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"Spending more on health care sounds like it should improve health, but our study suggests that is not the case and social spending could be used to improve the health of everyone," says Dr. Daniel Dutton, The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta. "Relative to health care, we spend little on social services per person, so redistributing money to social services from health care is actually a small change in health care spending."
Health care costs are expanding in many developed countries like Canada, and governments are seeking ways to contain costs while maintaining a healthy population. Treating the social determinants of health like income, education, or social and physical living environments through spending on social services can help address the root causes of disease and poor health. However, health spending continues to make up the lion's share of spending.
[...] The commentary author suggests governments should allocate social spending fairly for both young and old to ensure that the younger generation is not being shortchanged.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180122104016.htm
[Related]: The need for health in all policies in Canada
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:22AM (4 children)
Then obviously they're not paying "proper" tax now are they. They may be "legal", but that doesn't mean it's proper or appropriate.
What people seem to forget is that taxes for business only applies to actual PROFIT. And it's only a percentage of that profit. All the reinvestment, all the advertising, all the wages, all the equipment all the supplies and travel expenses are taken out before they even tax them on anything. This is meant to make sure you can't run into the negatives from taxation - you can't be bankrupted by it unless you're trying to do things under the table (hiring illegal immigrants for pennies compared to minimum wage for instance) at which point that's their fault. The problem is that corporations refuse to hand over any of the actual profits, so they start looking into extremely creative methods to dodge the tax they would have owed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
It's not actual profit till someone claims it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:57PM
I think the last few large discussions have melted your brain.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:18PM (1 child)
> The problem is that corporations refuse to hand over any of the actual profits
Actually the problem is that "actual profits" are a purely fictitious accounting construct and can easily be made to be any number you want, and can be shifted between tax jurisdictions at will using using transfer pricing, "intellectual property" (which doesn't physically exist but conveniently has any value you like), offshore loans and a million other tricks which actually have perfectly legitimate business uses in some cases, which makes them difficult to ban.
Actual cash is not a fictitious construct, is a lot harder to fake, and businesses that run out of it tend to expire rapidly, problem is we don't tax actual cash or cashflow or turnover, and any attempt to do so will run smack into a good hundred years+ of international tax treaties that are all based on the assumption that it is profits that are taxed. Hence sorting out corporate tax avoidance requires coordinated action at international level - don't hold your breath waiting for that.
Can try and tax cashflow / turnover indirectly with sales tax and/or VAT - but both those have their own faults and avoidance problems.
One thing we should be doing is cracking down on businesses that say one thing to investors about profits and another to the taxman - saw a multinational do this a couple of years ago, one week investors were told (I am pretty sure by a director) "our UK business is very profitable" and the next week the taxman was told "our UK business is running at a loss". Both of those cannot be true, and making false statements to investors _or_ to the taxman is an offense. Was it investigated? Guess. Multinationals change what their "profits" are all the time without penalty. This is the sort of thing that needs to stop.
Report a loss for tax (in X jurisdiction) = cannot pay dividends in X jurisdiction. Oops, that'll hurt the share price.
Report a loss for tax (in X jurisdiction) = management in X jurisdiction cannot take performance bonuses. Oops, that'll hurt.
["but what if they have international parent company share options" - well then they get 100% tax on any benefit because they didn't contribute to the success because on their own admission they _lost_ the company money]
And so on.
Of course then X jurisdiction becomes a really expensive place to do business and hence an expensive place to buy anything and the whole population complains that their country is a Rip Off.
Might as well just concentrate on taxing/charging the people - after all what is a corporation if not a collection of people?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:02PM
That's common sense, not a problem. And if you're not collecting the taxes, then you don't have to care whether it's a profit or not.