CANADIAN POLITICS BRITISH COLUMBIA:

DEMAND FREE VOTE OVER HST:

Last week the British Columbia Supreme Court declared that the anti-HST petition initiative was legal and therefore binding. CUPE BC is demanding that the BC legislature be recalled and a free vote held on this outrageous tax grab. Here's the story from their website.

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Recall BC Legislature now, put HST before MLAs for free vote says CUPE BC
Aug 20, 2010 03:06 PM

Burnaby, BC —Today’s ruling by BC Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman that the anti-HST initiative petition and accompanying legislation are legal clears the way for Premier Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberal government to respect the wishes of British Columbians and recall the Legislature for a free vote on the HST, says CUPE BC President Barry O’Neill.

“This campaign was able to do what almost no one thought possible and the chief justice recognized the magnitude of that accomplishment in his ruling,” said O’Neill. “Premier Campbell now needs to do the right thing - respect the clear will of British Columbians and allow MLAs from all parties to actually vote on whether the HST is the right thing to do. And if the Liberals have the courage of their convictions, then they should make it a free vote so that British Columbians can see which elected officials truly have their interests at heart."

“In the meantime, if Mr. Campbell won’t respect the democratic will of the people, the interim Chief Electoral Officer no longer has any legal impediment to forward the initiative to the legislative committee. He should do so immediately, and the committee should meet at the earliest possible opportunity to take the next steps: either putting the legislation before MLAs for debate or a province-wide referendum,” said O’Neill.

O’Neill encouraged CUPE BC members and other opponents of the HST to write to their BC Liberal MLA to demand the government recall the legislature to debate the HST.


For more information, contact:

Barry O’Neill
CUPE BC president
cell: (604) 340-6768

Clay Suddaby
CUPE Communications
Cell: (604) 313-1138

HUMOUR:

THE WRATH OF GOVERNMENT BEATS THE WRATH OF GOD:

CANADIAN POLITICS BRITISH COLUMBIA:

BC FEDERATION OF LABOUR AGAINST THE HST:

The campaign to put the proposed 'Harmonized Sales tax' to a referendum in British Columbia continues to gather steam, and people from both the right and left are lining up to oppose this tax grab. Here's a press release from the BC Federation of Labour about their view of the tax.

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Commentary: BC Fed Opposes Unfair Taxes

BY: JIM SINCLAIR
PRESIDENT, B.C. FEDERATION OF LABOUR

Published in The Province newspaper May 14.

The labour movement is not against taxes.

We understand that taxes fund important public services and programs.

But the labour movement is against taxes that are dishonest and regressive. The HST is both. And, we simply cannot accept a tax that takes $2 billion from the pockets of British Columbians, many of whom are having trouble making ends meet, and gives it to corporations, many of which are already profitable.

This is the wrong tax at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

It might be acceptable if the money generated by the HST went into healthcare, education and building a sustainable economy. But it won't. The HST will generate another tax holiday for corporations and vague promises that the rest of us will benefit one day.

The BC Liberals have fed us this line before.

They slashed income taxes by about $2 billion a year, disproportionately to the wealthy, and told us it would make us a stronger province.

The Liberals have already slashed corporate taxes by about $1.5 billion a year. They told us this would boost competitiveness, productivity and job growth.

Having cut $3.5 billion in annual provincial revenues who feels any richer?

A real estate and construction boom in some parts of the province may have created an illusion of prosperity for a while, but the BC economy is chronically underperforming most other provinces.

No matter how you measure it, the Liberal's tax slashing has failed to deliver the promised results. Employment growth has been lower than the 1990's. Investment in machinery and equipment in BC has barely increased. Even before the recession began in 2008, the forest industry had lost almost 24,000 good jobs. BC's per capita GDP is lower than it should be, our productivity is behind Alberta and Ontario, and our wages are below the Canadian average.

Tax cuts haven't worked. Instead, they have left a legacy of chronic cuts, closed schools, underfunded healthcare facilities, angry seniors, children without proper support, declining wages and growing unemployment.

The Liberals never tire of telling us that people don't like paying taxes. But that's only a half truth. People understand value for money, and most people don't mind paying fair taxes to build a strong province.

What people really don't like is being lied to and taken for fools.

Hundreds of thousands of British Columbians are voicing their anger and opposition to the HST. The Liberals should listen. They should cancel the HST and muster the courage to begin talking to British Columbians about honest and fair taxation that makes us all stronger.

