Quote:
Originally Posted by Yakk
I already subsidize your family to a huge extent. I'd be willing to make that 650 a month tax-deductable, it being a cost of employment, but building a government child care program is a bit much.
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I'm not entirely sure how you meant that, and I hope you didn't mean it as you wrote it. That's incredibly presumptuous to the point of rude if so. You don't subsidize my family at all. We pay money to the government, not receive it, and proudly so.
That being said, we're looking at this from two separate perspectives. The argument you use is sound, and of course, correct. My argument is approaching this from another perspective.
Let’s assume we use your numbers, because I find no fault in them at all. Let’s assume that she does go to work, for 12 dollars an hour (which by the way in my neck of the woods, not happening. But I'm pretty sure that’s doable anywhere else in Canada), and send her child to daycare at a cost I believe we both agree on. All being said, with what she takes home, she cannot survive. The amount of money that she would bring home, deducting rent, childcare costs, food, utilities, essentials such as a small budget for clothes etc, if she DOES manage to somehow get by living in a cheaper part of the country, leaves absolutely nothing to allow for educational upgrades or spending on the child.
Now, my perspective is this. Let’s do as you say and allow the daycare costs to be deducted from taxable income. Molly goes to work, making, using the numbers, a total of 23160 a year, or 1930 a month. Before, using the taxable combined rate in BC, she would be paying 425.57 a month in taxes, taking home 1504.43 a month. Now, using the new numbers, with daycare rate deducted from the taxable income, molly has a taxable income of 15360 and pays 282.24 a month in taxes, taking home 1647.76.
Rent:650 (lets assume she lives in the ghetto)
Daycare: 650 a month
food: 200 dollars a month
We're up to 1500 dollars a month in expenses and she's eating rice every night without a telephone.
You see, we're approaching this from separate perspectives, and both of us are right in one way. But even with the daycare removed from taxable income molly could not support the family.
Feel free to poke holes in that. It's an open discussion and I'm never always right (according to my wife, its actually quite rarely I am). But unless I'm misunderstanding your perspective, which I don't believe I am, I don't think what you have offered provides a solution more than a band-aid to the people we are both talking about.