Conservative Senator Hugh Segal: Negative Income Tax

negative income tax: Many of you were intrigued by one possible answer we explored in Herald Opinions last weekend replacing all or most of our welfare and income-support programs with a negative income tax, or NIT, according to The Chronicle Herald. As last weeks articles by former NDP leader Ed Broadbent and Conservative Senator Hugh Segal demonstrated, the NIT has backers across the political spectrum. In the 1970s, both the Trudeau government in Ottawa and the Nixon administration in Washington which didnt see eye to eye on much else were taken with the NIT idea and set up pilot projects in Manitoba, New Jersey, Denver and Seattle to test whether it would prompt people to reduce their paid employment. Except for mothers staying home longer with small children and teens staying to finish high school, it didnt have much impact on working choices and How can we do a better job of reducing poverty without a maze of bureaucracy and without lodging people in a welfare trap? An NIT is a guarantee that anyone who falls below a specified income will receive payments through the tax system, just as anyone who earns more than the basic and family exemptions generally expects to pay tax. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.