How paying people’s way out of poverty can help us all
andyt @ Fri May 06, 2011 9:39 am
The part I'm not sure I agree with is lowering taxes on the lowest paid. That shifts the burden to all taxpayers, instead of business where it belongs. Let business absorb the cost by paying higher wages, so that even lower income workers contribute taxes. Or, raise the corporate tax back up to pay for the tax decreases for the working poor.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/how-paying-peoples-way-out-of-poverty-can-help-us-all/article2011940/
$1:
Behind corridors lined with contemporary Canadian art, sitting at a dark wooden table in his downtown Toronto office, Ed Clark offers some economic advice that might not typically come from Bay Street.
Give the poor a tax break.
“I say, ‘Why don’t you cut the taxes of the most overtaxed people?’ It isn’t Ed Clark,” the Toronto-Dominion Bank CEO said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s the people at the low end, because they face the highest marginal tax rates.”
It may seem an uncommon prescription in his neck of the woods. But there’s an increasing awareness, among even the country’s most wealthy, that poverty reaches beyond the tables of the hungry and digs into their own pocketbooks.
When people are poor, out of work or homeless, it hurts the bottom line of all Canadians. And as the country struggles to maintain a shaky recovery amid growing global economic uncertainty, that’s not a hit they can afford to take.
If Ottawa and the provinces fail to make this a priority, Tory Senator Hugh Segal predicts, “over time, we will begin to run out of the money that we need to deal with the demographic bulge because it will be consumed in the health care requirements of the poor, which will increase. It will be consumed in the costs of the illiteracy and unemployment which relate to poverty. ... And it'll be unsustainable.”
It’s not just Canada’s problem: Income inequality is sparking social unrest in the Middle East, North Africa and China.
It rang alarm bells at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s conference in Paris this week, where the think tank warned that if a slew of countries – from Sweden to Canada to the United Kingdom – don’t take drastic action by raising taxes for the richest, they risk runaway increases in inequality....
It’s already on the radar of some provinces: One of Christy Clark’s first actions as B.C. Premier was to raise the province’s minimum wage for the first time in a decade and offer a tax cut for low-income families. Ontario has launched a sweeping review of social assistance programs that Community and Social Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur has admitted are failing the province’s neediest....
The ranks of the working poor have swelled as minimum wages fail to keep pace with rising costs and social assistance levels drop.
“The economy took a hit and then is coming back up,” TD’s Mr. Clark said. “But what Canada’s economy will look like coming out of this is different than when we were coming in to it. The result of the shift in world economic conditions ... all means that the skill sets you need are shifting. Globalization is good for the world as a whole, but its benefits are not equally distributed.”...
Homelessness costs taxpayers money – in both foregone wealth and social service spending. As evidence of the social and financial costs of inequality mounts, a growing body of research indicates paying to get people out of poverty can be an economic boon.
Calgary’s business community crunched the numbers: It costs four times more to pay for a year’s worth of emergency shelter, emergency-room medical care and law-enforcement for one homeless person than it costs to fund that person’s supportive housing for a year.
More recent figures have backed them up when it comes to the costs of poverty: A study earlier this year from Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital found homeless patients cost hospitals an average of $2,559 more than their housed counterparts.
At the same time, research into projects that guaranteed people a minimum annual income indicated savings in everything from social services and health care to law enforcement.
The irony is that Canada already scores high compared to other OECD countries when it comes to helping the elderly. Where it falls short is where it matters: The working-age poor – the ones who should be contributing to the economy.
“With respect to working-age poverty, our numbers are really bad,” Mr. Segal said. “And that’s where we need to do more.”
Give the poor a tax break.
“I say, ‘Why don’t you cut the taxes of the most overtaxed people?’ It isn’t Ed Clark,” the Toronto-Dominion Bank CEO said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s the people at the low end, because they face the highest marginal tax rates.”
It may seem an uncommon prescription in his neck of the woods. But there’s an increasing awareness, among even the country’s most wealthy, that poverty reaches beyond the tables of the hungry and digs into their own pocketbooks.
When people are poor, out of work or homeless, it hurts the bottom line of all Canadians. And as the country struggles to maintain a shaky recovery amid growing global economic uncertainty, that’s not a hit they can afford to take.
If Ottawa and the provinces fail to make this a priority, Tory Senator Hugh Segal predicts, “over time, we will begin to run out of the money that we need to deal with the demographic bulge because it will be consumed in the health care requirements of the poor, which will increase. It will be consumed in the costs of the illiteracy and unemployment which relate to poverty. ... And it'll be unsustainable.”
