One has to hand it to the neo-liberal ideologues and the neoconservative political movement in Canada; they have managed to get all political parties, the mainstream media and most of the population on board the "tax relief" train. To one degree or another, they all kneel at the alter of this ultimate false god.
And in the wake of round-after-round of federal and provincial income, sales and corporate tax cuts, the threat of severe austerity measures grows as each year passes.
While this story has played itself out across the country, right now it is doing so most dramatically in the province of Ontario, where citizens are faced with an austerity agenda that will be one-degree-or-another of the disgraceful Drummond Report
The massive income tax cuts of the 90's and the past decade in Ontario are the chickens that have come home to roost and they are directly why our governments claim they cannot "afford" to fully fund the programmes that citizens depend on, and why they are increasingly rattling the sabres by giving us the entirely false and unnecessary choice between supposed impending economic collapse and massive service cuts and user fees.
To put this in perspective, we have to begin by looking at what potential revenue was lost by Ontario's two decades of tax cuts. By 2003 the Harris era personal income tax cuts alone were removing $11.6 billion per year from the Ontario treasury. (1) These tax cuts, which were never reversed, (and which no one is proposing to reverse) have meant that Ontario has lost a minimum of $90-100 billion in revenue since 2003, not including the further tax cuts of the McGuinty era and not including the revenue lost during the Harris era itself. They also were of far greater benefit to the upper income brackets than the lower.
The reversal of these specific tax cuts would have reduced Ontario's overall debt from in excess of $236 billion to under $140 billion. This is very significant, given that Ontario paid out more in interest on this debt in 2010-2011 than it spent on post secondary education. The interest the province is handing to global financial concerns would have been around half the nearly $10 billion it was. That pays for a lot of programmes. It would also have meant that instead of facing an approximately $16 billion deficit this year we would be facing at most a deficit of $4.5 billion.
And this does NOT include all the other tax cuts; the cuts to corporate taxes, to small business taxes, to personal taxes since 2003 under McGuinty, etc. It only includes cuts to personal taxes that occurred under Mike Harris.
In fact, McGuinty's government has bragged that it is cutting income taxes even further. In Ontario's Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth the Ontario government is openly proud about how their personal income tax "relief" will benefit 93% of Ontarians (which means many very well-off people) and take another $11.8 billion in revenue out of the coffers over three years. That's almost $4 billion a year. And that means that, without these additional tax cuts, had there not been the "tax relief" since 1995, there would have basically been no deficit and their would be no need for the austerity agenda at all.
If the corporate and small business tax cuts of the 1995-2011 period had not happened, combined with the restored revenues from personal income taxes mentioned above, we would be running a surplus now and we would have an overall debt well under the $100 billion mark.
And yet no one, in any of the mainstream political parties, is advocating for reversing the vast bulk of these taxation policies. Not even close.
It is very important to understand that for the majority of citizens the money that they have received through this "relief" does not even remotely compare to the services, social cohesion and opportunity that they have lost as a result of it.
Unless you are in one of the small tax brackets at the pinnacle of our very steep income pyramid, tax relief is no relief at all. 100 per cent the opposite in fact. Tax relief is the key reason we can't "afford" and do not have programmes like universal day care. It is the reason that "economists" like Don Drummond can claim a fiscal crisis where none need exist and advocate to cut your programmes to the bone in the name of "fiscal responsibility". It is the reason our social programmes are not as good as they were in the '80's and early '90's. The reason our social and even physical infrastructure is falling apart. The reason why all those kid's programmes that used to be free or at very low cost are now either gone or charge often high user fees. The reason why public transit exists at levels way below what is required. The reason why if you lose your job you can't count on any real long-term government help, why health care is in "crisis", why tuition fees are way up, and so much more. It is a large part of why it seems, despite unprecedented economic "growth" over the last 25 years, that we are asked over-and-over again to make sacrifices to keep the wealthy wealthy and big business afloat. And it is the primary reason we have been utterly unable to really confront the stain of child poverty and it is a root cause of the massive growth in social inequality.
The results of the theory and practice of "tax relief".
Tax relief is the greatest snake oil salesperson political trick of all time...it promised to deliver financial aid and social stability but, for the bulk of the population, it delivered the exact opposite.
After the 2008 crisis of capitalism and the massive funds that were found to bailout major corporations in both Canada and the USA, it is also very clear that the idea that all this "tax relief" would result in eternal prosperity, corporate investment and trickle-down wealth has now obviously been shown to be the total nonsense that it always was. Most of the population has less job security, less access to programmes and less of a share of overall social wealth than they did when it all began. So, one has to ask, what was the point if not simply to benefit companies and those with higher incomes?
