(10-05-2012, 08:37 PM)ShadowHM Wrote: No, those of us with our 'weird modern job name-manager which actually make a lot more money' jobs would have a bit less money, but our socialist national goverments might have more tax revenue, due to actually receiving income tax from those citizens who now are unemployed to help pay for the services all citizens receive.
Let's back-of-the-envelope those numbers, in the best case scenario where this actually works - although I still maintain we have very little reason to suspect it would. Unemployment is at about 7.5%, and emp/pop is at historical levels, so we can pick up somewhere around 3 to 4% of the labour force before reaching full employment. Let's call that 2% of the population extra, employed, and paying taxes. That's 700,000 people. Now let's be generous and say that these people enter the labour force well above the ground floor - at $40,000 per year. Assuming no deductions, that's about $7000 in taxes per year. That's 4.9 billion in extra tax revenue.
That would pay for slightly less than 2% of the budget. That's not peanuts, but it's not going to radically alter the Canadian tax base. It might pay for the CBC, but it's not going to pay for major redistribution or social programs. If there are even minor inefficiencies involved in severely reducing our international trade (to better reflect our localist values, but at the cost of cheap goods), then we'll lose more than we gain.
Given Canada's situation as a very open economy (our trade share of GDP is something like 40%, which means of everything we make, about 40% of it goes to other countries, and of everything we consume, 40% comes from other countries), I strongly suspect that a trade disruption of that magnitude (even if we kept trading with the US) would have huge negative effects on efficiency, and hence, on the tax base.
It's also assuming that we don't lose any tax revenue at all from those "weird modern job title manager" people, who make up the largest parts of our tax base...
-Jester