Skip to main content

Home/ Economic Challenges Research/ Group items tagged trickle down

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
dylan huber

Canada discovers trickle-up economics - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...discovers-trickle-up-economics

Income Inequality trickle down canada

shared by dylan huber on 03 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • there’s been a massive transfer of income and wealth from Canada’s middle and lower class to the rich.
  • some degree of inequality is inevitable and even desirable (allowing bigger rewards for those making bigger contributions), the level of inequality that exists today in the Anglo-American countries — the United States, Britain and Canada — is extreme
  • virtually all the income growth in the last 30 years has gone to the top.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • less equal societies almost always have more violence, more disease, more mental health problems, higher infant mortality rates, reduced life expectancies, as well as less social cohesion.
  • average CEO was making about 25 times the average worker in the late 1970s, today’s average CEO makes roughly 250 times the average worker.
  • evidence linking extreme inequality with serious economic problems. The level of inequality reached in 2008 was virtually identical to that of 1929, suggesting that large concentrations of wealth at the top create a dynamic leading to reckless financial speculation and Wall Street crashes
  • people in less equal societies have reduced social mobility.
  • the top-earning 1 per cent of Canadians almost doubled their share of national income, from 7.7 per cent to 13.8 per cent, over the past three decades.
Carolyne Wang

How paying people's way out of poverty can help us all - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...singlepage

Income Inequality Tax Cuts Homelessness Set Annual Income Unemployment

shared by Carolyne Wang on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • 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.”
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Despite Canada’s reputation for a strong social safety net, the country is becoming economically polarized. And the decades-old dominant economic dogma that growing wealth among society’s highest earners would trickle down to those less fortunate is being challenged by an alternative approach: Eliminate crushing poverty among the lowest earners, and wealth will trickle up.
  • The ranks of the working poor have swelled as minimum wages fail to keep pace with rising costs and social assistance levels drop.
  • The recession widened the chasm, and a subsequent recovery hasn’t closed it.
  • On paper, almost as many jobs have been added as were lost during the financial crisis. But they offer fewer hours and less pay – and some of the hardest-hit sectors aren’t coming back.
  • Food bank use hit a record high in 2010. Tellingly, more of the people using those food banks have jobs – they just don’t make enough to pay the bills or feed their families.
  • As the incomes of the country’s top earners have risen, the incomes of Canada’s lower- and middle-income earners have stagnated.
  • Mr. Masciotra is part of a growing group of skilled labourers on the brink. The métiers in which they’ve worked for years are no longer economically viable: Many well-paying blue-collar jobs are being replaced by minimum-wage, service-sector ones. And that’s causing significant shifts on both sides of the border, notes MIT economist David Autor.
  • “I have records of over 100 jobs I have applied for,” he said. “I have looked really hard. ... But I haven’t been able to get a job yet.
  • Tony Masciotra is diversifying himself. The Argentine-Canadian father of two went back to school immediately after being laid off from his tool and die job at Ford Motor Co. in Windsor three years ago.
  • It gets more complicated, and more economically detrimental, if the people who’ve lost jobs aren’t the ones being hired to new ones.
  • They enter what Robin Somerville of the Centre for Spatial Economics calls “structural unemployment.” And if they leave the workforce entirely, they fall off the radar of unemployment stats: The numbers look better precisely because they’re worse.
  • The drop is even more significant because more Canadians are putting off retirement. That should mean more people in the workforce. But it doesn’t: So many younger workers are dropping out entirely that they outweigh the older ones sticking around longer.
  • “If you’re losing opportunities in some areas, and you’re not replacing them with opportunities of equal or greater value, then the overall level of income in the economy is reduced. And the ability of people to go out and buy goods and services is reduced.”
  • Homelessness costs taxpayers money – in both foregone wealth and social service spending.
  • Some see a solution in a 40-year-old experiment: In the 1970s, Manitoba wanted to see what would happen if it guaranteed poor people in a few communities a set annual income.
  • The philosophy behind this is simple: People are more likely to stay in school, out of emergency rooms and out of jail; they contribute to the economy through their purchases; they’re more likely to move eventually above the poverty line and pay taxes.
  • 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.
  • $134,000 Estimated amount for emergency shelter, emergency hospital care, law enforcement and other social services for one homeless person in Calgary, for one year
  • $34,000 Estimated cost to proide supportive housing for one person in Calgary, for one year
  • $12,555 Average cost of hospital stay for non-homeless patient at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto
  • $15,114 Average cost of hospital stay for homeless patient at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto
Lok-Hin Yuen

Corporate taxes being cut, Canadian jobs being lost - 0 views

www.marketwire.com/...an-jobs-being-lost-1420235.htm

Jobs Corporate Taxes Bell Canada

shared by Lok-Hin Yuen on 04 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The layoff of 100 Bell Canada workers is appalling, and a clear sign the next federal government needs to do much more to protect Canadian workers
  • BCE has eliminated close to 700 clerical jobs in Ottawa, many of the positions being outsourced outside of Canada.
  • The layoff of these workers is a far too common example of how the 'trickle-down' thinking of the Harper Conservatives is failing Canadian workers
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • corporate tax cuts are not creating jobs or investments, and they are not helping Canadians recover from the global recession
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page