-- Download Canada's Growing Income Gap Between the 99% and the 1% as PDF --

The rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer, and the gap between them is growing.

This is the test of whether we can be content in our complacency. Here’s why.

In 2010, a tax filer required an annual income of $201,400 to be in the top 1%. This was 37% higher than the threshold value of $147,500 in 1982, when the data series began. (All dollar figures in this text are expressed in 2010 constant dollars.)

The income gap between the top 1% and the rest of filers has widened over time. In 1982, the median income of the top 1% of filers was $191,600. This was seven times higher than the median income of $28,000 for the other 99% of filers.

By 2010, the median income of the top 1% of filers increased to $283,400, about 10 times higher than the median income of $28,400 for the rest.

The Daily — High-income trends among Canadian taxfilers, 1982 to 2010.

Statscan knows things. The 1% used to make 7x what the rest of us did, and now they make 10x what we do. What we as a society do with this information is up to us.

And our lacklustre employee, Mr. Stephen Harper, has exacerbated this growing inequality by finding clever ways for the rich to pay less taxes:

In 1982, the richest 1% of filers paid 13.4% of federal and provincial or territorial income taxes. This proportion rose steadily to a peak of 23.3% in 2007, then slipped to 21.2% in 2010. The share of income taxes paid by the rest of all tax filers fell from 86.6% in 1982 to 78.8% in 2010.

We must stop the Conservative Party from defunding our government and aggravating the crises they and the previous Liberals started.

Or, we can just sit back and watch our economic existence continue to become more precarious. And whine a bit. But mostly suffer, especially those on the economic edges.

It’s your choice!

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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