Reaping what has been sown

The power goes out with the slightest weather. Water mains burst with regularity. Our roads are a rutted mess, here in Toronto the Gardiner rains concrete on those below....
Our hospitals are overcrowded, under staffed and filthy. We send kids to school to be educated in mold infested portables, the quality of that education is determined by the ability of parents to raise funds

All this the consequence of our fetish for low taxes. If we continue down this road there will be no need to bomb us back into the stone age as Bush famously promised to do to the Iraqis, we will go there by our own design

We are long past due for some sanity when it comes to taxation We can no longer pretend that we can have it all, low taxes and quality services. Taxes must go up, there is no other option

However it needn't be painful for instance it is estimated that we spend upwards of a hundred billion a year on boutique tax expenditures such as credits for sports equipment, dance lessons and Harper's gawd awful income splitting scheme.

While some are useful many are not, surely if we were to review these expenditures we could find a few billion. Bringing back true progressively to our income tax regime, some more much needed revenue

Corporations are grossly under taxed and sitting on hundreds of billions gifted them through massive tax cuts, surely they can pay more. A robin hood tax could with little pain raise more revenue, capital gains taxed as income more yet.

There are many more ideas out there, we just need to show some sense, grow up and start to make the decisions necessary to build a society we would be proud to leave our children

If we don't change course and soon, we will wake up one day to find we no longer live in a modern society but one where everyone fends for themselves

We are nearly there now.