Income Splitting Déjà Vu

This blog’s unofficial slogan has been “Tomorrow’s conventional wisdom, today.” After this week’s Conservative backpedaling on income splitting, we may need to change it to “Today’s conventional wisdom, seven years ago.” Or we could just stick with “You read it here first.”

My first-ever blog post, Income Splitting Redux, argued that this tax policy “would benefit an affluent minority at the expense of important public programs and create a disincentive for women to engage in paid employment.” I made the same case in an opinion editorial published in The Ottawa Citizen seven years ago this month and revived it during the last federal election campaign.

That critique now seems to have garnered widespread agreement, even though the numbers are a bit less dramatic for the Conservative platform proposal to allow spouses with children to shift up to $50,000 for tax purposes than for unlimited income splitting between spouses.