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This article appears in the April 2014 edition of the Financial Post Magazine. Visit the iTunes store to download the iPad edition of this month’s issue.

To read most news reports, there’s really only one thing worth knowing about income splitting: It “mostly benefits the rich.” Wasn’t that the conclusion of a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a left-wing think tank, but also by the C.D. Howe Institute on the right? That clinches it, n’est-ce pas? Not so fast. The merits of a given tax policy cannot simply be reduced to whether it makes the system more redistributive or not. That’s a valid concern, to be sure. It’s just not the only one.

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Yet that is the constant theme of much commentary – and not only on income splitting. RRSPs, dividend gross-ups, capital gains inclusion rates, and, of course, the tax rates charged to different brackets: no matter what the subject, you can bet someone will analyze it through that one lens, as if that were all there were to it.