It really is disgusting. As inflation is eating away at your paycheque, the boss of your company could be going home with more than 200 times the salary of the average employee. And those chief executive salaries kept ballooning last year. And nobody is doing anything about it.
And try to live on a fixed income in a time of hyper-inflation. You know that the new pricing at the grocery story is not just because of higher cost of operating. And it does not seem to be in aid of paying their store employees a bit more. The greed today is at the upper echelons of business. The 100 highest paid CEO’s in Canadian business were each paid more than $14 million.
And the politicians are not going to do anything about it. Not surprisingly, these politicians have little or no experience in business. Prime minister Justin Trudeau told an interviewer—just before heading off for a Caribbean vacation with the family—that a wealth tax would not be worthwhile. As I recall Mr. Trudeau’s curriculum vitae, he went from university to teaching and then to politics. He has never worked in business and where he gets this sudden expertise in economics, is a mystery to me.
But, to be fair, neither does Mr. Poilievre. He attacks the Bank of Canada governor for the wrong reasons and promotes Bitcoin to his uneducated followers. And as for Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, he is a lawyer and he might call for a wealth tax, but you shouldn’t ask him to explain it.
What I would like to see is a graduated profit tax for business. We want the low end for small business, which it gets anyway, but a graduated tax for large businesses could deal nicely with unconscionable profits such as our large grocery chains claimed in the past year. What you really want is high rate of tax for profits in excess of the usual. For example, when Loblaws has a miraculous 40 per cent rise in profit as it did recently, they could afford to contribute 50 per cent of that windfall to taxes.
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