But there is no real political counter-offensive against the basic idea of personal tax cuts.
As shown the McGuinty Liberals have carried the Harris tax cuts further, and have pledged repeatedly that any tax hikes are off the table. The Tories advocate for even deeper tax cuts, and have implied that they would, if they could, implement Drummond's report in its entirety: a recipe for Greek-style social collapse.
The Ontario NDP has called for a raise in the corporate tax rate back to 14%, but the money that this would put back into government coffers would be offset in large part by what the government would lose by the NDP's promises to cut the HST on home heating and gasoline, and by tax breaks to small business. They outline this themselves in their Plan for Affordable Change. Nowhere does this platform call for any personal tax increases, not even on the highest income earners. (2)
The plan's constant refrain of "Rewarding Job Creators", "Living Within our Means", and "Making Life Affordable" expose the central idiocy of the tax relief idea. These targeted tax cuts of the NDP are bad environmental policy, as many have pointed out, most notably the David Suzuki Foundation. But also, would life not be made considerably more affordable for the pocketbooks of "working families" if we reversed personal income tax cuts and used the money to create a provincial system of, for example, free daycare or free pharmacare?
These are programmes that cannot really happen in any other way. Sometimes one can't help but feel that Social Democrats in Canada think that one day they will deliver Scandinavian Social Democracy and social programmes with US level tax rates. They won't.
These are just two examples of the programmes that could have, and could yet exist, if we turned back the near twenty years of personal and corporate tax cuts. Instead we will likely see more service cuts, and we will see a yet greater burden on the province's poor, its workers and its middle-class.
In fact, of course, without personal tax increases on, at the very least, the top income brackets, all the rhetoric of the "shared pain" that is flowing from Queen's Park is unbelievably and contemptibly hollow.
Now, more than ever, we need to fight for real, fair, steeply graded progressive income taxes and to understand that only with these taxes can we build the kind of society that we want and can we fight the inequality that is the hallmark of our times.
(1)http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Ontario_Office_Pubs/bti_taxcuts.pdf
(2) The platform, I would note, also envisions savings from the kind of fictional government "gravy" that Rob Ford said was being wasted in Toronto. And yet increasing income taxes marginally on even the top 25% of incomes in Ontario, which it does not advocate, would generate far more government revenue than all these "savings" combined, and many times over.
Showing posts with label Don Drummond. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Don Drummond. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
The World that made Don Drummond
In his opening paragraphs to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx noted that people "make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
It is one of the most basic and fundamental insights into the way our society, its politics and its mass thinking work, and yet its meaning is often forgotten or ignored.
We, as people exist in a context, and that context shapes the way we think and the way we act. That context is sometimes of our own making, in part or in whole, but regardless, it is inescapable and it frames the way we think, react and act as a society, often imperceptibly.
This social discourse evolves constantly, and the actions of politicians and political advocates help to shape what becomes the essential framework of their day.
The citizens of Ontario have come under a kind of full frontal ideological assault recently, delivered to them by an agent of their own provincial Liberal government, the former TD Bank economist Don Drummond. His commissioned report has recommended deep cuts to programmes that millions depend on. It disgracefully calls for the imposition of user fees on things like school buses (as one small example), massive cuts to health care, farcical ideas such as ending all day kindergarten or cutting access for seniors to medication, etc. It seeks to undue the little that the Liberals can claim as their attempts to reconstruct an inclusive civil society in the wake of the Harris years.
But what is fascinating about the Report is that the reaction to it has been akin to the reaction to a hurricane or some other unavoidable though unfortunate force of nature. Much of it has accepted its basic premises (even when somewhat critical) and has promoted it as a "bitter pill" that was overdue.
The "progressive" Toronto Star has had the Drummond Report as a link under its own masthead on its website since it came out. Some of its less interesting commentators, such as Martin Cohn, have written nonsensical articles with idiotic narratives about the "chickens coming home to roost" economically etc. The National Post, Globe and the Toronto Sun, hardly surprisingly, have embraced its recommendations with a glee bordering on the obscene. It is as if they cannot wait to take these programmes away from people and to watch life become that much harder for Ontario's citizens.
The report seeks to make constant the false ideas that neoconservatives used to deconstruct the post-war social compromise, and it seeks to do so as a kind of permanent counter-revolution against the gains of workers and other groups economically that were the dominant ideological hegemony and narrative after the Second World War and until the mid 1980's.
