In keeping with the government’s vision of making Canada a low-tax jurisdiction, the Conservatives have been gradually cutting taxes on corporate profits since 2007.
By 2015 under this plan, the share of federal government programs paid for by corporate income taxes will have shrunk to 12.3 per cent from 20.8 per cent in 2000.
Do we really want to 'look more like Ireland?'
Shortly after rolling out the Harper government’s first budget in 2006, a boisterous Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was asked during a visit to New York what Canada would look like in five years under a Conservative majority regime.
“It will look more like Ireland — more dynamic, more attractive to investors, brighter, more positive, outward-looking,” Flaherty said in a published report of his comments.
Perhaps in part due to his Irish heritage, Flaherty has long been a fan of Ireland’s fundamental economic strategy — rock-bottom corporate income tax rates.
But with Ireland's low-tax Celtic Tiger now dead, the Harper government no longer cites the Irish example to promote corporate tax cuts in Canada. Nonetheless, despite the dire state of Ottawa's finances, the Conservatives are sticking to the low-tax policy pioneered in nearly bankrupt Ireland.
Billions in profits boost bank shares
Banks in the United States and Europe are getting hit by bonus taxes and a welter of new regulation but here in Canada, where policy makers see less need to penalize the sector, the Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion Bank thrashed earnings expectations with combined first quarter profit of $3.4 billion, driving their shares higher.Canadian corporate operating profits rose to $65.5 billion in the last three months of 2010, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday, a 7.9 per cent increase over the previous quarter.
StatsCan said the increases were widespread across the economy, with 19 of 22 industries reporting higher earnings.
The rise followed moderate declines in the previous two quarters. Operating revenues were up 2.8 per cent for the sixth straight quarter.
Operating earnings in the non-financial sector increased by 7.3 per cent, with the biggest gains in mining and oil and gas.
Financial institutions climbed by 9.5 per cent as insurance firms rebounded from a poor performance in the third quarter. Chartered banks rose 5.6 per cent.
Profits up 9% for the year
Compared with the same period a year earlier, operating profits for all industries were nine per cent.
By the end of 2010, profits had grown by 5.5 per cent since the beginning of the recovery, regaining 56 per cent of the ground lost during the recession.
It's looking like a better year for dividend increases
Please sir, I want some more dividends.
Flush with cash and encouraged by a strengthening economy, companies are doling out dividend increases to the delight of yield-hungry investors.
And with corporate profits rebounding strongly, the trend is likely to gather momentum over the next couple of years, analysts predict.
This month alone, Canadian companies including Rogers Communications Inc., Shoppers Drug Mart Corp., TransCanada Corp. and Russel Metals Inc. have raised their quarterly payments, signalling their confidence in both the economy and the strength of their balance sheets.
Armine Yalnizyan: Five economic reasons to say no to more corporate tax cuts in CanadaLeast effective job creation measure: According to the nation’s official number crunchers, if you want policy to encourage job creation, cutting corporate taxes is the weakest option (20 cents growth from every dollar of tax cut). Spending on infrastructure has the most impact ($1.50 on every dollar spent). The Department of Finance shows that spending on income supports for the unemployed and for low-income Canadians has an equally big pop, and housing initiatives are almost as good ($1.40 for every dollar spent).
Little impact on investments: Federal corporate tax rates have fallen from 28 percent in 2000 to 18 percent in 2010. Business investment (in non-residential structures and equipment) as a share of GDP was 12.4 percent in 2000. It was also 12.4 percent in 2009, and on track for the same in 2010. In the 1960s, the heyday of industrial expansion and economic development in Canada, the federal corporate tax rate was 40 percent. Statistics Canada’s data on business investment starts in 1981. That year the federal corporate tax rate was 36 percent, and business investment represented 11.5 percent of the economy. By 1990 the federal corporate tax had fallen to 28 percent. Business investment had fallen to 10.8 percent of the economy. There are many factors that drive business investment practices, and while taxes are a consideration, they are not the primary factor in investment decisions. The historic evidence shows that a commitment to this strategy is a costly faith-based proposition.
Pay more tax to cut taxes: Since fall 2010 the Harper team has been saying corporate tax cuts “pay for themselves”. But Budget 2009 figures show that reducing the general corporate tax rate from 22.12 percent in 2007 to 18 percent by January 2010 removed $6.7 billion annually from public coffers, right through the worst of the recession. Cutting the rate further this year to 16.5 percent meant another $2.8 billion in foregone revenues annually. The Harper team’s commitment to reducing the corporate tax rate to 15 percent will reduce the size of the public purse by $13.7 billion annually by 2012, according to Finance estimates, at which time the federal budgetary deficit will be between $21 and $26 billion (the range of Finance, PBO and IMF estimates). Financing this tax cut requires borrowing more money. The average Canadian taxpayer will pay interest on the borrowed money to provide a tax break for profitable corporations.
Friday, March 04, 2011
Tax Breaks=Corporate Welfare
The Rich Get Richer
Executive compensation
The $1,700,000,000 golden handshake
Inside the best deal Frank Stronach ever made.
