For years I have been highlighting the demand in Canada for tech workers. The October 2019 employment data is typical of the obvious trend: Professional, Scientific and Technical Services employment is up +7.4% Y/Y while Service Producing is up 3% Y/Y and Goods Producing is up 0.1% Y/Y.
Yes, the information revolution is producing new data consumption markets at the corporate level, but what about our social contract and our environmental needs? We need to direct capital and labour towards complex issues like environmental remediation, infrastructure, education, health, wellness, and electoral and taxation reform. Tax reform should be taken on by the tech sector, because the political institutional approach towards taxation is built upon generations of carrot and stick incentives which end up benefiting one voting constituency over another. If we are to take on the the greatest challenges to our well being, the Automated Payment Tax developed by Edgar L. Feige, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison would indeed kick start stubborn 20th century institutional thinking into a progressive 21st century that the new tech sector generation dreams of. How? The APT (Automated Payment Tax) is a micro tax taken at every financial transaction where each side of the transaction gets debited a small amount of capital that is credited to the government in a revenue neutral algorithm. Professor Feige's team modeled the U.S. economy from late 1990's data and realized that it would take less than 2% of every financial transaction to produce a revenue neutral state where all the government's fiscal objectives were met. The APT would eliminate the need to file tax or information returns. That in itself should provide enough incentive to read the 41 page PDF study by Feige. The foundations of the APT tax proposal—a small, uniform tax on all economic transactions—involve simplification, base broadening, reductions in marginal tax rates, the elimination of tax and information returns and the automatic collection of tax revenues at the payment source. The APT approach would extend the tax base from income, consumption and wealth to all transactions. Think about the desirability and feasibility of replacing the present system of personal and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes with a single comprehensive revenue neutral Automated Payment Transaction (APT) tax. If we want to take on the challenges of the 21st century, ie: the urgent generational "moonshots" facing us, then tech sector - take on the challenge of tax reform.
Simon J. Thorpe agrees in his 12 page PDF: "The global financial crime wave is no accident Financial crime is a feature of our global financial system not a bug." said pioneering economist Susan Strange. November 28, 2018 by Naomi Fowler Financial Secrecy Index - 2018 Results
INVESTOPEDIA KEY TAKEAWAYS, July 2019 Pierre Trudeau’s Washington Press Club speech |
History, Charts & Curated Readings"History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome." Jane Austen spoken by Catherine Morland in 'Northanger Abbey'
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"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
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