this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
38 points (95.2% liked)
Ontario
2220 readers
23 users here now
A place to discuss all the news and events taking place in the province of Ontario, Canada.
Rules
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No porn.
- No Ads / Spamming.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"tax the wealthy" - I would say that in particular this should be taxing wealth. Canada is in the unique position that most of the wealth in this country is real-estate, and therefore has a street address. Capital flight is much more difficult under that circumstance. The guy who owns three houses and a few condos and a car-dealership is far more interesting than a well-paid surgeon, but one owes more of their lifestyle to their wealth rather than their labour. I tend to dislike Jagmeet Singh on policy issues but I think he's spot on about it being time for wealth taxes in Canada.
Normally I'm pretty neoliberal when it comes to the housing crisis (ie: a huge part of the problem is overregulation) but at this point the solution will require undoing decades of damage and that will mean a need for below-market housing at least until the free market can catch up, if not forever. Taxing Canada's wealthy land-owners is an obvious way to fund this, since they're the ones profiting the most from this shortage.
That's a really good point I've never seen articulated that way before.
I've long been curious about the impact of tweaks to the principal residence exemption for capital gains tax. Eg a cap, ie once a house has appreciated say $1M in value, further appreciation is taxable as revenue.