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One columnist dismissively described the anti-reformers as just a bunch of whiners who don’t want to “pay the same tax as others earning the same or less income.” And a report last week on CBC’s The National implied that top income earners pay “an effective tax rate of 50 per cent,” while an incorporated small business owner pays a “much smaller” corporate tax rate of 15 per cent.

Such gross misrepresentations feed the class warfare beast at the heart of the Liberal tax agenda. The CCPC reforms may indeed close tax benefits buried in the CCPC structure, as Morneau believes, but the prime objective is to push the incomes of more and more Canadians into top marginal tax brackets.

In one sense, Morneau has triggered something of a tax revolt among the rich — it’s about time — but it’s a revolt that will fail if wealthier Canadians and the Coalition for Small Business Tax Fairness continue to claim they’re entitled to lower small business tax rates, income sprinkling and the passive investment, capital gains and dividend dodging gambits.

By focusing on the details of the reforms, they are missing the larger point and they will lose the long-run battle as a result.

The tax system for decades has been much like a Hollywood epic

The tax system for decades has been much like a Hollywood epic. Political superheroes – modern day Robin Hoods — move in on the rich, seize their property and directly or indirectly redistribute it to those with lower incomes.

Why the rich and the not-so-rich put up with this escalating expropriation of income and wealth is something of a mystery. Maybe it’s good old-fashioned Canadian guilt of being successful. More broadly, most across the income spectrum seem to accept that it is good — and right — for government to take a staggering proportion of the incomes of the so-called rich and that marginal tax rates of 50 per cent and higher are somehow justified.