Columnist needs a math tutor. (Letters to the Editor).

I enjoy your magazine but I disagree with articles such as the May Back Page "Minimum Wage Increase Little More than a Tax Grab' This must have arisen out of desperate search for a topic, or paranoia, but the article is "little more than an attention grab."

From the earner's perspective, the article indicates that a five per cent increase is really four per cent. I'm sure this is not uniformly true because many of these earners get far less than the 1,920 hours assumed annually in the article. Any amounts paid to CPP and EI are closer to insurance and savings than to taxes. For those who do pay some tax, so what? If most of us get a raise, we pay some tax on it, as part of the price of living in the civilized society. Should raises be banned? Or just raises for the lowest paid?

For employers, the article says that the five per cent increase is really seven per cent. This is stated without justification or explanation, and is just plain wrong. The employer increase in cost is obviously

(1008.40 + 33.67 + 31.05/960 + 31.41 + 29.57) - 1 = (1073.12/1020.98) - 1 = .051068 = 5.1%

for the example presented. And 5.1 per cent is not the seven per cent given in the article.

For the government the increases are listed as 19 per cent and 17 per cent, etc. Part of this is not income taxation but CPP and El which give rise to liabilities as well as revenue of course. But overall, the percentages are meaningless in this context. If you do a similar example with half the hours the governments would take zero tax. What would you accuse them of then -- undue generosity?

If you want to accuse the governments of a tax grab, then justify your position properly instead of attempting a low-level "how-to-mislead-with-percentages" course. Show us how much more tax revenue it gets, compared to what it gets before the change to get a meaningful comparison. You should note that a low earner could pay no tax, and then suddenly get a $100 raise that made him taxable. At any rate, the tax increase from zero would be infinitely large! What a tax grab eh?

I don't mind your demanding honesty of our governments, but your articles doing so must be honest themselves.

Larry Miller 

Saskatoon