PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY BY WHOM, FOR WHOM?

 

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).

(This blog post is in response to several opinion letters in local newspapers touting personal responsibility.  The question is personal responsibility by whom, and for whom when financial formulas consistently benefit the married and the wealthy over other segments of the population.)

Some Libertarians and right wing Conservatives continually opine about personal responsibility.

What is personal responsibility?  It is the willingness to both accept the importance of standards that society establishes for individual behavior and to make strenuous personal efforts to live by those standards. But personal responsibility also means that when individuals fail to meet expected standards, they do not look around for some factor outside themselves to blame. The problem with those who tout personal responsibility is that they are no different than everyone else.  They also place the blame for failures on everyone but themselves (the-sequence-of-personal-responsibility).

Quote from an opinion letter by a staunch Conservative in a local newspaper on personal responsibility: ‘A true Conservative is a citizen who believes in personal responsibility, self reliance and moral Christian behaviour in every aspect of his or her life, taxation rates as low as possible (necessary only for national support of healthcare, education, policing and military), market driven wage and salary growth, and total elimination of crown corporations’.   ‘Alberta is the only entrepreneurial province left in Canada, thus Albertans are more hardworking, aggressively self reliant and productive and feel personally responsible for their own welfare and future strength and success of their families’.

Quote by the same author states that the PPC is the only party that is remotely close to his interpretation of conservatism:  ‘There are no truly Conservative parties left in Canada.  The People’s Party of Canada party is the only true Conservative party.’

The PPC is a newly formed Canadian political party that has been referred to as conservative, libertarian, populist and classical  liberal, and is positioned on the right wing.   However, in the recent election the people spoke. PPC received zero seats.

Fact check:  Non Christians also can be moral.  Legal system supports excluded?  Even the Wild West had its judges.  Low income Canadians surviving on more than one job work just as hard as Alberta entrepreneurs.  Those who support far right political extremism like the PPC are in the minority.

This same opinion writer believes that entrepreneurship is superior to the public service sector because entrepreneurs create wealth, the public section does not.  He negatively views all social programs as socialism.

Regarding entrepreneurship all political parties have been responsible for introducing and implementing changes in entrepreneurship rules.  In recent years Liberals rightfully changed financial rules for family entrepreneurs on income sprinkling and earning passive investment income in corporations, etc.

 “Income sprinkling” (INCOME SPRINKLING)  describes how some families use private corporations to sprinkle income among family members. In a typical example, dividends that would have been received by the primary owner/manager of the private corporation, say, mom or dad, would instead be paid to the spouse, partner or kids of the primary shareholder, who are often in lower tax brackets than the primary owner/manager and thus the family’s total tax bill would be reduced.  When it comes to income sprinkling of salary income, this rule is meant to prevent a parent who owns a corporation from paying his spouse or child an annual salary when he or she doesn’t actually perform any work or provide services to the business.   In the past transferring dividends to children under the age of 18 was eliminated (this blog writer’s opinion – this was the right and fair thing to do as children would benefit from double dipping while using multiple combined medical and educational services and receiving concomitant tax free Canada Child Benefits). 

Conservatives in the recent election promised to reverse some of these entrepreneurship rules changed by the Liberals, however, the election resulted in Liberals winning a minority government.

Since singles never married no children, millennials not yet married and early in life divorced persons without children in their financial circles are basically financially responsible to themselves, ‘Income sprinkling’, etc. is of no benefit to these entrepreneurs so they will pay more taxes. Why would singles and millennials not yet married even try entrepreneurship when they know from the get go that they will not have the same advantage, Alberta or otherwise, to married and wealthy entrepreneurs with spouses and children?  Singles are forced to be more personally responsible since they do not receive equivalent benefits in financial formulas.   Tax fairness needs to be ensured regardless of marital status and how income is earned.

It would be interesting to have this question answered:  Which businesses are more likely to fail – those initiated by married/coupled with and without children or those initiated by singles never married/no children, millennials not yet married, and early in life divorced without children?

The above quoted Conservative opinion writer who touts personal responsibility also favours Ayn Randian principles.   However, he ought to educate himself on what happened to Sears.  In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert restructured Sears according to Randian principles (pbs.org).  He consistently bought back stocks, but made no effort to update and improve the Sears outlets. Executives and employees undermined each others units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance.  Sears became a miserable place to work.  As a result, Sears went bankrupt, greed took over with upper executives receiving bonuses and employee pensions robbed.

When Ayn Rand (habitual user of amphetamines because she felt they kept her awake so she could write) died she was surviving on Medicare and Social Security benefits, aka ‘socialism’ so stated by the above Conservative opinion writer.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

TRUDEAU’S CPP INCREASE FOR WIDOWS MUST BE AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE

 

TRUDEAU’S CPP INCREASE FOR WIDOWS MUST BE AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).

Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s CPP increase for widows must be an April Fool’s joke except it is not an April Fool’s day.

Justin Trudeau in one of his campaign promises has promised astounding 25 per cent increase to the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) for widows or widowers and would receive up to $2,080 in additional benefits every year with the increased survivors’ benefits under the CPP and Quebec Pension Plan (QPP).  (Added November, 2019 Survivor benefits would see an increase of up to $2,080 under the Liberal proposal, which would need provincial approval.)

Trudeau said losing a partner is one of the hardest things to endure, and this added support will help during the period of grief.  “Seniors have built the Canada that we know and love today. And they deserve to enjoy their golden years to the fullest,” Trudeau said “Our parents have worked so hard and sacrificed so much to give us a good life,” Trudeau said.  “Once they get to retirement they shouldn’t have to worry about their savings running out.”

Apparently the only persons who experience grief and/or who have worked so hard  and therefore deserve more are the married and married parents.

Apparently this would take effect when person is widowed but at what age?  (Updated October 1, 2019)

(added November, 2019) Excerpt from article ‘The election promises that could affect your personal finances’ by a financial planner (election-promises): “The Liberals have also proposed an increase in Canada Pension Plan (CPP) survivor benefits payable to the surviving spouse of a deceased CPP contributor. This could be meaningful for many widows and widowers, who might otherwise receive only 60 per cent or less of the CPP pension of their deceased spouse. That said, those who already have high CPP pensions of their own may receive little to no CPP survivor benefits if they are already entitled to the maximum CPP or close to it based on their own contributions — a potential flaw in the CPP system.” (Comment by blog author:  A potential flaw, really?  Why is it many financial planners only take into consideration married persons while excluding singles from the household definition?  As of this date it is unknown whether this election promise will be kept and what form it will take.)

WHO IS INCLUDED AND WHO IS NOT

Included:

Married seniors with and without children who have deceased spouses and can check off that magic box ‘widow’ on their income tax forms.

Excluded:

Singles never married, no children

Singles who have adopted or are parents of children (sometimes willingly or unwillingly through horrible circumstances)

Divorced/separated persons with and without children

Common law persons with and without children – are they considered to be ‘widowed’ or just common law?

MOST PENSIONS BENEFIT MARRIED THE MOST

At present time, the CPP plan already benefits married the most.  Singles who have worked for forty years while contributing to CPP can die at one day after the age of 65 and receive only the flat rate death benefit of $2,500.  This amount has been in place for many years, is not indexed for inflation and doesn’t begin to cover funeral costs.  Their entire lifetime CPP contributions except $2500 will be forfeited without any benefit to the estates of single persons.

Combined survivor and retirement pension at age 65 in 2019 already equals $1,154.28 for both widowed and singles.  Why does Trudeau believe widowed should receive more CPP benefits and have better lifestyles than singles?  After all widowed are now ‘single’ and should have to live the same frugal lifestyle of many singles.

Public and private service pensions are taxed, but both spouses will be able to pension split and maybe receive less OAS clawback while one spouse or both spouses are receiving pensions.  There also is the possibility of receiving multiple pensions – surviving spouse of the deceased employee will receive pension to which he/she has not contributed as an employee plus receive his/her own pension.  With 25 per cent survivor CPP increase this is just another example of compounding of benefits on top of benefits for the wealthy and the married, both in married and widowed state (regressive tax expenditures).

Elizabeth May, Green Party applauds social justice but has lobbied to repeal legislation that denies pension benefits to spouses who have married after the age of 60 or retirement even though these newly married spouses haven’t contributed one dollar to that pension plan.  Now as widowers they will also receive a whopping additional 25 percent CPP bonus at age 75 after being married for only 15 years or less.  (Many pension plans have this clause for newly married elderly persons in their pension policies).

CONCLUSION

Where is the critical thinking on the part of politicians? Do they really think all Canadians are stupid and can’t do the math?  Which political party should one vote for when they all are like ‘pigs at the trough’ making unrealistic vote getting promises that benefit wealthy and married the most and don’t include Market Basket Measure and declaration of assets in financial formulas?  Where are the Elizabeth Warrens’ of the Canadian political world who have financial formulas that provide social and financial justice for all, not just the wealthy and the married?

Only the married at the time of being widowed would ever get an astounding 25 per cent CPP widow pension increase.  The Canadian senior population is not made up of just married/widowed persons.

Reader opinion letters in newspapers on this subject are interesting to read.  They are mostly slam Trudeau or present a sense of entitlement by the married with no critical thinking of how the rest of the population will be affected..  For example, one of the few very comments about persons not able to benefit like LGTB couples, the comment was “a spouse is a spouse is a spouse”.  In other words, everyone who is not married be damned.

