A state of constant dread - Poverty Today
Bruce_the_vii @ Sat Jan 13, 2007 2:10 pm
Oh, tosh. Canada is an immigration country. People forget that the problem is too many jobs, and too many good jobs. This is a very wealthy nation, we should be proud of our record. Personnally, I don't believe any one of those people quoted really give a fuck.
This article sounds like an report by a staffer. A few quick statistics, CEO"s make a lot, and it's off home to the wife.
Scrappy @ Sat Jan 13, 2007 2:50 pm
I agree with the article, females in NS get cradle to grave welfare with No limitations on how many illigetimate children they can have. Welfare with no accountability. It's criminal alright, the tax payers are the victims.
The treatment of those on Disability Pensions is atrocious, they are given less than $9000 dollars a year to survive or die a slow death. Can you image paying into CPP for over 30 years and have a stroke and this is how we treat people? Starve them slowly to death?
Blue collar workers having to work two jobs to pay rent and eat.
The elderly forced (in NS) to pay for medical insurance, I guess 50-60 years of paying taxes means little in this country. If you can pop out a kid you are set for life, god help those who are ill, elderly and hard working. You don't stand a chance.
It's time to revamp social safty nets, the wrong people are getting the lion's share of our tax dollars. Three generations of the same families' on "Welfare" is enough. Get them into the job market and educate them.
If one is given everything on a silver platter they have no self worth, no selfesteem and no respect.
Quote: Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Deserata.
SJ-24 @ Sat Jan 13, 2007 4:27 pm
What's the best way to starve a socialist? Hide his welfare cheque under his work boots! 
Firecat @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 8:53 am
Scrappy Scrappy:
I agree with the article, females in NS get cradle to grave welfare with No limitations on how many illigetimate children they can have. Welfare with no accountability. It's criminal alright, the tax payers are the victims.
The treatment of those on Disability Pensions is atrocious, they are given less than $9000 dollars a year to survive or die a slow death. Can you image paying into CPP for over 30 years and have a stroke and this is how we treat people?
The treatment of those on Disability Pensions is atrocious, they are given less than $9000 dollars a year to survive or die a slow death. Can you image paying into CPP for over 30 years and have a stroke and this is how we treat people?
Now add raising two teens in the mix.
Intersting about this -- the Child Care Benefit from the federal government that gets sent to parents is clawed back by Disability. Any money you can make - half is deducted from any Disability you receive. You live dread of everything.
No snacks in my house. No money for them I afford one meal per day. It breaks my heart. My son (typical teen) goes to his Mom's house to get food because there isn't much at Dads. CPP Disability allows a certain amount extra per child BUTR - here's the kicker - the Mom gets it all, regardless that I have equal custody - So my ex can work, gets the extra for the kids - I cannot work, and have the kids the same amount of time.
She gives them spending money and has trhe cool snacks. My kids hate living with me because I can nevder have any kind of snackfood or "treat them" to anything ever.
Christmas is crushingly depressing for me. I can't contribute.
My monthly income is 1,309. No more is PERMITTED. Even what small part-time work I do becomes nearly nil after they claw back one half , tax the other half and I buy my bus pass. I "work" solely to get out one half-day a week. When the kids move out on their own, my benefit will be reduced accordingly (no argument there) but life will not ever get any easier. Ever.
I can rent out a room in my house -- and the same amount will be deducted... so loss of privacy with no net gain.. If my kids get their OWN part-time jobs that gets counted as "family income" and it gets deducted from me there too. So if they want to make their lives better it makes mine tougher.
The foundling cat I took in needs to be fixed soon.... it's going to be a hungry month.
Banff @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 8:55 am
SJ-24 SJ-24:
What's the best way to starve a socialist? Hide his welfare cheque under his work boots!
I work hard and make up to $70.00 per hour and have employed 1000 people but you pal , may two fully loaded tractor trailers have a high speed head on collision with you in the middle while you are running a red light ...little ignorant pr**k .
ridenrain @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:06 am
$1:
The Toronto Star's poverty scam
National Post
Published: Monday, January 15, 2007
On Saturday, the Toronto Star devoted the whole of its front page to "A State of Constant Dread: Poverty Today," a breathless piece of advocacy that ranks as one of the sloppiest pieces of Canadian journalism we've ever seen. The newspaper's evident goal is to promote a "national strategy" for combating poverty. But if an argument for such a campaign can be cobbled together only by nakedly misrepresenting the available data, as the Star has done, it doesn't say much for the cause. Whatever one's view of poverty in Canada, the Star's journalistic methods are an insult to its readers.
The central theme of "Constant dread" is that Canada is suffering a poverty epidemic. According to author David Olive, "one in six Canadians [is] trapped in poverty." Later, he tells us there are "five million Canadians living in poverty, more than one million of them children." Then he serves up the same statistic in a third form, lamenting the "15.5% of us mired in poverty." Having thus established the extraordinary prevalence of poverty in Canada, Mr. Olive proceeds with a stream of leftwing policy recommendations.
