Family Tax Cut: A Tax Cut for the Rich

The Family Tax Cut that the Conservatives say makes “the tax system fairer” disproportionately benefits one-income families with very high household incomes. I ran some numbers using the excellent Income Tax Estimator available here to find out how much benefit accrues to a one-income household with two children at various income levels. If you look at dollar amounts, families with incomes of $50K or less will save little to nothing under the Tory income-splitting proposal. But, as you can see in the following graphic, families with household income exceeding $100,000 will save substantial amounts on their income taxes.

One could argue that, of course, higher income families would save more because they pay more in taxes. So, let’s look at the percentage of income tax a household could save when the Family Tax Cut is implemented. Ideally, what we’d like to see is lower income households saving a higher percentage on their income taxes than a household with a higher income. But, as the following graphic shows, that’s not the case with the Family Tax Cut. A household earning $50K will save 13% on their federal income taxes, which is less than the 16% that a household earning $200K would save. Single-income households with a household income of $90K will save a stunning 29% on their federal taxes.