In the past 12 years, there’s been a 444 per cent salary increase for Canada’s top CEOs. The top 10 earners collected a total of $60.7 million in 1995—by 2007, that number had jumped to $330.3 million. For example, Paul Desmarais, CEO of Power Corp, made more than $5 million in 1995; in 2007, his take-home was more than $29 million.Bank of Montreal CEO pay jumps 28 percent to C$9.5 million
Average annual pay of a top Canadian CEO: $7 million
The total average compensation for Canada’s 100 best-paid CEOs was $6.64 million in 2009, compared to the average Canadian income of $42,988 and the average minimum wage worker’s income of $19,877.
The biggest pay package went to Aaron Regent at Barrick Gold Corp., who made $24.2 million in 2009, according to Mackenzie’s calculations. In second place was Hunter Harrison at Canadian National Railway Co., at $17.3 million, followed by Gerald Schwartz at Onex Corp., at $16.7 million.
A Globe and Mail review of pay for CEOs at Canada’s 100 largest public companies in 2009 shows top executives across Canada received, The cash portion of pay packages – salary and cash bonuses – did show substantial growth, with a combined median increase of 7.6 per cent. (Medians reflect the experience of the middle-of-the-pack CEO, while averages can be skewed by CEOs with particularly large or small compensation amounts.)
A list of the Top 50 Canadian CEOs and their astronomical take-home pay increases
Canada’s richest CEOs pocket the average Canadian wage of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. January 2nd – before most Canadians have booted up their computer for another year of work,” says Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Research Associate Hugh Mackenzie.
The CCPA released a report on January 2, 2009 showing that the 100 highest paid CEO's at publicly traded corporations in Canada earned an average of $10.4 million in total compensation in 2007, which was an average increase of 22%, from its $8.5 million average in 2006.
This compared with an average pay hike of only 3.2% to $40,237 for the average Canadian worker during 2007.
"Compared with ordinary Canadians, whose wages have been stagnant for 30 years, Canada's economic downturn promises to hit the masses far harder than the best paid 100 CEOs," Mackenzie said. "They have enjoyed a decade of record pay hikes and will land on a softer cushion if they stumble from their lofty heights in the New Year."
The wage gap between the average Canadian worker and CEOs has been growing steadily over the past decade. In 2007, Canada's top 50 CEOs earned 398 times more than the average worker, compared with 85 times in 1995.
MacKenzie said that between 1998 and 2007 the average compensation of top CEOs increased by 147%, adjusted for inflation. This compared with a 3% decline in inflation-adjusted weekly wages for average Canadians and a 6% rise for those on the minimum wage.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Has Gadhafi Been Reading Lyndon LaRouche
During the interview with the BBC, which took place in a restaurant in Tripoli, Gaddafi blamed outsiders for the civil turmoil, adding: "It's al-Qaeda. They went into military bases and siezed arms and terrorised the people.
"The people who had the weapons were youngsters and they're starting to put down their weapons now as the drugs that al-Qaeda gave them wear off."
He previously claimed that al-Qaeda had drugged demonstrators by spiking their "Nescafe".
LaRouche puts some sociopolitical and intellectual movements into the "positive" category and some into the negative. He believes the Reformation militated against the nation-state (and human well-being) while the Renaissance was an inspirational positive. He believes in classical humanism and defines philosophy and philosophers based on their contributions to it. In order to arrive at these conclusions, he has researched the underlying fundaments of what he (and many others) call the Anglo-American axis (or empire) and traced it back to Venetian bankers and even earlier. For LaRouche, Western history is a recitation of Anglo conspiracies that have ever attempted to draw ever-tighter the noose of mercantilist central banking and its torrents of debt-laden fiat money.
Charlie Gadhafi
"It's perfect. It's awesome. Every day is just filled with just wins. All we do is put wins in the record books," the 45-year-old actor said. "We win so radically in our underwear before our first cup of coffee, it's scary. People say it's lonely at the top, but I sure like the view." The embattled actor opened up his Beverly Hills home, which he now shares with his two girlfriends and his twin sons with soon-to-be ex-wife Brooke Mueller, to ABC News this weekend.Mind you at least the reporters talking to Gadhafi challenged him unlike the reporters who pandered to Charlie Sheen. Maybe Qaddafi should consider moving to Hollywood, where he would get the fawning respect of the entertainment industry that masquerades as news.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi appeared Monday either to not know that demonstrators in cities throughout Libya are calling for an end to his rule or not accept it, according to excerpts from the interview "No demonstration at all in the streets," he told ABC News and the BBC in a joint interview carried out at a restaurant in Tripoli, excerpts of which were posted on the BBC's website.Gadhafi, wearing sunglasses and clad in brown tribal clothing, refused to accept the reporter's assertion that they were not. "No. No one against us. Against me for what?"
When Rossen said that Sheen was seen as crazy as he talked about being a warlock with tiger's blood, Sheen shrugged. "It's entertaining as hell. I'm laughing. ... Did they expect it to be a normal interview - conventional, boring? No, we're shaking a a tree. We're shaking all the trees."Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi has told the BBC he is loved by all his people and has denied there have been any protests in Tripoli.
Col Gaddafi said that his people would die to protect him.
He laughed at the suggestion he would leave Libya and said that he felt betrayed by the world leaders who had urged him to quit.