Thursday, March 4, 2010

Today’s Globe article recommends Marshall Savings Plan


Ignoring the fact that Globe readers voted “Changes to income trust rules” as readers’ number one budget wish by a large margin, the Globe instead ignores those results completely and runs an article on Budget Day entitled ““Flaherty’s trust tax not so scary after all” written by some complete unknown, Larry MacDonald.

Talk about deliberately leading of the news to promote the commercial agenda of the Globe’s four owners, BCE, Teachers’, Torstar and the Thomson billionaires.

In its continuing effort to mislead Canadians about Flaherty’s highly regressive and totally destructive income trust tax the Globe actually ends up endorsing the need and enormous benefit of the Marshall Savings Plan., since the articles advises:

“Returns will be higher to holding trusts outside tax-deferred accounts. That’s because they will be eligible to claim the dividend tax credit when the trust converts to corporations or continues to operate as a trust after January 1, 2011”

What this Larry MacDonald person is pointing out is that the government has created a condition where it is no longer attractive to use the RRSP to save for retirement at a time when the government should be doing everything in its power to make things more attractive for people to save for retirement to deal with the demographic time bomb.

Furthermore the point that Larry MacDonald is making, may be valid, it is also totally facile in the absence of the Marshall Savings Plan. Just exactly how does Larry MacDonald propose to move some $80 billion of trusts that are captive in RRSPs into cash accounts? Just where is that money going to come from Larry MacDonald? People barely have enough spare cash to make their RRSP contribution for the year, and this person is advocating that people will be okay from Flaherty’s rapacious income trust tax “simply” by buying these securities out from their RRSPs with money they don’t have.

This is what the Marshall Savings Plan overcomes., as it allows people to take what was once an efficient vehicle to own within an RRSP, that Larry MacDonald is acknowledging is NOT an efficient vehicle to own within and RRSP, except his recommended advice is completely impractical and NON OPERATIVE, whereas the same result CAN BE ACHIEVED if the government were to mitigate the DAMAGE IT HAS CAUSED by creating the Marshall Savings Plan solution, which by the way, obviates the reason why the lame brain Harper government sought to kill income trusts in the first place, since the Marshall Savings Plan turns Flaherty’s falsely alleged tax leakage into today’s hard cash currency for the government.

2 comments:

Dr Mike said...

Trust investors have been caught in a situation not of our own making.

We owned trusts inside our RRSPs because they were interest producers & as such there was no need for the dividend tax credit.

These are great investments , real money makers so why switch out.

The problem is that thru no fault of our own , these are converting to dividend payers & dropping their payout accordingly to reflect the availability of the tax credit.

Now we are stuck in a situation where our income is reduced because we do not have access to this credit.

The phrase uttered often by Jimmy himself comes to mind "It`s not my fault".

The least the gov`t could do is correct this mess they foisted on us & allow us to move these units tax free into a pure taxable account--no tax implications should apply as they made this situation , not us.

The marshall plan is the only way out.

Dr Mike Popovich

Anonymous said...

Paul Szabo: My favorite MP!

Carswell