Taxing times

In more ways than one

THE CANADA REVENUE AGENCY took a chunk of tax money out of my bank account this morning. Which, fortunately, I’d been expecting.

Better to let it go in four quarterly instalments than one painfully hefty fistful at the end of the year.

Retirement doesn’t just involve lollygagging in bed till all hours, cheaper transit fares and a monthly old-person’s discount day at the cat-food store.

Living life “like lamb and salad,” as my mother would have said.

(A colloquialism apparently unknown outside northeast England. Quite evocative, though.)

Not so much, no.

When you transition from a regular paycheque, with deductions already deducted, to a pension, the government still wants a cut and you’re responsible for seeing that they get their due.

Or paying the interest when they catch up with you. And they will.

The CRA estimates how much you’ll owe by the end of the year and divvies it up into four payments, which you then authorize your bank to cough up.

Not a terrible system. And when Lesley, who’s aces at this stuff, did my tax return a couple of months ago, I actually got some money back.

It almost covered what I gave them this morning…

Some people take taxes as a personal insult. Not much point in that. One way or another, you’ll wind up paying anyway, and Canada’s social safety net could be a lot worse.

As always, we cast a jaundiced eye to the south, where radical surgery is underway — without anaesthesia — on America’s Medicaid system, which is supposed to provide health care to low-income people.

What the hell. Give them an aspirin and tell them to stop moaning.

Sorry. I meant sell them an aspirin. No freebies in the Land of the Free.

Trump has returned there, departing the G7 summit in Alberta early. Perhaps because his steak wasn’t large enough, well enough done or sufficiently ketchuped.

I suspect he left the other heads of state breathing a collective, collaborative and cooperative sigh of relief.

He’s back in Washington ostensibly to further muddy the waters in the Israel-Iran conflict.

But it may well be to brood some more over his debacle of a birthday parade. It’s been much on his mind since Saturday.

The images are all over the internet.

Trump squatting there like a toad (no disrespect to short-bodied, tailless amphibian vertebrates), a petulant, addled old man.

Some of the time he looked bored, a couple of times he appeared to be dozing off.

I’ve even seen speculation that it wasn’t Melania sitting next to him, but a body double. If that’s true, then whatever she was paid, it wasn’t enough.

(Though, on reflection, she probably won’t be paid.)

Trump reportedly is blaming Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth for the parade being “convivial” rather than the “menacing” show of force that befits a tyrant.

The squeaky tanks didn’t help.

There’s been lots of speculation as to whether the troops ambling along the route weren’t marching properly in step either as a calculated slight to their commander-in-chief, or because they simply couldn’t be bothered.

Some of them even (gasp) waved at what passed for a crowd. All of their fingers, too.

Trump, it’s said, accused them of “hamming it up.”

Hegseth could be out on his ear over this. There are any number of better reasons why he should be, but this could be the one that swings it.

Bad enough already that his name is an anagram of “get the sheep.”

Poor Pete.

We all have our cross to bear.

But at least mine’s paid off for the moment.