Let’s prevent the hyper wealthy from using our province as a hotspot for tax evasion, speculative housing investments, and money laundering. Let’s build a redistribution of capital that is effective and just.
I understand that our society is dominated by a series of broken capitalist systems intended to guard the interests of unaccountable powerful entities and individuals. Governments protect these interests by creating tax codes which misrepresent the financial realities of our communities, creating an adversarial relationship amongst groups from a perceived scarcity of available resources.
Consequently, I understand that when a state borrows money through schemes that make it vulnerable to the forces of international finance, it grants power over it to hostile or parasitic forces.
I will fight for a budget that:
Does not enter into any financial arrangement that increases the province’s vulnerability to international bond-raters and financiers.
Restructure the tax code to be more progressive, relying less on income taxes and sales taxes which disproportionately harm the working class and impoverished.
Fully abolish ‘sin taxes’ which are patronizing while also shifting the blame for societal issues on individuals choices.
For the hyper-rich, taxes on income mean virtually nothing because individuals and lineages monopolize a larger and larger portion of the world’s wealth while utilizing financial instruments our tax codes are ill-equipped to recognize such as equity lines of credit. This wealth is often inaccessible through income taxes and can only be accessed through taxes on capital, inheritance, and wealth. In government, I would fight to:
Institute a marginal inheritance tax from 0% for amounts under $100,000 to 50% for amounts exceeding $10 million.
Create a special, well-resourced tax investigation and enforcement unit including experts in enforcement, mathematics, economics, and the law with a specific focus on collecting taxes from the hyper-wealthy.
Following the lead set by parties in the UK and New Zealand, I would fight for a wealth tax to both incentivize spending in the BC economy and to fund our social and environmental programs. In particular, a 1% tax on all net assets (total assets minus total liabilities) over $1 million for each person, which would increase to 2% for all net assets over $2 million. To integrate this policy with BC's existing tax on homes worth more than $3 million, the wealth tax would work as follows:
* all net assets (excluding the portion of each owned house's value that is above $3 million) above $1 million would be taxed at 1% annually, and 2% annually above $2 million
* the portion of each owned house's value above $3 million would additionally be taxed at 0.2% annually, plus an extra 0.2% for the value(s) above $4 million