Unpublished letter submitted to The Toronto Star

Re: The Goldilocks MAYOR, December 7, 2019.

Mayor John Tory’s realization that the conservative pipe dream of low taxes while the population grows, inflation eats away at our value and transit, affordable housing costs, infrastructure and social costs are beckoning constantly is only that. His tax proposal makes sense but it does not go far enough to create equity between the private sector and the tax-paying public with the corporate sector getting off Scot-free. It is an ongoing source of frustration for taxpayers that they are the  only target of tax increases and service cuts by eager government and municipal employees while corporations like BMO that recently made just over a billion dollars in their recent quarter and cut 300 jobs are allowed a free pass. The anger is not about paying taxes, it is the blatant inequity between the private sector taxation rate and the tax-paying public’s. The former are responsible for collecting huge profits while leaving the social costs for the public to deal with.

This revelation by Mayor Tory should be accompanied by a similar one on the need to re-inflate corporate taxes. Corporate tax cuts are a dismal failure. The real wealth is in the private sector and Tory should tax it. There should be a 10% Social Safety Surtax placed on all corporations annually for the building of infrastructure, affordable housing, transit, healthcare and policing all of which they benefit from greatly. For most large corporations this is a pittance compared to their after-tax profits per year. We should all remember that corporations depend on all these public services to get their employees to and from their jobs safely and easily and they should be expected to share the cost with the tax-paying public whom they serve.

The public is sick and tired of hearing that the wolves are at the door for corporations and the wealthy when the banks alone all make billions each year in after-tax profits while paying negligible property taxes on their glass and steel towers. Faceless shareholders hidden in obscurity do not build social wealth or social welfare. Big corporations create their minimum wage McJobs and nothing more. Taxation is the only way to balance the scale.

In this dystopian one-way universe we of capitalist democracy everything is wonderful but in a terms of a real democracy there is little evidence that this is actually true. Governments have become the handmaidens of the private sector not the servants of the people. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.