Trudeau, who touts gender equality, indigenous people rights, etc., has flagrantly financially discriminating on the basis of marital status.

Selective socialistic privileging of election promises like this one only lead to the rise of anger and rising populism.

(Addendum:  Added November, 2019   It is yet unclear how the above policy if implemented will be carried out.  If implemented it is likely that widowed seniors will be the beneficiaries.  Singles never married and divorced persons will receive zero benefits since they do not have spouses.

CARP – Canadian Association for Retired Persons in past years has stated that older unattached women are especially vulnerable to poverty. In 2016 approximately 28 percent of single older women (widowed, single or divorced) lived in poverty.  CARP has advocated that the federal government support single seniors, with particular regard to older women, with an equivalent to spousal allowance for single seniors in financial need.

Why are politicians giving benefits only to widowed seniors?

 

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

TAX SYSTEMS ENSURE FINANCIAL DISCRIMINATION OF LOW INCOME FAMILIES AND SINGLES

 

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).

It is a known fact, as presented by the experience of this blog author, that present tax systems benefit the wealthy and married while compromising low income families and singles.  However, most political parties fail to acknowledge this and/or fail to do anything about it.

The following two excellent articles describe different aspects of the Canadian tax system problem.  In addition as to why tax systems disparage certain groups, particularly low income families and singles, it may be that political parties unknowingly leave out certain groups because they don’t do the necessary work or have tunnel vision about including, for instance, singles in their financial formulas.

 

Article #1:  ‘Panel process obscures what need to be done’ by Joel French, Executive Director of Public Interest Alberta (panel-gives-political-cover-to-public-service-cuts

“With much fanfare, Alberta’s UCP (United Conservative Party) government has appointed the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s finances to recommend a path to balance its budget. Unfortunately, the entire project is compromised from the outset because the panel’s mandate ties one of its hands behind its back.

Budgets have two components: revenue and expenses. However, the panel’s mandate specifically excludes any consideration of changes necessary to the way our government generates revenue — which means that its job is restricted to recommending cuts to Alberta’s public services…..

The panel is designed to provide a rigged rationale for making big cuts to public services, by not even considering the better alternative of paying for our public services through the kinds and levels of taxation that all other provinces use for that purpose…..(Alberta is the only province without a provincial tax)…..

The Kenney government’s plans….. have already adopted a massive tax cut for Alberta’s largest and wealthiest corporations, making our government’s significant shortage of tax revenue even worse. Our tax system was already by far the least effective in the country at raising revenue, to the extent that adopting the tax system of any other province would raise between $11.2 and $21.5 billion in additional revenue every year, which would more than cover our current deficit of $6.7 billion and allow for much-needed quality improvements to health care, education and other services…..

The inescapable truth is that this panel is nothing but a political gimmick to give the UCP government a pretext to make deeply unpopular, ideological cuts to the public services we all need and value.

Obviously, more services will be turned over to the whims of private corporations. Other services and programs will disappear from public budgets altogether, but we all know the real costs never disappear. Instead they are shifted to the pocketbooks of Alberta families and paid for individually rather than collectively through our tax system.

How our government decides to handle its budget situation is a choice. They can fix our deficient revenue system so we can properly fund our services, or they can make deep cuts. The mandate of the panel makes it abundantly clear that the UCP government has already decided on the latter and simply appointed the panel to tell it what it wants to hear.

Albertans should reject this panel’s biased mandate, hold Premier Kenney to his word that more funding — not less — will be allocated to the front lines of our public services, and demand a process that fairly considers the alternative of revenue reform to properly support and enhance our public services.”



Article #2:   ‘This election campaign, let’s own up to Canada’s two-tiered tax system’ by Norm McKee (this-election-campaign-lets-own-up):

“Why is no political party talking about the Panama Paper and Paradise Paper tax disclosures?

“Because something is legal does not mean it’s not a scandal.”

If there is a serious problem, and no one acknowledges it, does the problem really exist? And why is no political party talking about the Panama Paper (2016) and Paradise Paper (2017) disclosures in this federal election campaign, which is only 10 weeks away?

All political parties are mute about the thousands of affluent Canadians who continue to legally use tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The estimated $5 billion annually, or $25 billion over five years in lost revenues through “individual” tax avoidance practices, are staggering amounts. When affluent Canadians do not pay their share of taxes, as per Revenue Canada’s published tax schedules, Canadians must make up the difference.

It’s important to be clear. The use of tax havens by individuals to avoid paying taxes is not about greed or any person breaking the law. Despite what our federal government says, it has nothing to do with tax evaders, complex tax scams, tax audits or the CRA getting more money to combat tax cheats.  This is a political issue about Canada’s two-tier tax system that benefits the rich while doing immense financial harm to other Canadians, and that diminishes the quality of life for all.

