The second paper should address the decision by Canadian families to rent or buy houses. In this course, you have learned that homeownership offers significant tax advantages to Canadians. Yet a McMaster Professor (Frank Tristani) suggests to his students that the choice is not clearcut, and that buying may cost families more in the long run than renting. Are these two views compatible? You can begin this assignment by reading carefully the sections in your text and in the problem sets dealing with home ownership, and by reading some of the arguments made by Professor Tristani (these can be found through the internet, including an article in the Globe and Mail by Rob Carrick that can be found at
Your paper should explain both the tax advantages on buying your own home in Canada, and the suggestions by Professor Tristani that home ownership might not be advantageous. Can you reconcile these two views? What particular assumptions are involved in an argument against home ownership, and what assumptions are involved in an argument in favour of home ownership. When you graduate from University and have a regular job, what would lead you to favour homeownership, and what would lead you to favour renting. Finally, have the tax advantages for ownership been good or bad for Canada? State the arguments on both sides clearly and draw your own conclusion.
Requirements:
Your papers must be no longer than 1500 words (about 5-6 typed double-spaced pages, using normal margins and normal print). Longer papers will be penalized. The penalty will increase with the amount that you exceed the limit (naturally, there will be no penalty for slightly exceeding 1500 words, but the point at which the penalty will be assessed is not specified, as is true for many legal penalties!). At the bottom of your paper you must state the number of words in your paper (Microsoft Word provides this information under Tools, subheading Wordcount; other wordprocessing packages also provide this information; you may omit the references from your wordcount if you like; be honest, because we have been known to count words!). You must double-space your papers and leave margins of at least 1 inch (2.5 cm) at the top, bottom, and both sides of the paper. Again, there will be penalties for untyped papers or papers not conforming to spacing or margin requirements. They will be accepted, but will be penalized up to 8 marks (depending on the nature of the violation).
In general you may want to do some additional research for each paper (beyond the reading list). Since both papers deal with issues that are real and recent, you can probably find lots of discussion of the taxation issues by using the normal search engines on the Internet. If you are having trouble finding out what you need, ask a librarian for help. You should of course provide complete references and footnotes, even to works from the reading list. Do not plagiarize. Cheating will be dealt with severely. Keep in mind that this is a paper in Public Finance, not in Tax Law or Tax Accounting – a good grade will depend on your ability to tie your analysis into the concepts learned in this course. In the past, students with access to accountant (eg. relatives) have occasionally turned in papers that present an analysis of the issues that is not particularly useful in this course.
A separate note on use of the internet: Many students use the internet to do research, in this and other courses. This is fine, but you should carefully footnote references, just as if you had gotten a book out of the library. Copying material off an internet site and representing it as your own is plagiarism, and the University takes that very seriously. You should also be aware of the obvious point that the internet does not have anyone controlling it. Often very useful sources will appear on your search engine side-by-side with sites that are complete garbage. It is your task, if you use the internet, to differentiate between the two! Librarians can help you do that.
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