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The @FraserInstitute has SO MUCH money (including from the Koch brothers) and so many staff: why do they so often produce reports that distort the truth so grossly?
Case in point: their report today on spending on taxes and growth in taxes vs necessities of life fraserinstitute.org/studies/taxes-…
They include in the family tax bill pretty much all taxes, including corporate profit taxes, other taxes paid by corpus, natural resources royalties, etc--but then don't include retained profits in the denominator.
More importantly, they take their calculations of growth from 1961 and ignore everything those taxes pay for and all the important social programs introduced since then.
While some may be nostalgic about the past, 1961 was before we had national medicare/health care (1966/1984), before CPP (1965), before UI (1971) and before much else.
The bulk of our taxes go to pay for these public services and social programs, which were skeletons of their future selves in 1961.
For instance, total full-time enrolment in post secondary education was less than 130,000 in 1961, less than 1% of the population; now it's 1.6 million, close to 5% of the population.
The biggest area of government spending in Canada is of course health care. Overall Canadians spend about half of what Americans spend per capita on health care, yet our life expectancy is 3 years longer.
In so many areas, the costs of public services are lower, better quality, and far more equitable than the private alternatives -- including for national public pharmacare. This is what our taxes pay for.
The @FraserInstitute and their backers may want us to go back to the 1950s, before taxes increased and before we had our most treasured social programs, but I really don't think most Canadians are with them on that.