Silence by political parties should not be an option. Canadians should demand that political parties engage in a frank and open discussion about “individual” tax avoidance prior to the October election. The cost to Canadians is too high to wait four more years until the next federal election.

We did not have the benefit in the 2015 federal election of the Panama and Paradise Paper disclosures that identified thousands of Canadians who used tax havens. We have this information now. The 2019 election is an opportunity for Canadians to realize tax reform that prohibits affluent Canadians from using tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Failure to address this issue now will mean four more years of great disparity in Canada’s tax system.

It’s worth noting that U.S. citizens cannot legally use tax havens for the purpose of avoiding taxes. In the U.S., “individual” tax equality is sacred.  This is not the case in Canada, where past governments have encouraged Canada’s financial élite to legally use tax havens to avoid paying taxes.

No one has anything good to say about tax avoidance, specifically tax havens used by affluent Canadians. Yet no political party or politician is doing anything about it. This can only change if “average” Canadians link the federal election with the funding of Pharmacare, economic, environmental and social initiatives, with new monies via tax reform. We need to pressure all political parties to address this scandal.

Historically, tax avoidance has been a taboo subject for all political parties.  No political party was pleased by the Panama and Paradise Paper disclosures. Instead of changing tax laws to abolish Canada’s two-tier tax system, the government response is increased funding to the CRA to address tax evaders, tax cheats and tax scams. Although these actions should be applauded, they do nothing to fix the root problem.

Canadians don’t like to think current and past government favour the financially privileged. That would be a serious violation of trust. But the evidence is clear that this is happening, and will continue, unless we make our voices heard before the October election.

The goal of The Grassroots Coalition for Tax Reform, http://www.betteroutcomes.ca, is to pressure political parties to address tax avoidance in their election platforms, specifically affluent Canadians who use tax havens to avoid paying taxes.”

CONCLUSION

What the above two articles do not convey is the anger and despair that certain Canadian groups feel about the tax avoidance that the wealthy and married can carry out within legal limits of the law and financial formulas.  Those disadvantaged by tax avoidance are damn tired of subsidizing the wealth of the elite and the married.  The following is an opinion letter by this blog author that may or not be published in a local newspaper.

“POLITICAL PARTIES DON’T CARE ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE AND FINANCIAL EQUALITY

Recent opinion letters in local newspapers talk ad nauseam about faults of one political party over the other.

Politicians are only interested in vote getting.  Far right wing Conservatives and Christian right  ‘sell their souls to the Devil’ so they can get their agendas passed even if it is not the will of the majority.  Liberals play their ‘one upmanship’ over Conservatives by continuing unfair Conservative financial formulas such as TFSAs (TFSA ABUSE OF THE PLAN) by not making changes to the formula so that financial abuse of TFSAs cannot occur.  Libertarians talk about personal financial responsibility but never unfair financial practices.

Conservative Jason Kenney attacks lowly wage earners (teens) and reverses anything and everything Rachel Notley put in place including replacing Notley merit based appointees with his cronies.  Conservative Stephen Harper TFSAs benefit wealthy to point where they may be able to claim GIS intended for low income persons because TFSA investments are not declared as income.  Conservative Blake Richards has initiated Motion 110 as a proposed financial reprieve for parents who lose infant to death, but other parents, siblings and persons who experience tragic deaths such as losing someone to gunshots, etc. don’t get an equivalent benefit.

Conservative Andrew Scheer has proposed tax free EI maternity benefits but families already receive tax free CCB benefits and likely have one spouse working.  Seriously, you want to give tax free EI maternity benefits but jobless singles and single parents have to pay taxes on their EI benefits????

Liberals line wealthy family pockets by calculating tax free CCB benefit clawback for $30,450 to $65,976 net income portion and two children at 13.5%, but only 5.7% for portion over $65,976 and up to approx. $188,000.

Elizabeth May, Green Party applauds social justice but has lobbied to repeal legislation that denies pension benefits to spouses who have married after the age of 60 or retirement even though these newly married spouses haven’t contributed one dollar to that pension plan.

Major theme of the above is that all political parties have implemented ‘gaslighting financial formulas they say help the middle class’ but instead promote socialism for the wealthy and married (LOST DOLLAR VALUE) while pushing low income families and singles further towards poverty, ensure young persons likely will never be able to leave their parents’ homes with home ownership being a major obstacle.

This blog author’s federal vote will be submitted as a spoiled ballot as there is not one political party who gives a damn about social justice and financial equality.”

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

BASIC OR LIVING WAGE INCOMES WITHOUT MBM WON’T SOLVE FINANCIAL DISCRIMINATION OF SINGLES

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).

There are several solutions that have been proposed to solve the issue of poverty and low income.  Increasing the minimum wage is one solution.  With AI and digital revolutions some proposals include living wage or basic wage as a partial solution to the possibility of maintaining level of job numbers as a result of these revolutions.

