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But in Monday’s speech Trudeau went further than before in isolating just exactly who is to blame. It isn’t just that the middle class is struggling, it turns out. It’s that it’s being held down. The Canadian dream, he said, “has been taken from too many for the benefit of too few for too long.” Taken, note. By the “few.”

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This has always been implicit in Liberal rhetoric about “the one per cent,” but now it is policy. If the rich have been “taking” from the middle class, then the Liberals want you to know they will take it back: a cut of one-and-a-half percentage points in the lower-middle bracket, paid for by an increase of four percentage points in the top rate of tax. Fairness demands nothing less.

Seldom have the politics of “gimme that” been expressed quite so nakedly. It is one thing to redistribute from rich to poor, or from the broader society to those on its margins. But the beneficiaries in this case are not the poor, or even the median: as the NDP helpfully pointed out, the $44,701 threshold at which the Liberal tax cut would kick in would benefit only the top one-third of tax filers.

But then, every line of the Liberal story is a fraud. The middle class isn’t struggling: the $53,000 the median family earned after tax in 2012 is an all-time high — 24 per cent more than in 1997, after inflation. The rich aren’t pulling away from the rest of us: the share of all income going to the top 1% has been falling steadily since 2006. At 10.3 per cent, it is back to where it was in 1998. Fairness? As it is, the top one per cent pay more than 20 per cent of all income taxes. If that is “taking” from the middle class, what proportion would the Liberals say was “giving”? 25 per cent? 30 per cent? How would we know when “fairness” had been achieved?