But the report did not fall out of the sky and its defenders are not merely post-modern Chicken Littles. It is the outcome of an ongoing process of ideological reeducation within the developed West that seeks to both reverse any traces of economic Social Democracy (in the traditional sense of the term) and that also seeks to make perpetual economic turmoil a constant so as to subsidize the lifestyles of people exactly like Don Drummond and so as to aid in the shareholder return driven amoral culture of profit that has destroyed the North American industrial base, wiped out the communities and jobs that existed for so many and that has successfully made even "left" parties sing its tune.
The idea, of course, is rather simple. Supposedly, despite decades of massive economic growth, despite record corporate profits, despite the fact that the wealthy are wealthy to a degree unparalleled since the "Gilded Age" era of capitalist Robber Barons, and despite the demonstrably obvious fact that our society is wealthier and has more overall social capital than it did forty years ago (and remember, the forces of capitalist ideological hegemony have hitched their fences to the logic of its capacity for perpetual growth, so they will not even deny this), we are still told to beleive that governments cannot afford to implement or sustain the kinds of programmes they introduced in the 1950's!
If that is the case then capitalism has manifestly failed. It has failed by even its own logic.
But how have we gotten to this point of absurdity? This surreality where we are told that capitalism has delivered tremendous material reward and incredible advances in social wealth, and yet, somehow, we cannot afford to fund basic social programmes and we are now suggesting that parents should PAY to have their kids bussed to schools that they have a legal right to have their kids attend.
And how is it that it is not noted that this supposed lecture and recipe for "recovery" comes from a social aristocrat, who was instructed to NOT discuss tax increases (not that he would have), and whose version of austerity would inflict far greater pain upon working people than it ever would upon those of his peculiar pedigree of social leach. Telling the masses to depend less on government while making an enormous personal sum off of government to say this.
Why did McGuinty hire him in the first place? Was it not perfectly obvious that Drummond had a vested interest in a specific agenda? To hire him to suggest how government could better govern itself was akin to appointing the head of the Yankees to run a commission on how to deal with revenue sharing in baseball. In other words, it was either stupid or this is what the McGuinty government wanted. It does not really matter which is true.
McGuinty, sensing perhaps that the "Report" would be nasty, tried to do the usual preparation for its impact in January, by telling everyone that they would all have to "share the pain" when the austerity regime started.
But never has this rhetoric been less true. There is no "sharing" that will occur. Millions of people will have their lives impacted on in ways that will range from the severe, in the case of the poor, to the serious, in the case of much of the middle class.
But others, like Don Drummond, given that tax increases are off the table, will feel little to nothing at all.
If you want to see how this really works, check out
http://www.mittbucks.com/
Here you will see that "sharing pain" in this era of grotesque inequality is a farce. For austerity to have an impact on the lives of the welathy like it will on the rest of us, taxes would have to be massively increased and laws put in place to remind corporations of their social responsibility to the society that created them and that they could not have existed without.
Instead, not a single party in mainstream "left" thinking is calling for anything like this at all.
They have completely capitulated to the forward march of the relentless neo-liberal economic logic of tax cuts, service cuts, deregulation, anti-unionism and much more.
Louis Menand of The New Yorker, when reviewing Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm" put what I am trying to say very well..."It's not only that more politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Tom Hayden. More politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Lyndon Johnson". What this was pointing out was that the ideological spectrum has changed to the point that the ideas of the "extreme" presidential candidate Barry Goldwater are now mainstream thinking, while the ideas of Johnson, who declared a "War on Poverty" that actually achieved results, would be regarded as unrealistically and even ridiculously radical now.
In Canada we can see the ideological shift in many ways. Unlike the USA and the UK, Canada took slightly longer to capitulate in the face of the new hegemony. Even as late as 1989, all federal parties were willing to agree that it was the function of government to actually attempt to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. They spectacularly failed to do so, but, far more significantly, none of them would really make this pledge now.
In 1995 a Liberal federal government introduced a budget that signified the first shift of "progressive" forces away from the ideas of interventionist government and the social responsibility of the wealthy and corporations.
The NDP has followed suit. It has also bought into all of the basic ideas of the new neo-liberal ideological framework, as is clearly shown in Manitoba, and, more bitterly, Nova Scotia, where the government has singularly failed to act on the few promises it made to organized labour and is bringing in a preliminary form of its own austerity agenda.
In Ontario the shift can be seen in how the party, which has sought in an entirely reactionary way to distance itself from its Bob Rae past, called their 2011 platform (such as it was) "The Plan for Affordable Change" as opposed to Bob Rae's "Agenda for the People". The difference in tone is quite telling. So is the reality that the ONDP's 2011 platform was far to the right of Rae's re-election platform in 1995 let alone the 1990 one.