It’s not just Canada’s problem: Income inequality is sparking social unrest in the Middle East, North Africa and China.
It rang alarm bells at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s conference in Paris this week, where the think tank warned that if a slew of countries – from Sweden to Canada to the United Kingdom – don’t take drastic action by raising taxes for the richest, they risk runaway increases in inequality....
It’s already on the radar of some provinces: One of Christy Clark’s first actions as B.C. Premier was to raise the province’s minimum wage for the first time in a decade and offer a tax cut for low-income families. Ontario has launched a sweeping review of social assistance programs that Community and Social Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur has admitted are failing the province’s neediest....
The ranks of the working poor have swelled as minimum wages fail to keep pace with rising costs and social assistance levels drop.
“The economy took a hit and then is coming back up,” TD’s Mr. Clark said. “But what Canada’s economy will look like coming out of this is different than when we were coming in to it. The result of the shift in world economic conditions ... all means that the skill sets you need are shifting. Globalization is good for the world as a whole, but its benefits are not equally distributed.”...
Homelessness costs taxpayers money – in both foregone wealth and social service spending. As evidence of the social and financial costs of inequality mounts, a growing body of research indicates paying to get people out of poverty can be an economic boon.
Calgary’s business community crunched the numbers: It costs four times more to pay for a year’s worth of emergency shelter, emergency-room medical care and law-enforcement for one homeless person than it costs to fund that person’s supportive housing for a year.
More recent figures have backed them up when it comes to the costs of poverty: A study earlier this year from Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital found homeless patients cost hospitals an average of $2,559 more than their housed counterparts.
At the same time, research into projects that guaranteed people a minimum annual income indicated savings in everything from social services and health care to law enforcement.
The irony is that Canada already scores high compared to other OECD countries when it comes to helping the elderly. Where it falls short is where it matters: The working-age poor – the ones who should be contributing to the economy.
“With respect to working-age poverty, our numbers are really bad,” Mr. Segal said. “And that’s where we need to do more.”
cougar @ Fri May 06, 2011 10:47 am
I am not sure about the financial side. What I see is, poverty and excessive competition for jobs is eroding the basic human values and culture as a whole and is changing the mentality of people for the worse.
Since I am in the group of low income families, but still having time on my hands, I can say the potential inability to pay bills, provide for my kids or grow professionally is having a huge impact on me and is a cause for a lot of stress. Having time and freedon, on the other hand is sometimes a good thing; no pressure from a carzy boss I do not agree with, except my wife, of course. 
BartSimpson @ Fri May 06, 2011 12:24 pm
cougar cougar:
I am not sure about the financial side. What I see is, poverty and excessive competition for jobs is eroding the basic human values and culture as a whole and is changing the mentality of people for the worse.
Since I am in the group of low income families, but still having time on my hands, I can say the potential inability to pay bills, provide for my kids or grow professionally is having a huge impact on me and is a cause for a lot of stress. Having time and freedon, on the other hand is sometimes a good thing; no pressure from a carzy boss I do not agree with, except my wife, of course.
Since I am in the group of low income families, but still having time on my hands, I can say the potential inability to pay bills, provide for my kids or grow professionally is having a huge impact on me and is a cause for a lot of stress. Having time and freedon, on the other hand is sometimes a good thing; no pressure from a carzy boss I do not agree with, except my wife, of course.
In the periods of my life where I was disabled from an injury *and* unemployed from a regular job I went out and did all sorts of gigs to earn money on the side. In 2001-2002 I had a six month stretch of disability-unemployment and, funny enough, I made more money on my contract gigs than I'd made on regular jobs.
If you're sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself then you're missing out on any number of short term gigs that you can be doing for work.
Let's say you live in Toronto a quick check of Craigslist shows a whole pile of short-term gigs - some of them IT related.
If you've got all this free time then why not make a little extra $$$?
http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/ggg/
cougar @ Fri May 06, 2011 1:03 pm
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
If you've got all this free time then why not make a little extra $$$?
http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/ggg/
http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/ggg/
I do some of that stuff Bart, but I am not in Toronto any more. I burried myself in a small dying community and now I have to figure out a way of either making a living here somehow, or moving somewhere else again.
I do have a few possibilities, not all is lost yet. I am still applying to job postings, I am likely going to have a small job for the summer, I am suing an agency in town as well
(I am sure, if you knew what they were doing you would approve of my actions.), and finally, I'm working on a couple of personal projects, one of which may bring something in.But who knows, I may end up in an orange suit too, for being too open.