Living wage research has been helpful in determining what it costs to live in specific urban and rural areas.  However, a living wage is a bare bones wage with no possibility of saving for emergencies or retirement.  The living wage premise is based on adults working full time (one adult in one person adult family, one adult and one child,  two adults and no children or two adults and two children family unit).   However, if living wages are not based on OECD equivalence scales such as Canadian Market Basket Measure or MBM unattached persons and single parents are often the financial losers in these plans.  (If single person household has a value of 1.0, lone parent, one child or two adult household has a value of 1.4, one adult, two children 1.7 and two adult, two children 2.0.  It costs more for singles to live than couples without children).

“Andrew Yang on Universal Basic Income

(https://baseandsuperstructure.com/andrew-yang-ubi) Excerpts from this article describes the UBI plan and provides some rather interesting insights from right and left political perspectives.

‘The plan is relatively simple. The government pays all US citizens between the ages of 18 and 64 a UBI of $1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year. For citizens 65 and up, the existing Social Security system would be left in place.

Yang wants to pay for this system using four sources: a.) eliminating existing social spending (e.g., food stamps, disability, WIC, unemployment insurance, et al.), generating $500-600 billion worth of savings; b.) A value-added tax (VAT) that he estimates will generate $800 billion per year; c.) $500-600 billion in new tax revenue from UBI-generated economic growth; b.) $100-200 billion per year in savings from UBI-generated crime reduction and health savings.’

The article states that problems with the plan include: ‘UBI doesn’t pay people nearly enough, would eliminate social programs, encourage low wage and exploitative labor practices, and put more money into the hands of companies who prey on low income Americans.’  “A Leftist take on Universal Basic Income” (leftist-universal-basic-income-ubi) by same author says ‘Here’s what would happen if a UBI proposal got off the ground in the United States: it would get turned into the right-wing version. It wouldn’t apply to everyone, it wouldn’t pay enough to live, it would gut social programs, or possibly all three of these things.’  The author offers suggestions that better solutions are comprehensive health care, housing and food assistance and indexed minimum wage that is increased every year.

It seems that USA plans for social justice and equality of wages never seem to include equivalence scales like MBM outlined above so singles would benefit the least from the plan because it costs singles more to live than a two person household.

Alberta report on basic income

“An Alberta Guaranteed Income:  Issues and Options” (May 2019) by Wayne Simpson and Harvey Stevens, The School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary (https://journalhosting.ucalgary).  Excerpts from the report include:

(From Summary) – ‘For all the job booms and wealth that have benefitted Alberta over the decades, nothing yet has been able to drastically reduce, let alone eliminate poverty in the province.  The prospect of a guaranteed minimum income could help change that, and Alberta is particularly well positioned to roll one out and with relative ease and at a manageable cost.

An Alberta guaranteed basic income could be straightforwardly developed by revising the  existing provincial tax system to make tax credits that are currently non-refundable into  refundable tax credits, such that people earning below the minimum income-tax threshold will still be able to claim them as subsidies.  This can be done while avoiding significant new funding and relying solely on budgetary measures to improve the fairness of the tax system.

Converting just a few non-refundable tax credits into refundable ones can produce a  guaranteed annual income of over $6,000 for a single-adult family and over $9,000 for a  two-adult family, with no significant new funding required. This would improve supports for 37  per cent of Alberta families, with the largest gains properly concentrated among the poorest households, and would reduce the rate and depth of poverty by 25 per cent.

An even more powerful approach would be if Alberta were able to persuade the federal government to combine a similar program federally with the provincial guaranteed basic income, converting non-refundable credits into refundable ones and eliminating the federal GST credit.  A combined federal-provincial guaranteed annual income would increase dramatically to over $13,600 a year for a single-adult family and to over $19,000 a year for a two-adult family.  The disposal income of the poorest 20 per cent of Albertans would increase by more than 50 per cent under the combined plan, while the rate of poverty across all Albertans would be cut by a substantial 44 perr cent.  Among single parents and non-elderly and elderly couples, poverty would be eliminated completely.  And while two-parent families and non-elderly singles would continue to be in poverty, its rate declines significantly and its depth would be reduced by more than half.’

The report ‘offers two models:  one that includes selected non-refundable tax credits but excludes current Alberta refundable tax credits; and one that includes both selected non-refundable tax credits and the refundable credits’ (including Alberta Child Benefit and the Canada Child Benefit in the second model).

The report does talk about Low Income Cut-offs (LICO) and Market Basket Measure (MBM).  They state that LICO has been replaced as Canada’s official poverty measure by the MBM.  However, (page 3) certain versions of statistical reports did not allow them to calculate the MBM measure, so they adopted the traditional LICO measure of the incidence and depth of poverty in the report.