Andrea Horwath, reflecting this now, released a statement calling for a "Balanced Approach to a Balanced Budget" as if a balanced approach is really what is needed and as if a balanced budget, with the fetishistic right wing reductionist logic that this entails, is actually what should be the government's focus as opposed to the well being of its citizens and the attempt to end the suffering and deprivation that poverty and social inequality cause.
The federal NDP has also done this, and the Jack Layton lead "Orange Crush" took opposition on what was without any doubt the most right wing platform the party has ever run on. Read it for yourself:
http://www.ndp.ca/platform
As with the Democrats in the US and most of the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, the Liberals and the NDP have bought into almost every fundamental aspect of the new ideological order and, by doing so, have created and helped to perpetuate the very ideas and philosophies that hinder them in their pursuit not only of power but of actually making a difference and being anything other than a last defence against the "Storm"
They have aided in their rhetoric, their platforms and, most importantly in their acceptance of the basic premises of the neo-liberal right, in perpetuating the ideological and social ideas that allowed this report to be taken seriously at all, which it would not have 30 years ago (despite the fact that our economy has supposedly "grown" so much in the meantime).
They have helped in every meaningful way to manufacture the world that created Don Drummond.
It is one of the most basic and fundamental insights into the way our society, its politics and its mass thinking work, and yet its meaning is often forgotten or ignored.
We, as people exist in a context, and that context shapes the way we think and the way we act. That context is sometimes of our own making, in part or in whole, but regardless, it is inescapable and it frames the way we think, react and act as a society, often imperceptibly.
This social discourse evolves constantly, and the actions of politicians and political advocates help to shape what becomes the essential framework of their day.
The citizens of Ontario have come under a kind of full frontal ideological assault recently, delivered to them by an agent of their own provincial Liberal government, the former TD Bank economist Don Drummond. His commissioned report has recommended deep cuts to programmes that millions depend on. It disgracefully calls for the imposition of user fees on things like school buses (as one small example), massive cuts to health care, farcical ideas such as ending all day kindergarten or cutting access for seniors to medication, etc. It seeks to undue the little that the Liberals can claim as their attempts to reconstruct an inclusive civil society in the wake of the Harris years.
But what is fascinating about the Report is that the reaction to it has been akin to the reaction to a hurricane or some other unavoidable though unfortunate force of nature. Much of it has accepted its basic premises (even when somewhat critical) and has promoted it as a "bitter pill" that was overdue.
The "progressive" Toronto Star has had the Drummond Report as a link under its own masthead on its website since it came out. Some of its less interesting commentators, such as Martin Cohn, have written nonsensical articles with idiotic narratives about the "chickens coming home to roost" economically etc. The National Post, Globe and the Toronto Sun, hardly surprisingly, have embraced its recommendations with a glee bordering on the obscene. It is as if they cannot wait to take these programmes away from people and to watch life become that much harder for Ontario's citizens.
The report seeks to make constant the false ideas that neoconservatives used to deconstruct the post-war social compromise, and it seeks to do so as a kind of permanent counter-revolution against the gains of workers and other groups economically that were the dominant ideological hegemony and narrative after the Second World War and until the mid 1980's.
But the report did not fall out of the sky and its defenders are not merely post-modern Chicken Littles. It is the outcome of an ongoing process of ideological reeducation within the developed West that seeks to both reverse any traces of economic Social Democracy (in the traditional sense of the term) and that also seeks to make perpetual economic turmoil a constant so as to subsidize the lifestyles of people exactly like Don Drummond and so as to aid in the shareholder return driven amoral culture of profit that has destroyed the North American industrial base, wiped out the communities and jobs that existed for so many and that has successfully made even "left" parties sing its tune.
The idea, of course, is rather simple. Supposedly, despite decades of massive economic growth, despite record corporate profits, despite the fact that the wealthy are wealthy to a degree unparalleled since the "Gilded Age" era of capitalist Robber Barons, and despite the demonstrably obvious fact that our society is wealthier and has more overall social capital than it did forty years ago (and remember, the forces of capitalist ideological hegemony have hitched their fences to the logic of its capacity for perpetual growth, so they will not even deny this), we are still told to beleive that governments cannot afford to implement or sustain the kinds of programmes they introduced in the 1950's!
If that is the case then capitalism has manifestly failed. It has failed by even its own logic.
But how have we gotten to this point of absurdity? This surreality where we are told that capitalism has delivered tremendous material reward and incredible advances in social wealth, and yet, somehow, we cannot afford to fund basic social programmes and we are now suggesting that parents should PAY to have their kids bussed to schools that they have a legal right to have their kids attend.
