Madam Speaker, I appreciate the participation of the member opposite who is a member of the finance committee. I believe he is a very astute member of that committee and mostly does his math right.
I was very interested in his presentation of the facts. I believe his characterization of our members is not accurately portraying the facts and is probably a bit of stretch, if I can be kind. We do have a deep desire on this side of the House to deal with the facts, to debate the issues and to avoid personal attacks such as we get from the member who spoke before him over and over again to the point where it really does decrease the respect people have for members of parliament.
He thought Reform's agenda was just to reduce the taxes for those who make over $60,000. We know there are marginal tax rates which are so very important to many Canadians, in particular to poor Canadians. If we take into account moving out of the income bracket where one is eligible for some of these so-called benefits the Liberal government and the Conservative government before it arranged in the tax system for people, when we think of the loss of eligibility for those programs, as one's income goes up the effective tax clawback or tax rate on that marginal income is extremely high.
Unfortunately I do not have the numbers with me but one the calculations I saw put that number at around 60%. I think the income level was around $25,000 a year for a family. If it earned more money because of the total impact not just in the tax scheme but on the family budget, it meant that basically some 60% of its additional earnings was lost. It was not effective to give it more income.
With respect to the so-called rich, we know that many families earning $60,000 and more are just ordinary families nowadays trying to make ends meet. Both people are working because they cannot live on one income. Many of them are forced into that. We know that the marginal tax rate is around 50% when one combines federal and the provincial taxes. I do not think that I have ever heard of a person whose annual income is $1 million a year paying anywhere near $500,000 in taxes. For the hon. member to accuse us of wanting to give a tax break to the very wealthy is perhaps empty because it seems to me that the very wealthy already do avoid those taxes.