CANADIAN POLITICS- BRITISH COLUMBIA:

ANTI-HST CAMPAIGN IN BC:

Who would ever have thought that the Moll and the Zalm could agree on anything ? It's true. Ex-Premier Bill Vander Zalm of BC has launched a campaign to repeal that province's Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), and I have to say that I'm in full agreement, though undoubtedly for different reasons than Bill may have. Here's the story from the Straight Goods website. See the end of this article for my own opinions as to why I support such a campaign.

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"Fight HST" campaign launches

Group has 90 days to collect signatures for repeal.

by Bill Tieleman

Former BC Premier Bill Vander Zalm will launch the Fight HST citizens Initiative petition campaign to stop the Harmonized Sales Tax in BC Premier Gordon Campbell's own riding of Vancouver-Point Grey on Tuesday April 6.

The public rally April 6 marks the beginning of the 90 days that "Fight HST" has to collect the signatures of 10 percent of registered BC voters in each of the province's 85 constituencies for the Initiative petition to be accepted by Elections BC, says Fight HST Lead Organizer Chris Delaney.

"The HST takes money out of people's pockets but doesn't put a dime into healthcare, education or important services," said Vander Zalm



Vander Zalm says it was important to launch the campaign right in Premier Gordon Campbell's own riding, to send a clear message to the BC Liberal government.

"British Columbians don't want Premier Campbell's HST — not even in his own riding," said Vander Zalm. "If Premier Campbell and the BC Liberal MLAs don't listen to the people and drop the HST, he and his party are finished."

Vander Zalm says he is confident British Columbians will make the Initiative a smashing success after drawing huge crowds as he toured across the province over the past two weeks.

"British Columbians are fed up with the HST and fed up with the undemocratic way Premier Campbell and Finance Minister Colin Hansen are imposing a tax after promising they wouldn't do it," said Vander Zalm. "This citizens Initiative petition is the people's chance to tell Premier Gordon Campbell they want him to drop the HST — and demand that he drop it."

"The HST is the most hated tax ever because it is a cruel tax that takes money out of people's pockets but doesn't put a dime into healthcare, education or important services," said Vander Zalm.

In addition to Vander Zalm, speakers at the rally will include Delaney and "Fight HST" Strategist Bill Tieleman, founder of the NO BC HST Facebook protest group, which has more than 131,000 members.


Bill Tieleman, president of West Star Communications, is one of BC's best known political commentators and communicators. Read political commentary from Bill every Tuesday in 24 hours, Vancouver's free weekday newspaper (also online). Listen to Bill on Mondays at 10am on CKNW AM 980's Bill Good Show, in Vancouver, BC. Bill's email address is below.

Email: weststar@telus.net . Website: http://billtieleman.blogspot.com/ .

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Here's a report from the CBC on what happened at last night's rally.

BCBCBCBCBCBCBCBC
Vander Zalm's anti-HST rally draws hundreds in Vancouver
Several hundred concerned taxpayers turned out to hear former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm launch his anti-HST petition Tuesday night in Vancouver.

Vander Zalm's supporters filled the auditorium of Kitsilano Secondary School to hear him criticize Premier Gordon Campbell's surprise introduction of the harmonized sales tax just weeks after the provincial election last May.

The 12 per cent tax goes into effect July 1, replacing the seven per cent PST and five per cent GST.

"If you want to make something bad look good, you have to lie, and you have to lie over and over, and that's what's been happening," Vander Zalm told the crowd.

But not everyone who turned out Tuesday night agreed the tax would be bad for taxpayers. One man said his mother's benefits would actually increase under the HST.

But Vander Zalm challenged him, saying vulnerable people will still be hurt by the new tax.

The former premier also criticized the timing of the introduction of a harmonized tax that will apply to many good and services that were previously exempt from the PST, such as restaurant food, hair cuts and sports club memberships.

"We're in a recession folks," he said. "We were hoping to come out of it. We were hoping to come out of it soon, but these people in Victoria are only digging us deeper down.

"We're going to suffer. Industry and our businesses and all of us will suffer with it. It's a bad tax at a bad time for the wrong reasons."

Recent university graduate Katherine Chan agreed with that sentiment.

"I'm planning to get married, you know, buy a house, build a family, and, seriously, I can't even feed myself now. How am I going to, like, you know, support my own kids?" she said.

