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So now it’s Tax Free Savings Accounts: yet another Conservative tax promise under fire on the grounds that it “mostly benefits the rich.” Before that it was income-splitting.

Before these recent controversies it was RRSPs, and before that the dividend tax credit, and so on and so forth. Wherever and whenever there is a proposal to lower taxes — or pretty much any policy change really — you may be sure somebody will jump up to object that it “mostly benefits the rich.”

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Sometimes this comes with the refrain: “and at such expense!” For example, the Parliamentary Budget Office calculates that doubling the TFSA, as the Tories propose, would increase the annual costs of the program in the long run, already set to grow exponentially, by about a third. All this — all together now — for a program that “mostly benefits the rich.”

This has become one of those monomaniacal obsessions that paralyze the collective cerebral cortex. To be sure, distributional equity is a valid objective of policy. It’s certainly worth pointing out if a program’s benefits skew disproportionately in favour of the wealthy, or its costs fall disproportionately on the poor. For example, you could make that point about the NDP’s preferred approach to child rearing: handing out heavily subsidized day care to everyone, rich or poor, in fact “mostly benefits the rich,” since they’re the ones who tend to line up for it.