Opinion Letter on above report

In an opinion letter “A basic income that reduces poverty is doable” (alberta-could-afford-a-basic-income-that-reduces-poverty) by Franco Savoia and Jeff Loomis, Executive Directors of Vibrant Communities Calgary and Momentum, respectively, they state:

‘Alberta is a prosperous province, but our poverty rate has hovered around 10 per cent for decades, costing the government more than $2 billion each year….

In recent years, the guaranteed income supplement for seniors and Canada and Alberta child benefits have been credited with reducing poverty rates. Some have gone as far as to call these programs a basic income for seniors and children.

For many in the social services sector, a similar program for adults aged 18-65 is a logical next step…..

Despite this, basic income critics point to the prohibitive costs associated with implementing such a program, noting that governments just don’t have the money. However, new research from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy shows that Alberta could actually afford to do it. Supported by a research partnership with Calgary’s Social Policy Collaborative, economists Wayne Simpson and Harvey Stevens have come up with an Alberta basic income program that wouldn’t require the province to spend any extra money or increase taxes…..

….the Simpson and Stevens program is financed entirely through modest changes to tax policy. By turning five existing non-refundable tax credits into a single refundable credit, the authors suggest that the province could achieve a basic income that would increase the incomes of roughly 40 per cent of Albertans, reduce poverty by almost one-quarter and eliminate poverty for single parents.

But, as always, the devil is in the details.

A notable element of the proposal is the decision to keep in place the current income support system — a choice that some basic income advocates may not support. Many envision a basic income as a better — and simpler — alternative to existing income supports, which are complex and often needlessly bureaucratic.

Also concerning is the redistributive impact of the tax reform required to create the program, which would result in increased tax pressures for middle-income earners.

These shortcomings aside, the Simpson and Stevens proposal is proof that basic income is more than a pipe dream in Alberta. And though the proposal wouldn’t eliminate poverty completely — it would leave many non-elderly single Albertans below the poverty line — it would be a significant step forward in our efforts to make poverty a thing of the past. As the basic income conversation evolves, both in Alberta and across the country, the School of Public Policy report has contributed valuable insight. We’re excited to see where the discussion goes.’

CONCLUSION

Shocking statistics show that in one of the richest provinces (Alberta) there were in January 2014, 33,000 Alberta Income Support program (excluding AISH) recipients of all ages.  Alberta Income Support program in January, 2017, had 54,374 recipients and in January, 2018, 57,003 recipients.  Makeup of claimants in 2017 and 2018 include individuals 69%, lone-parent families 24%, couples with children 5%, and couples alone 3%.  Totals do not say how many are turned away and do not include those who on verge of poverty.

It is a sad fact that regardless of what financial manipulations are applied to minimum wage and living wage or basic wage models, singles or unattached persons always appear to come out as the financial losers.  Until Market Basket Measures, etc. are applied so that one person households benefit equally to other households, social injustice and income inequality will remain for single persons.  But then who gives a damn?

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

IF HUMAN RIGHTS SAY THEY CAN’T HELP IN FINANCIAL DISCRIMINATION OF SINGLES, WHO CAN?

IF HUMAN RIGHTS SAY THEY CAN’T HELP IN FINANCIAL DISCRIMINATION OF SINGLES, WHO CAN?

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).

While it is wonderful that there is some recognition of the changing face of family and the grave financial struggles singles face, actions speak louder than words.

A single person 2019 $50,000 Alberta annual income ($25/hr. and 2,000 worked hours) with $11,000 tax, CPP (Canada Pension Plan) and EI (Employment Insurance) deductions results in only a bare bones net living wage income of $39,000 ($19.50/hr.).  It is impossible to maximize $9,000 RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan – 18% of earned income) and $6,000 annual TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account) contributions (35% of $39,000 with tax reductions for RRSP) even though many politicians, families, and financially illiterate believe $50,000 is a good income for unattached individuals and single parents.  As seniors they will likely be living only on CPP and OAS (Old Age Security) benefits and maybe without GIS (Guaranteed Income Supplement). There is no median income family that spends 35% of their income on savings and 10% for emergencies leaving only 55% for daily living expenses.

During child rearing years single parents will receive CCB (Canada Child Benefits), but after child rearing years they are ‘back to square one’ where it will likely be impossible to save for retirement on $50,000.

Example of approximate average cost of living for a single person household (easily obtained from Living Wage research) excluding child expenses:  Rent for bachelor apartment (including utilities, tenant insurance) $1,000, food $400, vehicle (gas, repair and insurance) $200, phone/internet $300, clothing/footwear $100, dental/eyecare $100, house tax and insurance if a homeowner $250, contingency saving for emergencies and replacement of vehicle $300 (10% of income).  Total equals $2,650 or $31,800 per year ($16 per hour based on 2,000 work hours). Totals do not include other expenses like bank fees, personal care expenses, household operation and maintenance, pets, license/registration and membership fees, vacations, entertainment, computer purchases and expenses, gifts, condo fees, professional association and union fees, etc.  Note: there is no ability for retirement saving beyond CPP contributions. The 2017 living wage for Alberta is about $18 per hour based on 35 hour work week or 1,820 hrs per annum. Unattached never married no children single person households receive very little income from government transfers (municipal, provincial and federal).