Thousands of volunteers collecting signatures
Vander Zalm is aiming to get rid of the tax by forcing the province to hold an initiative vote on the issue, but first, he needs to collect thousands of signatures on a petition supporting his draft bill.

So far, the veteran campaigner has signed up nearly 2,000 volunteers from ridings across B.C. to help him collect the estimated 300,000 voter signatures required to trigger an initiative vote, which is similar to a referendum.

Speaking before the rally, he said told CBC News he has seen a lot of hectic days in his 25-plus years in politics, "but I've never ever experienced anything like this."

"I have faxes coming in and going out till my fax machine is heating up. My telephone has never stopped ringing. And the e-mails? I hate to look at the computer," he said.

About 300 people signed the petition at the rally on Tuesday night, but volunteers have already begun collecting signatures across B.C.

Those organizing the petition have 90 days to collect signatures from 10 per cent of registered voters in every riding. Then Elections BC has to verify the signatures.

Once that is done, a legislative committee would then decide whether it will send a draft bill directly to the legislature for a vote or put the issue to a province-wide vote first.

But the provincial government has already said the HST is a federal tax, and an initiative vote wouldn't affect it.


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/07/bc-anti-hst-rally-vander-zalm-vancouver.html?ref=rss#ixzz0kTxDjz2e

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WHY MOLLY LIKES THIS IDEA:

Here are a few reasons why I think the anti-HST campaign is a good idea. Some of these reasons, I'm sure, are shared by the traditional leftists over at Straight Goods. Others are unique to a libertarian socialist perspective.

1) Value added taxes (sales taxes) are regressive. They impact people at the lower end of income distribution more than they affect those with higher incomes. If we have to have taxes they should be progressive, affecting those with higher income more or at least equally distributed. Not only is a greater percentage of upper class income devoted to savings and investment, and therefore exempt from a consumption tax, but a higher percentage of their consumption is also exempt from same. Think tax shelters, consumption in foreign countries, "benefits" as opposed to salary/wages etc..

2) Value added taxes are invariably favoured by corporations and opposed by small business. This is especially the case with the Harmonized Sales Tax where it has been introduced in various Canadian provinces. This is because such taxes favours the large, just as it does with individuals, and reduces the income of small business. Think of the hairdresser who now has to charge 12% on their labour. Small business has no legal way of escaping this sudden increase in their prices and extra accounting costs- and resulting lower sales- while corporations, especially those producing for export have a multitude of such escape hatches, let alone the ability to simply pass on extra accounting costs to the customer.

3) In connection with this the introduction of the HST in various provinces has actually been a sly way of introducing extra categories of taxable items, most particularly making labour provincially taxable. This increases the general tax burden for the consumer, especially those in lower income brackets. Put truthfully this legislation that taxes things previously exempt from at least provincial tax (the major effect of harmonization) reduces personal consumption and adversely affects the major generator of new employment in most developed societies - small business. Such taxes thus have a depressing effect on the economy that is greater than that of another initiative such as simply increasing income tax.

4) While I don't think that the introduction of a referendum process in Canadian politics is a major democratic reform it is at least a minor step to making our society more democratic. Real democracy would involve a much more radical decentralization (and "de-statization"). BC actually has a referendum process in legislation, but any attempt to put it into practice has been stillborn in every case. This protest has the potential to actually make the process a reality rather than empty rhetoric. That would be nice to see. From the final sentence of the last article above the government of BC is already thinking of ways to weasel out of this law. What they say is, of course, an outrageous lie. The decision to sign up for the HST is very much a provincial matter.

5) Far too much of our politics has been "spectacularized" into image versus substance. This particular campaign is all about substance. It is also heartening that it seems to be gathering support from both the right and the left. One of the worst aspects of "politics as spectacle" is the creation of both a right and a left that rarely articulate policy but do spend their time in petty sniping and in creating fantastical images of each other. Campaigns such as this move beyond this artificial divide.

6) As a libertarian socialist, as opposed to the statist form of socialism that is the image of socialism in most people's minds, I know that socialism cannot be created through government but only by gradually reducing the role of government and increasing the role of cooperative and local institutions. Sooner or later this has to involve the shrinking of the fiscal resources available to government. The big question is in what order you pare away the functions of the state, not whether you prune them or not. There will be no miraculous revolution that suddenly turns government organizations into cooperative ones controlled by the people affected. It will be a long and slow slog. It might as well start with resistance to increases in the fiscal power of government. that's what this campaign is.

