Details, details. Or how the Liberals finally figured out they need a calculator to explain their tax plan.
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/05/2015 (3235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
When Justin Trudeau unveiled his first major policy platform earlier this month, it probably didn’t get quite the bang the Liberals were hoping for.
The plan, dubbed Fairness for the Middle Class, creates the Canada Child Benefit, an income-based benefit for people with kids, a tax cut to the middle income tax bracket, and a new tax bracket for people who earn $200,000 or more.
In the process the Liberals will get rid of the Universal Child Care Benefit (it is being reshaped into the Canada Child Benefit), the increase to Tax Free Savings Account limits and family income splitting, which are the hallmarks of the Tory middle class vote-getting plan.
The general reaction has been less than stellar — the plan by the Liberals’ own admission is not entirely paid for yet. They are at least $2 billion short in having money to pay for it. (The Tories say that’s closer to $3 billion because they argue the Liberals goofed in their math, something the Liberals deny.) The Liberals say their plan will be fully costed but a political party that leaves out details such as how it will pay for something leaves their opponents free to try to fill in those details.
So it is the Tories who are happily going around saying Trudeau will eliminate pension income splitting for seniors even though Trudeau has said he won’t.
In 2003, Stuart Murray charged out of the gate in the Manitoba election, promising a PC provincial government would eliminate education property taxes on homeowners and farmland. It was bold and it was an attention-getter since it’s a tax many people hate. But it took nearly a week for him to unleash the details of how he would pay for it, and by then, his opponents had already filled the void of detail and convinced voters the only way Murray could pay for it was by cutting education spending.
Voters rejected it and Murray lost the election.
Trudeau is also struggling on the complexity of his plan. While there are many critics of the Universal Child Care Benefit, its brilliance politically is in its simplicity. It’s $160 a month for kids under six, $60 a month for kids aged six to 17. Sure, it’s not really that simple because it’s a taxable benefit so how much of that I keep, or you keep, and how much goes back to the taxman depends on your income. But it’s still far simpler than the Liberal Child Benefit, which starts at $533 a month per child, and goes down from there until it reaches nothing when a household income hits close to $200,000.
But figuring out exactly how much you might get is difficult. So difficult my colleague at the Ottawa Citizen, Glen McGregor, got a math professor to work out the formula.
But today the Liberals jumped in with a handy dandy calculator. As long as you know your household income you will get a ballpark figure on how much money you will get every month from the Canada Child Benefit.
It’s curious why the Liberals didn’t think of coming up with this calculator in time for the May 4 launch. One might have thought the Liberals would have learned how hard it is to sell a complex plan with the disastrous Green Shift in 2008. The plan to shift taxes from income to carbon was so complicated, it was easily criticized. Eventually the slogan “tax what you burn, not what you earn” came out but it was too late.
Better late than never is certainly in play here. The campaign doesn’t officially begin until September, and lots of people are barely paying attention to anything political before then. Of course many people won’t even pay attention then, but that’s an entirely different rant.
Will the Liberals learn from this and be fully prepared for the next big unveiling?