After 87 Years, It Is Time To Fix the Income Tax Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On Sept. 20, 1917, the federal government promulgated the Income WarTax Act to help fund Canada’s strained war effort. Income taxes quicklybecame a central feature of Canada’s tax system, with Ottawa and theprovinces now using it to collect over $200 billion annually in personal and corporate taxes. In fact, income tax is the most important source of government revenue. The Act’s introduction provoked a substantial debate over key issues affecting the livelihood of Canadians, including the effect of an income tax on Canada’s competitiveness. Its major flaw was its discrimination against productivity-enhancing investment. The 10-page 1917 Act, mercifully short compared to today’s volumes of tax legislation and regulations, reflected both simplicity and the economic relationships of that time. Individuals paid no taxes if income was less than $1,500 and the top rate of 25 percent applied to incomes above $100,000. Married individuals, or those with dependants, had an extra $2,000 exemption. By comparison with today, after adjusting for inflation, taxes were much less punitive in 1917. For example, using 2004 dollars, no single individual with an income less than $25,980 would have paid tax, while today the federal exemption level is $8,012. The top rate in 1917
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.007 |
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".