(This is a loosely edited transcript of the video above)
The rich need to pay their fair share. How often do you hear politicians talking about that?
Justin Trudeau used to say that all the time. He jacked up all kinds of taxes. You hear it from Democrats in the States, Liberals in this country. You’re hearing it from the socialist mayor of New York. Zora Mamdani’s ideas are being adopted by politicians here in Canada.
He’s going to drive a real soak the rich agenda. And he’s doing that with his pied-a-terre tax. He’s driving out investment and major investors from New York.
And yet people still say, well, the rich don’t pay their fair share. They don’t pay enough.
I want to show you some things that will actually show that this is not the case. So I pulled the numbers from StatsCan and from the Fraser Institute that studied this.
Did you know that the bottom 20% of income earners in this country pay just 0.7% of all personal income tax?
Now, I’m not advocating for the bottom 20% to be paying more. If you’re in the bottom quintile, you’re not making much money. And you’re probably struggling.
But 0.7%, that’s what the bottom 20% pay.
The top 20%, which is people making, families making over $270,000 a year, they earn 49.5% of all income in the country. And they pay 65.3% of all taxes.
We’re going to break it down even further in a moment, but think about that, 49.5% of the income pay 63.5% of the taxes.
You get into the middle and they’re making about 15% of all income, paying about 10%. This is not the story that you hear out there.
Now, let me show you the top 1%, the 1% versus the rest of us.
Let’s go back to that Occupy Wall Street language of the top 1%.
To be a top 1% income earner in Canada, you have to earn over $294,000 a year. In the United States, to be in the 1%, you are earning in the millions.
We do not have that kind of wealth in this country.
This is the same pattern that’s been going on for years. And I’m going to break it down even further.
The bottom half in Canada earns, bottom half of income earners in Canada, 50% of the population earned 17.5% of all total income. They pay 5% of total income tax. The middle 40%, earns nearly half of all income, 47.5%, but they pay 39.5% of the tax bill.
The top 10% earns 34% of all income, and they pay 55% of the entire tax bill.
So enough with the idea that the rich don’t pay enough.
Do we want a fair tax system? Of course.
Do we want one that isn’t rigged so that people at the bottom are paying everything or the people in the middle carry the bill and folks at the top get away scot-free?
No, that’s not what we want.
But it’s also not what we have.
The rhetoric doesn’t match reality.
And this is something that I have been writing about, talking about for well over a decade. I’ve shown this on TV, on online videos, I’ve written columns. The research is there.
You can find this data from Stats Canada. You can find the reports by the Fraser Institute.
Most people in the media aren’t going to let you in on this.
Want to debate if wealth should be concentrated this way? That’s another debate, but you can’t say the rich aren’t paying their fair share.
There’s another reason why you should be subscribing, brianlilley.com, so that you get this sort of thing.
