Taxes Schmaxes

This is the time of year when my thoughts inevitably turn to income taxes - and my thoughts are inevitably homicidal.

Tell me, was it the intention of legislators, when they first introduced the income tax at the early days of the last century, that it would become a tool to punish and impoverish their citizens? Surely not. Yet that is what has happened.

There was a recent story out of Vancouver about a group of current and former JDS Uniphase employees who are now facing ruin because they were "gifted" by their employer with a cheap stock deal. They got something like a 15% reduction in the price of a stock that was then, in the middle of the dot.com boom, flying high. With the passage of time, the dot.com boom went bust and their holdings became a pale shadow of the price they had paid for them.

End of story? Not quite. The federal income tax agency, in its wisdom, has decided these people must pay tax on the 15% benefit they gained, valued at the time of when the stock was actually worth buying. For some, that represents a hefty piece of change. Two, three, even four times their annual salaries in some cases. Of course they can't pay. Some will lose their homes. One woman will lose both her home and her business.

Tough luck, eh?

It reminds me of another scam the income tax people tried a few years ago. Some genius came up with the idea that artists should pay taxes on their "inventories." Those are the works that they have completed, but have not yet sold. As you might expect, Canada's novelists, painters and composers freaked out. These poor people make ridiculously low incomes. About 90% of everything they create rots in their basements. It NEVER sells. Now the income tax people were talking about taxing them on money they would, in all likelihood, never, ever see.

Sanity somehow intervened, and that perversion bit the dust. But there's plenty more where that idea came from.

Like this one. A friend of mine invested his life savings - along with a bunch of other wrongheaded savers - with a highly touted financial advisor who turned out to be a crook. All of them in this sadly familiar story lost their nest eggs. That would have been hard enough to take, but just as they were absorbing that blow, Revenue Canada stepped up with a bag of salt to rub in their wounds. Seems the crook had misinformed them about their investments being tax sheltered. Not true. Seems they owed megabucks in back taxes.

Several went bankrupt. Others had to postpone retirement. Everyone was impoverished.

What's next? Taxing babies on the money they MIGHT, in theory, earn in their lifetimes? Screwing widows and orphans out of their pensions? Kicking welfare recipients in the teeth because they THOUGHT about winning the lottery one day?

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think people should pay taxes on income they actually make. They should be able to see and taste the money, take it to the store and buy groceries with it. They should not be asked to pay tax on money that disappeared long before it reached their bank accounts.

Apparently this is an unsophisticated and naive approach to modern taxation methods.

In any event, there's a moral in these stories. Don't ever trust the government. Do not ever regard the government as your friend and protector. Do not save. Do not invest. If you must save and invest, do not tell your friend, the government. Better still, leave the country.

Work only if you must, and never work for yourself in an activity that might actually contribute to the cultural life of the nation.

For God's sake, don't be one of those honest, salt-of-the-earth people who worry about doing their part and pulling their share of the load.

The government will make mincemeat out of you.