Does pork exist in government? Obviously. But it's disingenuous to claim that somehow you're going to get rid of government pork by abolishing taxes. You should be angry that the politicians you voted for passed pork on to special interests and demand accountability from them, and if they do not give you a satisfactory answer as to WHY they forked over the pork, vote them out.
But low-tax, low-regulation economies have a human cost and as a construction worker
you would be on the front lines for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Ag ... _of_income
Plus, higher taxes on net income strongly encourages reinvestment of revenue. It's not "net income" if you spend it as part of your expenses, i.e. while there are payroll taxes, corporations don't pay income tax on the portion of money that's set aside to pay their employees, because that counts as an operating cost, which comes out of their profit. From
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefin ... e-tax-work:
"Taxable corporate profits are equal to a corporation’s receipts less allowable deductions—including the cost of goods sold, wages and other employee compensation expenses, interest, nonfederal taxes, depreciation, and advertising."
Higher taxes literally create jobs because it's money that the corporation would lose to the government anyways. Corporate taxes are the government's way of saying "I don't care how much money you make so long as you keep it moving in the economy." Furthermore, this isn't just some idea that people has, it's actually backed up by robust evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_cu ... rical_data
It appears that government revenue peaks out at around 70% top nominal bracket (which is not 70% of your earnings, if you want to know how brackets work talk to Thallium). And hey look at this bit of data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_cu ... x_rate.svg
The way the propagandists get you is by making you "feel" like it's "your" money that you earned "all by yourself." Actually, the money you've made in your career is a result of the fact that you live in a 1st world nation that has carefully developed and maintained a modern infrastructure that supports a highly specialized economy in which "designing steam pipe junctures for buildings" is a) a job, b) a lucrative job, and c) a job you personally could be trained to do. This isn't a dismissal of the hard work you put in for your career, quite the contrary: it's an acknowledgment that you had a unique opportunity and were successful in pursuing that opportunity. Canada couldn't be happier, but some day you're going to retire and die and they would very much like to be able to afford roads so that the next generation of steam-pipe-junction-designers can get to their classes and/or clients, so if you wouldn't mind giving them a reasonable portion of what you've earned that would be great.
The high-tax, high-regulation economy of Canada is why you are wealthy. The data backs this up considerably. Now that you're wealthy you want to take it away for the next generation.
Also, I'm not going to touch "fiscally responsible" with a 10-foot pole because you strike me as the kind of person who considers the Mars probes a waste of money.