CANADIAN POLITICS:

AVOIDING A RECESSION-THE CEO WAY:

If you think you've had it bad the last year-you're probably right, but not if you are a member of Canada's management elite. According to a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives this country's top ten CEOs had an average income of $7,352,895 in 2008, shortly before the recession began to "bite hard". This was 174 times the average Canadian wage. To put this in further perspective, from 1998 to 2008 the average Canadian wage packet dropped 6% when adjusted for inflation. During the same period the average compensation for top CEOs increased !!! by 70% !!!!. The Globe and Mail weighed in today with an editorial on this report. Not denying the facts of the study, as per usual, because they are pretty rock solid. What the Globe opined is that nobody should pay attention to the difference between the average wage and that of top CEOs, nor to the difference in increase versus decrease. According to the Globe the only matter of concern is that the average wage is declining, and it is all fine and good that corporate executives increase their income.

Well finagled I must say. A few little problems are, however, contained in this little excuse. one is that there just might be a connection between the two arms of this lever. It is entirely possible that corporate executive plunder is inversely correlated with employee compensation, and not just because this sort of thing is a zero sum game where money given to one class is unavailable to another. It is also more than likely that one of the things that corporate executives are rewarded for is their ability to "reduce labour costs and increase productivity". In plain language this means quite deliberately reducing the income of their employees. Quite deliberately. It is also a certain fact that this excessive executive compensation is in another zero sum game where the upper levels of management (and lower ones too to a lesser degree) bleed corporate entities at the expense of the stockholders. In a managerial society such as ours the term "stockholders" means, more often than not pension and other mutual funds held in dispersed ownership by the same employees whose wages are being reduced.

Then there is, of course, simple justice. Nobody in his right mind would try and claim that corporate executives work 174 times as long as the average Canadian does. Neither can one claim that their jobs are 174 times as disagreeable as the average job. Then we come to value. No doubt the value produced by a corporate executive may sometimes be high. Can it be, however, 174 times as valuable as that of the work of people such as nurses, firefighters, ambulance drivers, farmers, miners and to put it bluntly pretty well everyone else ? Think about it for awhile.



The following article from the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) gives a general summary of the report in question.
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Canadian corporate CEOs average $7,352,895 each:
New CCPA study says top 100 Canadian CEOs pocketed 174 times each what average Canadian workers earn all year.





Ottawa (5 Jan. 2010) - Canada's highest-paid CEOs raked in an average of $7,352,895 in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available. That's 174 times more than the average wage of the typical Canadian worker.





"To put that in perspective, Canadians will work full-time throughout the year to earn the national average of $42,305," says Hugh Mackenzie of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), which has just released a new report on the subject.





Yet as of 1:01 p.m. on their first working day of this year (Jan. 4) the top 100 CEOs in the country had already pocketed as much as the average Canadian worker will in all of 2010.
The CCPA study says average compensation for the top CEOs has outpaced inflation by 70% between 1998 and 2008. During the same period, Canadians earning the average income lost 6% to inflation.
Here are the top 10 hogs at the corporate trough:
Thomas Glocer, Thomson Reuters Corp. - $36,595,233.
Ted Rogers, Rogers Communications Inc. - $21,484,708.
J. M. Lipton, Nova Chemicals Corp. - $19,753,245.
George Cope, BCE Inc. - $19,551,345.
Robert Brown, CAE Inc. FY end March 08 - $17,293,144.
William Doyle, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan - $17,026,317.
Hunter Harrison, Canadian National Railway Co. - $13,350,048.
Dominic D’Alessandro, Manulife Financial Corp. - $13,251,274.
Stephen Wetmore, Bell Aliant Regional Com. Income Fund - $11,563,250.
For the entire 100 names please go to the link below and read as much as you can stand. Caution: Not for those with weak stomachs.
NUPGE
The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada's largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE
More information:Full Report: A Soft Landing - Recession and Canada's 100 Highest Paid CEOs
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A MOLLY PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:
I've tried the link to the publication by the CCPA in the report above, and it doesn't seem to work. Here is A LINK that does work, at least for Molly. The report is actually a great report, and it deserves far more publicity than it has been given in the mainstream press. As to the "why" of the astronomical executive compensation, much of the standard justification has been dealt with in my introduction to this post. The real "why" is a totally different matter.




