Stupid
Math Tricks

Since I, thankfully, still seem to have no problems with high blood pressure, I can safely visit a blog which I will refer to as Sewage without Respite and not have my heart or head explode. The proprietor of said corner of the bloggosphere, who admittedly has a way with words, but regrettably a lack of respect for facts, could perhaps win a Pulitzer or even a Nobel for fiction, but insists on calling his writing opinion at best or even gospel at worst.

In a recent post he presented "his friend" Peter Brown's recent letter to the cantankerous Cummins led BC Conservative party, pleading with these new challengers to the BC LIEberals for the "free enterprise" vote to line up behind Clueless Christy to save the province from the socialist hordes led by "Comrade Dix." He shortly found himself (Greatest Blogger Guy in Moderator mode) fending off an attack on the banksters, fraudsters and outright modern day Robber Barons by resorting to the classic class warfare meme, or the even more credible argument that said critics of capitalism gone wild were (take your pick) delusional, late for their meds, on some kind of illegal drugs, just more of the stupid Occupytards or just didn't have enough brain cells to understand how business really works.

When it was pointed out by one of the eminently reasonable commenters that his buddy Pete had been found wanting in the ethical department to the tune of being fined $3.5 million, by the usually willing to turn a blind eye to even egregious rip-offs by con artists disguised as investment advisers or stock brokers,British Columbia Securities Commission (the saviour of Bennett the Lesser and Doman, oh so many years ago). To that and the fact old Petey was found guilty of at least three other infractions by the notoriously lax BCSC, our hero replied that that is just how he and his friends in business roll, get used to it. Anybody who expressed concerns about our current state of socialism for the rich and social Darwinism for the rest, just didn't have the gumption to get up off their asses and steal their own fortune from the poor and leave the poor downtrodden rich and their ill gotten gains alone.

But the comment by one of the fawning sycophants of the Greatest Blogger on this planet and any other really got even my usually cool blood almost to the boiling point, even on a planet the size of Jupiter (BP would of course be higher on the largest planet and I realize this FACT because I fortunately got to go to school before Herr Harper the not so Great banned science from the land). This apparently rich dude, who shall remain nameless to protect the stupid, claimed that during the dark dismal nineties when BC suffered under the heel of a brutal commie regime called the NDP, the provincial share of his income tax had gone up $2000, not just one year, but another $2000 the next and then again the next.

Now since I am too far to the low end of the bottom 99%, I can neither afford, nor need, to hire experts to help me prepare my taxes and hide my income in super secret bank accounts and sliced and diced financial instruments. Therefore I have to utilize my math skills to calculate how much to either remit to Ottawa or hopefully expect CRA to send to me as a Happy Summer gift.

Now in some jurisdictions the provincial tax is calculated as a percentage of the federal taxes owing, and in others it is a percentage of taxable income as determined after all deductions are taken both federal and provincial. Now I just used a random recent tax return of my own as a reference so my figures may not be accurate by 2012 rates, but then again our whining Mr. Dumpkoff is speaking of the evil dark nineties and I've thrown all those out by now anyway. The bullet point to take away though is that this percentage is generally quite small, and the year I referred to once one reached a taxable income slightly north of $28,000, the provincial share kicked in and ranged from 3.5% to 14.7% for the one percenter club types(this rate kicked in for those whose accountants couldn't reduce their taxable income below $97,000 .

Now my math skills may be more honed from use in trigonometry and calculus, due to my line of work before retirement rather than the more pedestrian arithmetic used in counting money. But I think they are still not so rusty that I can't figure out that some asshole whose PROVINCIAL income taxes increased by $6,000 over three years under the communist heel of Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark was doing quite well, thank you. Of course for people like this dude, things got even better when Gordo the Magnificent Crook took office and virtually eliminated pesky taxes for corporations and rich folks and then tried to unload what little they still had to pay onto the rest of us by imposing the HST, yet another form of INCOME REDISTRIBUTION upward. Funny thing though, guys like the Great Blogger and Mr. Dumb Dude never seem to have a problem with that form of income redistribution, after all as Stompin' Tom might have said

- "The job creators they call us,
we trinkle down to you.
We know our golden showers
will float the poor's canoe!