Statistics Canada can be your friend. CANSIM 204-0001 to be precise.
You don't have to manipulate numbers.
There are roughly 221, 455 who earn below the $29,600 median income for all tax filers in Newfoundland and Labrador. The figures are for 2013, but the general pattern still applies.
The average income in that group was $15,900. The median income (precise half-way point) was $16,600.
Two things: the average person in this income bracket will NOT pay any of the levy because their gross income is less than the floor on the program.
Second thing: the amount of gross income for these focus would be something around $3.5 billion if we used the average figure. That's twice what you claimed. Note that they pay about five percent of the total provincial income government tax haul.
Among the crowd above the half-way point for income, you have 197,380 people. They make - on average - $71,400 each. That gives you about $14 billion.
No matter how you slice it, the problem is not that we don't take enough from the folks in the top. The problem is that the people on the lower side of the divide make so very little. What we should be doing is trying to figure out a way to build those folks up, not find a way to suck more out of the other half.
You see, those 221,000 folks paid an average of $700 each in federal AND provincial taxes. That's $155 million in total to both governments. The other half of the population paid $2.8 billion.
If you have people making $3.5 billion who pay $155 million in tax, they are giving, collectively about four percent of their income to income tax. The folks on the other side of the line are paying 20%, collectively. That's five times as much.
And you have to remember that the bulk of those folks on the high side of the divide are making a lot less than the folks on the sunshine list, on average. There's not a lot of room to suck cash from the middle, in other words.
The numbers tell one story, honestly, without any manipulation beyond addition, and the other math functions.
The numbers will lie if you try to do math using ideology.
Don't manipulate numbers, Brian.
-srbp-