Policy Forum: Liability Without Control - The Curious Case of Pension Income Splitting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian pensioners are now allowed to split income from an employer pension and, in the case of people 65 and older, income from a registered retirement income fund, a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) annuity, and some other forms of annuity. In this commentary, I argue that pension income splitting has no efficiency benefits and involves significant revenue sacrifices. From an equity perspective, pension income splitting benefits some of the least needy taxpayers in Canadian society and inhibits equality between men and women. Administratively, pension income splitting under the current rules is inferior to a number of other methods of achieving the same distributional outcomes; in particular, it imposes tax liabilities on the lower-income spouse, who may lack the means to pay those liabilities. There are better ways of achieving the government's goals, such as allowing for retroactive conversion of personal to spousal RRSPs or transferring basic rate tax room as opposed to tax liabilities. There are also better ways of spending money on older Canadians - for example, expanding the reach of the guaranteed income supplement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.078 | 0.040 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".