy is that you can’t just look at the way things are now and then assume they’ll stay the same while you collect a tax off the top. In reality, people change their behaviour to avoid taxes as much as possible so taxes on specific things tend to have distortionary effects on the market.
If you want a very good example of a non-distortionary tax, look at land value taxes. The beautiful thing about them is that you can’t take your ball and go home. You can’t move the land with you to another country (not without an army anyway). You can’t even destroy the value of the land (for LVT purposes) by say, burning down the buildings, because LVT is based on the value of the land without any buildings or other improvements. All you can do is pay the tax or sell.
I've always thought a tax on taking a loan out using your stock as collateral is a good idea.
Borrow 1mil, tax it like half of capital gains. Repay the loan, get it back. Sell the assets to pay the loan off, pay the other half of the capital gains.
Or something like that.
Only do it for the wealthy on these bigger transactions. Maybe even starting at 10m, I dunno. They can afford the accountants to do it right at that point.
Edit: and only if the money is taken out of the investment account or used outside an investment account. So you can trade on margin, but not withdraw the loan to buy a house.
Start it at 10m? So if you only borrow 9m you pay no tax?
It'd probably has to be aggregate, so you don't just do 10 $1 million loans as well. A million seemed too low as that'd hit a lot of people and small businesses. Somewhere between 1 and 10.
Keep in mind there is interest on these loans that has to be paid eventually, which probably involves taxes, unless they're so wealthy they can just keep chaining it forever until they die which is what the billionaires do.
Edit: at least with something like this, we aren't taxing unrealized gains without them trying to access the gains.