Finance committee  The marriage penalty?

Finance committee  If somebody who's a single parent is in a new relationship, unless they're in a new relationship with somebody who has no income, they're going to lose. If they move in together or get married, they will lose quite substantial amounts of CCTB. The numbers are large for low-income

Finance committee  Yes. With the WITB, it's not like that. If the CCTB looked liked more like the WITB, the problem wouldn't be so big.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  Basically, if you have a single parent who's earning $30,000 a year, and they have a relationship and they fall in love with somebody else who's also earning $30,000 a year, when they form a family, when they go from being a single parent with a net income of $30,000 to a two-par

Finance committee  Yes, if I were a government that was committed to providing tax relief to hard-working Canadian families, that's what I would look to do. I would look to take the CCTB and the UCCB and roll them together, address some of the concerns with marginal tax rates, and address some of t

Finance committee  I don't know. I'm really not fit to answer that question.

Finance committee  Yes. I would for sure.

Finance committee  To the question that the person running the NGO is now encouraged to step down from that position, yes, absolutely; I think this is why economists are concerned with efficiency. You're distorting people's choices, and you lose benefits when this happens. You start interfering wit

Finance committee  Yes. I would say that if you look at the poverty rates of families with children, there is no doubt the Canada child tax benefit has been part of really quite a remarkable reduction in poverty among families with children in this country. But there is certainly room for reducin

Finance committee  Basically, anything that reduces the cost of child care will increase female labour force participation. That's a very, very robust finding. I should also say that there are two issues; one is the cost of child care, the other is the availability of child care. Both dimensions a

Finance committee  You framed the question in terms of economic growth and so on. When there are more people working the national income will be higher.

Finance committee  When you're looking at efficiency, really you're looking at the marginal tax rates. Income splitting does raises the marginal tax rate faced by the lower-income spouse. What we know is lower-income spouses are most likely to be women, and women are more responsive. They are more

Finance committee  Well, sure, as soon as the second earner goes into the workforce, those tax savings from income splitting are lost, and so that raises the effective tax rate. When you have higher tax rates you have efficiency costs.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me to speak to you today. The first message for you is don't cut taxes. Although the federal budget is close to balance, the federal government still has substantial debt. Moreover, there are serious fiscal challeng