2020- 2022 Policy Process | Green Party of Canada
Where GPC membership collaborates to develop our policies
G21-P057 Income, Wealth and Estate Tax Reform to Address Inequality
Submitter Name
Brian Smallshaw
Ratification Vote Results: Adopted
PDPC Comment: P057 has significant content overlap with P056. Both P057 and P056 were adopted at the 18th General Meeting.
Proposal
The GPC will reduce inequality by:
- Making income taxes much more steeply progressive;
- Adopting a progressive wealth tax that will be applied to large family fortunes;
- Adopting a progressive estate tax that will be applied to very large inheritances; and
- Taxing income from capital and labour at the same rate.
Objective
This policy's objective is to reduce inequality and fund social programs with a more steeply progressive income tax; by taxing the wealth and inheritances of those with large fortunes; and by taxing income from capital and labour at the same rate.
Benefit
These measures will narrow the gap between rich and poor, which is widely acknowledged to have grown in recent years. It will also help to make “dead capital” held by the very rich more productive, and reduce the tendency for large fortunes to perpetuate themselves over multiple generations.
Supporting Comments from Submitter
Inequality of income and wealth has risen in the last few decades, as the progressivity of income tax rates have declined. There is strong evidence that returning to something close to the rates of the 1970s would help to reduce the gap, as would adopting taxes on large fortunes and inheritances, and eliminating the tax break enjoyed by capital gains.
The following two books exhaustively explore the history of inequality, and propose tax measures to reduce it:
- Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty
- The Triumph of Injustice, Saez and Zucman
This study, commissioned by an NDP MP, looks at the revenue that could be generated by a wealth tax: Net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families Parliamentary Budget Officer, Government of Canada:
https://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/web/default/files/Documents/Reports/RP-2021-01
A recent StatsCan study reveals Canadians’ wealth is more tied to that of their parents than ever before:
https://globalnews.ca/news/7631994/canadian-income-gap-wage-inequality-statscan/
Green Value(s)
Social Justice
Relation to Existing Policy
Add to current GPC policy G06-p44.
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Backgrounder (continued)
The concentration of a nation’s wealth in the hands of a few is a threat to the economic health of the country, and the wetiko of extreme inequality is also detrimental to a country’s overall happiness. A large fortune tends to perpetuate itself and grow larger long after the individual or company that created it has ceased to innovate, or even exist. The money that is concentrated in these large fortunes is dead capital that could be more productive were a portion of it returned to society as a whole. To enable redistribution and to spur innovation, a low annual wealth tax of say 1% can be levied on large fortunes to reduce the tendency towards the concentration of capital. Furthermore, many of the largest fortunes tend to persist over generations, for even greater stagnation of a country’s wealth. Canada is one of the few developed countries without an inheritance tax, and the implementation of an inheritance tax on large fortunes would be an important step in reducing inequality and spurring innovation.
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