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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • In Canada, we spend about $8k on healthcare each year per person. This is mostly taxes, but also partly co-pays and private employer insurance.

    America spends about $14k per person.

    In both the USA and Canada, about 28% of government spending goes to healthcare. In the US that means about ~6k in total government budget from your tax dollars is spent on healthcare, while in Canada it’s about ~7K.

    The difference is that the average american also pays an additional $8K in their own after-tax dollars from their pockets in insurance and direct-billing for services.

    And for the privilege of paying nearly twice as much, the Americans have a life expectancy of 6 years less than Canadians (76.3 vs 82.6)


  • And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.

    Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.

    With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it’s really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.

    However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.




  • Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

    Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

    The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)



  • The problem is that’s literally just money laundering?

    They are using a shell corporation and bullshit liscencing fee to cover over the fact that this transaction is and should be illegal.

    Like, the idea here is that the church is not allowed to donate to a political figure, so they’ve set up a shell corp in the middle. The church pays $60 to the shell corp, who sends back 30 cents worth of paper, and then passes on 59.70 to Trump as a “licencing fee”, which is obviously just going to be spent on his campaign.