But astute Star readers might have noticed something odd: The statistic at the heart of the article, without which the whole argument falls apart -- the claim that 15.5% of Canadians are "mired in poverty" -- is never sourced. Why?
The reason is simple: The statistic is total nonsense. As Statistics Canada itself attests, Canada doesn't have an official poverty rate or an official poverty line -- something Mr. Olive and his editors somehow failed to mention in a lengthy article that purports to comprehensively describe the problem of poverty in this country. And so the number Mr. Olive draws upon might as well have been plucked out of thin air.
What, then, is the origin of the 15.5% figure? It has popped up in a number of other media publications, where it typically is sourced to the 2004 value of an official Canadian statistical indicator called the "low-income cut-off" (LICO). But LICO has nothing to do with poverty. Rather, it measures differences in relative wealth among Canadians. To calculate LICO, statisticians measure what proportion of income the average Canadian family spends on food, shelter and clothing. The LICO is pegged at that number, whatever it may be, plus 20 percentage points.
To understand how baseless it is to rely on LICO as a measure of poverty, consider this: If every single Canadian instantly had his or her income doubled, or tripled ... or multiplied by 100 -- if every one of us became millionaires overnight, and upgraded every aspect of our lifestyles in proportion to our newfound income -- the LICO would remain completely unchanged. (An outdated but widely cited 2000 UNICEF report about child poverty in Canada also yielded a 15.5% statistic -- though it, too, relied on a bogus measure of what its authors call "relative poverty.")
Even if one accepts the false conflation of poverty and LICO, the Star article is still botched. As Statistics Canada reported last year (citing after-tax data), "In 2004 [the last year comprehensively measured], about 3.5-million people were [under the LICO line]. They accounted for 11.2% of all Canadians in 2004, well below the peak of 15.7% in 1996. Among families, the proportion living in low income after taxes declined to 7.8% in 2004 from 8.5% the year before and a high of 12.1% in 1996." In other words, Mr. Olive's own distorted statistical methodology demonstrates that Canada is a country where poverty is a diminishing problem affecting less than 10% of families.
And what should Ottawa do to redress this imaginary poverty crisis? Why, implement the same laundry list of discredited left-wing policies the Star has been flogging for years, naturally -- including an increased minimum wage, universal day care and expanded welfare programs. None of these policies would do much to alleviate poverty, of course. As Andrew Coyne pointed out on this page last week, increasing the minimum wage -- Mr. Olive's peculiar obsession -- would actually hurt Canada's poorest workers. Any competent economist might have pointed this out to the Star reader -- if Mr. Olive had deigned to quote any. But instead, the Star writer confined his sound-bites to a cabal of hand-wringing anti-poverty activists and shrill leftwing politicians who are on-message with his "anti-poverty" agenda.
Interestingly, the piggyback editorial appearing on the Star's Saturday opinion pages makes no mention of the front page story's one-in-six hoax, but rather forthrightly declares that the objective of the newspaper's campaign (of which this is apparently the opening salvo) is to reduce "the gap between richest and poorest."
This formulation at least has the benefit of honesty: What bothers Canadian socialists about our prosperous knowledge economy isn't so much absolute poverty, but the broader phenomenon of income stratification, by which hard-working, well-educated, entrepreneurial Canadians exhibit that nasty habit of generating wealth and raising their lot above the national average. The only antidote to such an evil, the Star and others have concluded, is socialism, which reduces income disparities by impoverishing everyone.
The Star is free to champion a program of national economic suicide -- it's a free country, after all. But we'd appreciate it if they didn't pretend that this campaign was about "poverty." More importantly, we suspect their readers would appreciate if the Star's editors and authors didn't mangle the evidence to suit their dated, socialist agenda.
It's more than just bad journalism: It's dishonest.
National Post
Published: Monday, January 15, 2007
On Saturday, the Toronto Star devoted the whole of its front page to "A State of Constant Dread: Poverty Today," a breathless piece of advocacy that ranks as one of the sloppiest pieces of Canadian journalism we've ever seen. The newspaper's evident goal is to promote a "national strategy" for combating poverty. But if an argument for such a campaign can be cobbled together only by nakedly misrepresenting the available data, as the Star has done, it doesn't say much for the cause. Whatever one's view of poverty in Canada, the Star's journalistic methods are an insult to its readers.
The central theme of "Constant dread" is that Canada is suffering a poverty epidemic. According to author David Olive, "one in six Canadians [is] trapped in poverty." Later, he tells us there are "five million Canadians living in poverty, more than one million of them children." Then he serves up the same statistic in a third form, lamenting the "15.5% of us mired in poverty." Having thus established the extraordinary prevalence of poverty in Canada, Mr. Olive proceeds with a stream of leftwing policy recommendations.
But astute Star readers might have noticed something odd: The statistic at the heart of the article, without which the whole argument falls apart -- the claim that 15.5% of Canadians are "mired in poverty" -- is never sourced. Why?
