Citizens above ground may not have noticed it, but hell froze over recently when Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, endorsed - wait for it - tax cuts.

The former head of the BC Federation of Labour announced it was time for low and middle-income earners to get a tax break. It's nice to see Mr. Georgetti finally on board the tax cuts bandwagon.

Too bad big labour's new chief hopped on just after, oh, big business, small business, the Fraser Institute, the CD Howe Institute, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Caledon Institute, Saskatchewan's NDP government, the Reform Party, Tories, Liberals, yogic flyers, taxi drivers, and about 99.9% of Canadians who are not A: the head of a major union conglomerate, or B: the Prime Minister.

Mr. Georgetti's timing is impeccable, sort of like the admission from the Catholic Church a couple of years back that, yes, Galileo had a point all those years ago about the earth revolving around the sun.

Still, a convert is a convert, and now that he is on board, it may help to define who exactly qualifies as low and middle income.

For example, to take taxpayers bumped up into the top tax bracket by inflation over the past decade, back down to middle-income tax brackets would look like a break for the rich, something Mr. Georgetti still opposes. In actual fact though, such a move would only restore some taxpayers to their rightful place in a tax system properly indexed for inflation.

Here is why: The top federal tax bracket now kicks in at $59,180. Those below that tax bracket are, obviously, middle-income taxpayers, since they don't pay the top tax rate. Problem: If that bracket had been properly indexed for inflation since 1988, it would actually be $73,981.

Raise that bracket to its proper place and some taxpayers that were thrust into the top tax bracket by inflation would be put back in the middle-income bracket.

That will present problems for Mr. Georgetti if he would like to continue bashing tax cuts for wealth-creators. His rhetorical opposition to tax cuts for higher incomes may slowly melt away as well though, and for reasons barely yet discussed.

The first is that most of the middle and high-income surtaxes imposed over the past fifteen years were all dumped on taxpayers' heads with the excuse that they were necessary to end deficits. (An excuse which conveniently ignored the possibility of spending cuts, and the fact that higher taxes tend to grind down an economy's engine, thus reducing tax revenues in the long run.)

Fact is, since most jurisdictions have eliminated their deficits (except the one in BC, who kept taking Mr. Georgetti's previous advice,) it is time to start dumping deficit surtaxes, especially at the federal level.

Another reason we may yet see Mr. Georgetti endorse high-income tax breaks is that now some of them "rich folk" are starting to show up in his constituency. Part of his present conversion to a tax cuts agenda may be explained by the fact that so many autoworkers in Ontario voted for Mike Harris and his tax cuts agenda in the last provincial election.

Since some of those autoworkers have now been thrust into the top tax bracket, the traditional bash-the-rich rhetoric is unlikely to sustain itself much longer either.

Congratulations are in order to Mr. Georgetti for endorsing the legitimate need for tax relief in Canada. Who knows Maybe one day he will also discover what destructive high marginal rates do to wealth creation and the resulting effect that has upon wage growth and job creation. A degree or two colder in Hades is really not that difficult since the flames have already been turned off.