Where I have to part company with the CCPA is not in what they have reported. It's obviously true. Neither, unlike the Globe and Mail, do I disagree with them that this sort of inequality is a "bad thing" and totally unjustified. I do, however, have to disagree about the realism of the remedy that they, as good left wing social democrats, have proposed. The simplistic way of summed up their solution (see the report) is "tax the bastards heavily". I wish them well in this enterprise, though it makes me a bit queasy knowing that social democrats rarely find a tax that they cannot love. The CCPA is under the impression that they can find a realistic way to tax such things as "stock options" (whereby management steals from the shareholders- as I said above usually ordinary citizens with dispersed portfolios). Maybe yes. Maybe no. What they will be unable to do , however, is find some magical formula in the byzantine tax regulations that will prevent upper management from switching their compensation to non-taxable benefits. That's the way that tax law has operated in the past, and that probably the way that it will operate in the future despite the best laid schemes of social democrats.




For what it is worth Molly has her own proposals that can be summed up in the brief bon mot of "abolish management". No doubt there will be tax law changes in such a process-mostly involving exceptions for ordinary people rather than attempts to penalize the ruling class. The main steps, however, depend more upon the easing of the legal burden of the state that prevents actual democratization of the workplace. It does not depend upon the failed illusion (demonstrated by the failure of over a century of attempts to build a more egalitarian society by taxation policy that the ruling class evades) of government largess rather than citizen action. That's why I am an anarchist, what I consider a "realistic socialist" and not a left social democrat.




Just in closing, here is the press release of the CCPA about their report, something that will probably never be quoted in anything but brief excerpts in the mainstream press.
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Soft landing for Canada’s CEOs:
January 4, 2010
TORONTO—Canadians may have been hit hard by a worldwide economic recession, but it appears Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs are enjoying a soft landing.





A report on executive compensation by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a progressive think tank, reveals Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs pocketed an average $7.3 million in 2008, the year recession broadsided the nation.





“Canada’s top 100 CEOs earned 174 times more than the average Canadian wage,” says economist Hugh Mackenzie, CCPA Research Associate.





“To put that in perspective, Canadians will work full-time throughout the year to earn the national average of $42,305. The top 100 CEOs pocket that amount by 1:01 p.m. on January 4 – the first working day of the year.”





Soft Landing: Recession and Canada’s 100 Highest Paid CEOs shows executive compensation remains as resilient to worldwide economic forces as ever.





“Between 1998 and 2008, Canada’s top 100 CEOs’ average compensation outpaced inflation by 70 per cent,” says Mackenzie. “In contrast, Canadians earning the average income lost six per cent to inflation over that period.”
–30–
Soft Landing: Recession and Canada’s 100 Highest Paid CEOs is available at www.policyalternatives.ca
For more information please contact: Kerri-Anne Finn, CCPA Senior Communications Officer, at 613-563-1341 x306.
Related Reports & Studies
A Soft Landing
Recession and Canada’s 100 Highest Paid CEOs
Canadians may have been hit hard by a worldwide economic recession, but it appears Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs are enjoying a soft landing. The total average compensation for Canada's 100 highest paid CEOs was $7,352,895 in 2008—a stark contrast from the total average Canadian income of $42,305. They pocketed what takes Canadians earning an average income an entire year to make by 1:01 pm January 4—the first working day of the year. During the worst of economic years, the...January 4, 2010 National Office
Read the full Report

CANADIAN POLITICS:

TAX FREEDOM DAY:

According to the Fraser Institute, a right wing Canadian public policy think tank, "Tax Freedom Day" fell on today, June 14, this year. The concept of "tax freedom day" originated in 1948 with Florida businessman Dallas Hostetler. Since then the idea of such a measure has spread worldwide. Within federal systems such as Canada and the USA this presumed day falls on different calendar dates in different provinces and states. The concept of such a measure may seem straightforward. Calculate total "income". Calculate the total payments in taxes. Subtract b from a . The result would be the proportion of national income that is not paid out in taxes. Divide a by b sand multiply by 365, and you would theoretically get the day of the year where "you begin to work for yourself rather than for government". The problem is that it is nowhere near so simple. In Canada the Fraser Institute calculates this day annually. The American equivalent is the Tax Foundation.

