In her budget speech, Chrystia Freeland, defending the government’s capital gains tax hike to a two-thirds inclusion rate for amounts over $250,000 in a given year, suggested that without the tax hike kids would go hungry — a reference to the government’s National School Food Program. “Do you want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry?” she asked. If not, she remarked, stop complaining and pay up. This of course is nonsense: even if the federal government wanted to insert itself into the provincial responsibility of schooling with a food program, then defunding the CBC, as one easy example, would pay for it seven times over. There is no need for higher taxes.