Right wing Stephen Harper introduced tax free TFSA investments benefiting wealthy the most (tax-free-savings-account-tfsa-designed-to-make-married-and-wealthy-even-richer.

In the left wing Liberal financial world, tax free CCB benefit clawback for $30,450 to $65,976 net income portion and two children is 13.5%, but only 5.7% for net income portion over $65,976.  This is just more upside down politics where clawback percentage is greater for the $30,450 to $65,976 income portion.  Shouldn’t it be the other way around where the clawback for the wealthy is 13.5%? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is so proud that nine out of ten families are receiving CCB benefits including wealthy families with never married no children single persons completely invisible in the family definition.  Why are families with $250,000 incomes receiving CCB benefits?

In 2018, Ontario couple with a child under six years of age would stop receiving CCB payments with a net income reaching $188,437.50 without other deductions such as RRSP (“CCB is a win for most families” article – child-benefit-is-a-win).

Using turbotax calculator for Alberta family with children and $250,000 gross income or approx. $160,000 net income ($80/hr.) they can max out 2019 $45,000 RRSP and $12,000 TFSA for couples.  Through compounding effect of benefits, including marital, they will pay approx.$21,000 less taxes, get larger CCB payment, increase their RRSP and TFSA wealth, own their home, and have approx. $181,000 minus TFSA $12,000 contribution or $169,000 ($84.5/hr.) spending capability annually. (This example may not include other possible deductions).

For every dollar that is given in benefits and tax reduction for the wealthy and the married is equal to dollars lost (lost-dollar-value-list) to singles.

CONCLUSION

Some of these financial discrimination issues for singles have been submitted to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.  They said they couldn’t help. If they can’t help, who can and who will?

To counterbalance the net income, tax avoidance and tax free socialism for the rich and the married mentioned many times in the above, it is crucial that lifetime federal and provincial income tax be exclusively and completely eliminated for singles and single parents with incomes under $50,000 so they also can save for their retirements. This should absolutely not be tied into refundable tax credits.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice).

POLITICAL PARTIES HAVE ‘CHICKENSHIT CLUB’ MEMBERSHIPS BECAUSE THEY TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT ON SOCIAL INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY

POLITICAL PARTIES HAVE ‘CHICKENSHIT CLUB’ MEMBERSHIPS BECAUSE THEY TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT ON SOCIAL INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

(Blog author’s comment:  The topic of financial discrimination of singles and low income families has been addressed from many different angles in this blog.  This particular blog post shows how compounding of benefits on benefits such as Registered Retirement Savings Account (RRSP) combined with a tax free Canada Child Benefit (CCB) allows wealthy families with children who can afford to max out RRSPs to benefit the most from reduced taxes, increased income, and increased wealth.  It also shows how governments and politicians fail to right the biggest social injustices and financial inequalities by going after the easiest targets.

WHAT IS THE ‘CHICKENSHIT CLUB’

Jesse Eisinger in his book ‘The Chickenshit Club’  gives a blistering account of corporate greed and impunity, and the reckless, often anemic response from the Department of Justice.  He describes how James Comey, the 58th US Republican Attorney (appointed by Republican George W. Bush and fired by so called Republican Donald J. Trump) was giving a speech to lawyers of the criminal division.  These lawyers were some the nation’s elite. During his speech, Comey asked the question: “Who here has never had an acquittal or a hung jury? Please raise your hand.” This group thought of themselves as the best trial lawyers in the country.  Hands shot up. “I have a name for you guys,” Comey said. “You are members of what we like to call the Chickenshit Club.”

Comey had laid out how prosecutors should approach their jobs.  They are required to bring justice. They need to be righteous, not careerists.  They should seek to right the biggest injustices, not go after the easiest targets.

This ‘chickenshit club’ has continued to grow.  No top bankers from the top financial firms went to prison for the malfeasance that led to the 2008 financial crisis. And the problem extends far beyond finance–to pharmaceutical companies, tech giants, auto manufacturers, and more.

DPAs (deferred prosecution and nonprosecution agreements) have become the norm in the USA (and now is being legislated in Canada) where high crime perpetrators are being given the easiest way out by ensuring prosecution is carried out by paying a nominal fine and agreeing to minor policy changes, but without serving any jail time.

Political parties have joined the ‘Chickenshit Club’ by taking the easiest way out and failing to promote social justice and equality for all therefore ensuring that wealthy households and corporate elites continue to increase their wealth over single person and low income households.