The calculation of both taxes and income, however, is subject to more than a few subjective choices. The problems with the Fraser Institute's method of calculation have been extensively discussed at 'Tax Freedom Day: A Flawed, Incoherent, and Pernicious Concept" by Neil Brooks. The previous link is a pdf file available at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. The Fraser calculations both understate income and overstate taxes. Even calculations by different groups such as the Fraser Institute and the Tax Foundation have widely different methods, and applying the American method to the Canadian data would show TFD as falling far earlier in the year.

The estimate of income is underrated because of a number of assumptions that the Fraser Institute makes. They first of all only include "cash income" in their calculations. This ignores such things as pension and health/dental insurance contributions made by employers and investment income accumulating in pension funds and life insurance policies. The amount of taxes paid is also overstated by including such items as the employers share of payroll taxes as "family income". The Fraser Institute itself provides different methods of estimating income, but they insist on avoiding "total income" in making their estimates of TFD. The way that the Fraser Institute uses the "average" family income and taxes rather than the "median" also tends to inflate the amount of taxes that are presumably paid by lower income groups. Anyone interested in the full story of the Fraser Institute's calculations is urged to consult the reference above.

All that is well and good, and Molly has little doubt that both sides of this debate have an interest in exaggeration. The Fraser Institute is influenced by people with higher incomes, ones who do indeed pay higher taxes, and they attempt to garner political allies by making it seem as if lower income groups have the same magnitude of a problem as their natural constituency does. Leftist think tanks, on the other hand, are not straightforward spokespeople for the poor either. Their natural constituency is the salaried government employee engaged in "helping" ie "managing" the poor and other disadvantaged groups. The class position and income of such people depends in a very obvious way on continued high levels of taxation, and such groups naturally minimize the effect that taxes have on poor and middle income groups, once more to appeal to potential political allies. They even have their own version of the right wing's "trickle down economics" in that they believe that money spent on the social control bureaucracies automatically helps the situation of the so-called "clients". If I were to sum up I would say that this sort of debate has all the hallmarks of being nothing but a squabble amongst different factions of the ruling class over the division of the spoils.

So where to go from here ? Molly is a "libertarian socialist". She believes in socialized enterprise which is democratically controlled by its workers, the community it is in or its customers- or a mixture of all three. By this definition the so-called "socialism" of both Marxism and social democracy where property and enterprise is controlled by the state is not socialism at all. State enterprise and property are the property of that part of the ruling class embedded in state bureaucracies, and their class rule is not the democratic alternative envisioned by socialists who are not apologists for class rule. It would be useful to recognize the obvious, something that the leftists are usually reluctant to do, that the burden of taxes- no matter the quibble over the exact amount- represent a withdrawal of income initiated by a faction of our ruling class. Left with its original owners this income would be available for many other purposes-including the building of socialist institutions. With the right wingers Molly is in agreement that taxes should indeed be reduced. The significant caveat is that they should be reduced in a careful way that promotes the development of cooperative solutions to the many problems that the state presently pretends to address. On this point Molly is in agreement with the leftists who recognize another obvious fact- that a large majority of the population benefits to at least some degree from many of the government programs presently financed by taxation and that some people are utterly dependent on them. Where Molly parts company with the leftists is in refusing to believe that such programs are an unalloyed good and that there are not other and better solutions to the same problems. Molly sees the task of an anarchist movement in a industrial country as very much nothing more than thinking about how such institutions could be developed and then trying to carry such plans into practice. In the end there would be working models that could simply be expanded and generalized to replace the "social welfare" functions of the state. Taxes could be reduced as such institutions grew.

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY:

SOME RANDOM DEDUCTIBLE ITEMS:

*Capital Punishment: Ottawa comes up with a new tax.

*Canadians are now in a daze from intaxication.

*Children may be deductible, but they're still taxing.

*There is no child so bad that he/she can't be used as an income tax deduction.

*Parliament does some strang thing. It puts a high tax on liquer and then raises the other taxes that drive people to drink.

*One of the great blessings of living in a democracy is that we have complete control over how we pay our taxes...cash cheque or money order.

*A fool and his money are soon parted. The rest of us have to wait until income tax time.

*Our government really takes care of us. They give us free income tax forms.

*Everybody works for the government, either on the payroll or the tax roll.

*Nothing makes a person so modest about his income as filling out a tax form.

*The income tax forms have been simplified beyond all understanding.