And how is it that it is not noted that this supposed lecture and recipe for "recovery" comes from a social aristocrat, who was instructed to NOT discuss tax increases (not that he would have), and whose version of austerity would inflict far greater pain upon working people than it ever would upon those of his peculiar pedigree of social leach. Telling the masses to depend less on government while making an enormous personal sum off of government to say this.
Why did McGuinty hire him in the first place? Was it not perfectly obvious that Drummond had a vested interest in a specific agenda? To hire him to suggest how government could better govern itself was akin to appointing the head of the Yankees to run a commission on how to deal with revenue sharing in baseball. In other words, it was either stupid or this is what the McGuinty government wanted. It does not really matter which is true.
McGuinty, sensing perhaps that the "Report" would be nasty, tried to do the usual preparation for its impact in January, by telling everyone that they would all have to "share the pain" when the austerity regime started.
But never has this rhetoric been less true. There is no "sharing" that will occur. Millions of people will have their lives impacted on in ways that will range from the severe, in the case of the poor, to the serious, in the case of much of the middle class.
But others, like Don Drummond, given that tax increases are off the table, will feel little to nothing at all.
If you want to see how this really works, check out
http://www.mittbucks.com/
Here you will see that "sharing pain" in this era of grotesque inequality is a farce. For austerity to have an impact on the lives of the welathy like it will on the rest of us, taxes would have to be massively increased and laws put in place to remind corporations of their social responsibility to the society that created them and that they could not have existed without.
Instead, not a single party in mainstream "left" thinking is calling for anything like this at all.
They have completely capitulated to the forward march of the relentless neo-liberal economic logic of tax cuts, service cuts, deregulation, anti-unionism and much more.
Louis Menand of The New Yorker, when reviewing Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm" put what I am trying to say very well..."It's not only that more politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Tom Hayden. More politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Lyndon Johnson". What this was pointing out was that the ideological spectrum has changed to the point that the ideas of the "extreme" presidential candidate Barry Goldwater are now mainstream thinking, while the ideas of Johnson, who declared a "War on Poverty" that actually achieved results, would be regarded as unrealistically and even ridiculously radical now.
In Canada we can see the ideological shift in many ways. Unlike the USA and the UK, Canada took slightly longer to capitulate in the face of the new hegemony. Even as late as 1989, all federal parties were willing to agree that it was the function of government to actually attempt to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. They spectacularly failed to do so, but, far more significantly, none of them would really make this pledge now.
In 1995 a Liberal federal government introduced a budget that signified the first shift of "progressive" forces away from the ideas of interventionist government and the social responsibility of the wealthy and corporations.
The NDP has followed suit. It has also bought into all of the basic ideas of the new neo-liberal ideological framework, as is clearly shown in Manitoba, and, more bitterly, Nova Scotia, where the government has singularly failed to act on the few promises it made to organized labour and is bringing in a preliminary form of its own austerity agenda.
In Ontario the shift can be seen in how the party, which has sought in an entirely reactionary way to distance itself from its Bob Rae past, called their 2011 platform (such as it was) "The Plan for Affordable Change" as opposed to Bob Rae's "Agenda for the People". The difference in tone is quite telling. So is the reality that the ONDP's 2011 platform was far to the right of Rae's re-election platform in 1995 let alone the 1990 one.
Andrea Horwath, reflecting this now, released a statement calling for a "Balanced Approach to a Balanced Budget" as if a balanced approach is really what is needed and as if a balanced budget, with the fetishistic right wing reductionist logic that this entails, is actually what should be the government's focus as opposed to the well being of its citizens and the attempt to end the suffering and deprivation that poverty and social inequality cause.
The federal NDP has also done this, and the Jack Layton lead "Orange Crush" took opposition on what was without any doubt the most right wing platform the party has ever run on. Read it for yourself:
http://www.ndp.ca/platform
As with the Democrats in the US and most of the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, the Liberals and the NDP have bought into almost every fundamental aspect of the new ideological order and, by doing so, have created and helped to perpetuate the very ideas and philosophies that hinder them in their pursuit not only of power but of actually making a difference and being anything other than a last defence against the "Storm"
They have aided in their rhetoric, their platforms and, most importantly in their acceptance of the basic premises of the neo-liberal right, in perpetuating the ideological and social ideas that allowed this report to be taken seriously at all, which it would not have 30 years ago (despite the fact that our economy has supposedly "grown" so much in the meantime).
They have helped in every meaningful way to manufacture the world that created Don Drummond.
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