The reason is simple: The statistic is total nonsense. As Statistics Canada itself attests, Canada doesn't have an official poverty rate or an official poverty line -- something Mr. Olive and his editors somehow failed to mention in a lengthy article that purports to comprehensively describe the problem of poverty in this country. And so the number Mr. Olive draws upon might as well have been plucked out of thin air.
What, then, is the origin of the 15.5% figure? It has popped up in a number of other media publications, where it typically is sourced to the 2004 value of an official Canadian statistical indicator called the "low-income cut-off" (LICO). But LICO has nothing to do with poverty. Rather, it measures differences in relative wealth among Canadians. To calculate LICO, statisticians measure what proportion of income the average Canadian family spends on food, shelter and clothing. The LICO is pegged at that number, whatever it may be, plus 20 percentage points.
To understand how baseless it is to rely on LICO as a measure of poverty, consider this: If every single Canadian instantly had his or her income doubled, or tripled ... or multiplied by 100 -- if every one of us became millionaires overnight, and upgraded every aspect of our lifestyles in proportion to our newfound income -- the LICO would remain completely unchanged. (An outdated but widely cited 2000 UNICEF report about child poverty in Canada also yielded a 15.5% statistic -- though it, too, relied on a bogus measure of what its authors call "relative poverty.")
Even if one accepts the false conflation of poverty and LICO, the Star article is still botched. As Statistics Canada reported last year (citing after-tax data), "In 2004 [the last year comprehensively measured], about 3.5-million people were [under the LICO line]. They accounted for 11.2% of all Canadians in 2004, well below the peak of 15.7% in 1996. Among families, the proportion living in low income after taxes declined to 7.8% in 2004 from 8.5% the year before and a high of 12.1% in 1996." In other words, Mr. Olive's own distorted statistical methodology demonstrates that Canada is a country where poverty is a diminishing problem affecting less than 10% of families.
And what should Ottawa do to redress this imaginary poverty crisis? Why, implement the same laundry list of discredited left-wing policies the Star has been flogging for years, naturally -- including an increased minimum wage, universal day care and expanded welfare programs. None of these policies would do much to alleviate poverty, of course. As Andrew Coyne pointed out on this page last week, increasing the minimum wage -- Mr. Olive's peculiar obsession -- would actually hurt Canada's poorest workers. Any competent economist might have pointed this out to the Star reader -- if Mr. Olive had deigned to quote any. But instead, the Star writer confined his sound-bites to a cabal of hand-wringing anti-poverty activists and shrill leftwing politicians who are on-message with his "anti-poverty" agenda.
Interestingly, the piggyback editorial appearing on the Star's Saturday opinion pages makes no mention of the front page story's one-in-six hoax, but rather forthrightly declares that the objective of the newspaper's campaign (of which this is apparently the opening salvo) is to reduce "the gap between richest and poorest."
This formulation at least has the benefit of honesty: What bothers Canadian socialists about our prosperous knowledge economy isn't so much absolute poverty, but the broader phenomenon of income stratification, by which hard-working, well-educated, entrepreneurial Canadians exhibit that nasty habit of generating wealth and raising their lot above the national average. The only antidote to such an evil, the Star and others have concluded, is socialism, which reduces income disparities by impoverishing everyone.
The Star is free to champion a program of national economic suicide -- it's a free country, after all. But we'd appreciate it if they didn't pretend that this campaign was about "poverty." More importantly, we suspect their readers would appreciate if the Star's editors and authors didn't mangle the evidence to suit their dated, socialist agenda.
It's more than just bad journalism: It's dishonest.
source
hwacker @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:16 am
Ah the Red Star, making up things again, Avro swallowed it up hook line and sinker.
ridenrain @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:17 am
It's not for you.
It's simply the response to the "dated, socialist agenda" you cut & pasted. People can read both and make up their own minds.
But I agree Hwacker. Looks like Avro let his dated, socialist agenda affect his critical reading skills.
Banff @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:20 am
lily lily:
$1:
But anti-poverty activists note Statistics Canada defines low income in the GTA as below $32,500 a month for a family of four.
Wow... I'm a lot poorer than I thought.
And Banff - I agree. Sometimes after reading one SJ's posts, I remember why I'm a liberal.
Right , I'm not intentionally trying to be rude to SJ or specificly focusing on that one post ...its the accumulation grrrrrrr its maddening to see someone respond so arrogantly and without trying to enter conversation with at least a little personality . Geez its come to a point where the guy is politicaly neither liberal , con , or neo con , or even communist ...just plain old self serving grrrrrrrrrrrrr his talk is the exact reason why unions were created .Sorry SJ but get a grip man ...lose the noose avatar or something ...anything sheeeesh!
Firecat @ Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:25 am
It's always a comfort to the right wing to discount statistics as though that somehow makes the problem go awa, because it's easier be unmoved by a number like (let's say 10% if they don't like 15%) How many is that? 3 MILLION people.
3 MILLION in the worlds leading economy.
How is that tolerable to people?