Steve22 sez:

[QUOTE] I am a lower income resident living in the city of Toronto. I am dismayed and appalled at this apparrent support for the wealthy Ontario residents at the expense of less wealthy. [QUOTE]

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This is a bit concerning in that Steve makes out that all the wealthy people in Ontario are Jewish. This just isn't so.

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Steve states in his message:

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This list is only the tip of the iceberg, and makes me wonder whether the CJC is only here to protect the wealthy.

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Maybe I am wrong and if so I appologize to Steve for my misunderstanding.

This is not really my point though. My point is, that some are upset not because they didn't get something, but others did too. Why should wealthy people pay twice simply because they want to give their kids what is in their opinion the best education they can?

Let's get down to brass tacks and explore some numbers.

If you make $30,000 a year and you gotta pay 30% on that income with no exemptions whatsoever, you're on the hook for 9 grand. That's a helluva chunk to take out of someone's income when they're trying to keep their heads above water in the first place.

If you make $300,000 a year and you gotta pay 30%, that's $90,000. Big deal. You're still left with $210,000 to play with and if anybody in here wants to whine that you can't live on 210 grand a year, then I submit to you that you need spending cuts.

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A question for you, SW: I don't have children in any school system. At any given time, actually, a majority of citizens do not have children in the school system. Why are all of us still paying school taxes?

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But democracies are not states of nature. This is observable, first; and book-learnable, second. They appear in history for reasons; and they collapse and disappear for reasons, a main one being that a majority of citizens no longer understand the basic principles they are responsible for defending, and no longer care to defend them.

Democratic rights and freedoms are not self-evident, and can be very difficult to defend. It is very much in my interest that other people's children, all the children in my community, learn to care about those rights and freedoms, not so that they can go about banging their fists on desks and declaring that they know their rights, but so that they will defend mine, as I defend theirs.

I have zero problem paying for other people's kids to get educated. Hell, I'd pay extra if I knew it was going straight to the schools. Schools are needed. We have to educate our youth, or we'll end up with a big ol' nation of dimwits.

Being just past the edge of low-income into a higher tax bracket this year due to some lovely stock options coming into play, I have to say it's horrible to make $27G and only take home $18G of it. It's still three times as much as my parents make, so to me I'm rich, but when I think that nearly half of my pay went to someone else, it makes me slightly ill.

But then I think, well, to hell with it. It's not money I ever had anyway, coming straight out of my paycheck. And besides, it pays for things that affect me in other ways. So then I don't think of it any more and just enjoy what I have.

I mean, really.

You think lawyers drop out of the sky? You think doctors appear sometime out of nowhere? You think plumbers and electricians pop fully formed out of the ether like Athena out of the head of Zeus? Uh uh. You want people around to maintain our society? Then we need public education. And we all benefit from it: in the form of educated citizens, in the form of people qualified to take on jobs by which we benefit (unless you don't want doctors around when you get old? or you think only rich people's kids should be able to achieve that?), in the form of children productively occupied and not outdoors bored out of their mind stirring up mischief. The public benefit is tremendous. We ALL benefit; therefore we all pay.

Should I pay only for roads I drive on? Should I pay only for sewer pipes I use? Should I pay only for hospitals I frequent? Really. What a ridiculous, selfish and short-sighted argument.

Gayle: Every once in a while I feel teh same way. But if you want to feel better about your tax dollars, try the following mental trick.

List everything you get for it:

Roads. Sewers. Water pipes and treatment plants. Landfills. Electricity generating stations. Doctors, lawyers, accountants (the education thing). Lawmakers. Laws. Police to enforce them. Judges, courts, prisons, guards. Street lighting. Subsidies to the arts. Guaranteed income if you fall sick, are fired, become unemployed for a long time. Maternity leave, for yourself if you want it, for other women if you don't. Garbage collection. Recycling. Collective composting initiatives. Houses that don't fall down. Gas pipes that don't explode. Free doctors visits. Subsidized medication (everyone in Canada gets their drugs cheaper than they get them in the States). Old age pensions. Every four years, a ballot. Town halls and legislatures. Scientific research. Funding for NGOs. Snow clearing. and on and on and on.

Really, for all that, $7000 doesn't seem like so much anymore, does it? Certainly it's way cheaper than it would be if we all tried to provide for these things ourselves, out of our own purses.

We're all so used to all thsi stuff, we take it for granted; it's largely invisible to us. But our taxes pay for a tremendous number and level of services. Last year I paid about $10,000 in taxes. Worth every penny.

Two years hence, almost, I say that while nothing is wrong with being wealthy per se, not acknowledging all the breaks you got and all the help you got getting there is wrong.

If you don't like what is being offered change it. Join the parents advisory councils or run for the school board. Or advocate someone else who will.

Financing private education with public money, erodes the public system.