The ‘Chickenshit Club’ of low income and food insecurity and minimum wage

Living Wage and Minimum Wage

It is a known fact that the Canadian minimum wage in all provinces is not sufficient to bring households up to middle class status.

A major failure of Living Wage research is that it usually only identifies three household profiles, a single person, single parent with children and a family comprised of two adults and children.  The failure to include a household of two adults no children provides only a partial picture of inequality because it costs a single person household more to live than a two adult persons household.

Review of Living Wage profiles shows that even though living wages are higher than minimum wage, living wages are “no walk in the park”.  A living wage which only covers basic needs still leaves low income households, especially those with rent or mortgages, suffering a ‘no frills’ lifestyle with an inability to save for retirement or emergencies or replacement of vehicles.

By excluding the two adults no children household profile from Living Wage profiles the single person household is an incomplete profile since it costs more for unattached person to live than the two adults household as shown in cost of living scales like Market Basket Measure (MBM).  Example:  if single person household has a value of 1.0, lone parent, one child or two adults household have a value of 1.4, one adult, two children 1.7 and two adults, two children 2.0.  It costs more for singles to live than couples without children.

Many politicians, married and financially illiterate believe that a living wage is a good income but it only provides the bare necessities of life. The living wage in Calgary is about $18 per hour and in Metro Vancouver is about $19 per hour.  There is no saving for retirement or maxing out of RRSP and TFSA accounts on a living wage (see example below for single person household with $50,000 income).

In a recent Conservative meeting, a Canadian Conservative Member of Parliament for Alberta stated he did not think the recent increase in minimum wage helped anybody, not even the poor.  When challenged that ‘this was quite the statement’ and ‘what was the answer to low wages?’, he said ‘he didn’t know’. As outlined below, the upside financial chickenshit mess that has been created by government and politicians for single person households and low income families is because more benefits with less taxes and no declaration of assets has been given to the wealthy and the married.  To create more financial social justice and equality, a drastic plan along the the lines of “Elizabeth Warren” and “Bernie Sanders” is needed so that the wealthy, married, and corporations pay their fair share.

The ‘Chickenshit Club’ of Single Person Household Poverty

Present day political parties and married/two person households with no children belong to the ‘Chickenshit Club’ when they fail to recognize, through financial illiteracy and financial discrimination, that single person no children households will likely face more income insecurity in their lifetimes.

From The Affordability of Healthy Eating in Alberta 2015 by Alberta Health Services (affordability-of-healthy-eating):

(Page 3) “In Alberta, more than 1 in 10 households experience food insecurity and more than 1 in 6 children live in a home where at least one member is food insecure. Nearly 80% of Albertan households who rely on social assistance cannot afford to purchase adequate amounts of nutritious food or regularly endure significant worry about access to food. Furthermore, more than 75% of all food insecure Albertans are actively employed yet still are unable to secure enough money to support both their nutrition needs and other indispensable life necessities, such as housing and clothing.”

(Page 9) The above report provides a more complete picture of income inequality because it identifies four household types – 1) a family with two parents and two children because this composition is used most frequently by other social, income and poverty reports across Canada, 2) a female lone parent due to the high prevalence of food insecurity among this household type, 3) a single adult under age 65 since this demographic experiences the highest rate of food insecurity and the least financial support through social policy, and 4) a single senior to highlight the ability of current social policy to effectively reduce the risk of household food insecurity in this population.  Unfortunately, the two adults person household is still not represented in these profiles.

Quote from the report (page 18): “Although Alberta remains the most prosperous region in Canada, it also maintains the largest gap in income inequality since the wealthiest 1% earns 18 times more than the average income in the province. Thus, the relative economic power of low income households in Alberta is weaker than low income households in all other regions across the country.  Despite a strong economy, the poverty rate in Alberta has remained around 12%, which is only slightly below the national average of 12.5%. Boom and bust cycles, increasing household debt and the high number of temporary, precarious and low-wage jobs put many Albertans at risk of falling into poverty. The Alberta populations at highest risk to experience poverty include:  single persons, families with children under 18 years old, families with more than one child, female lone parent families, women (not an inclusive list).

(Page 24 and 27) These statistical data sources also validated several important characteristics of Canadian and Albertan households that are at highest risk for household food insecurity:  low income households, individuals who rent their home (rather than own their home), women, lone parents, Indigenous Peoples, individuals who receive social assistance, individuals who work for low wages, unattached (single) people, households with children younger than 18 years of age, recent immigrants and refugees (e.g. in Canada for less than five years), people who have a disability.

(Page 28) Single adult – In Alberta, 40.7% of people aged 15 and older are neither married nor living with a common‑law partner and 24.7% of all households are home to only one person.  Unattached persons in Canada experience three times the rate of food insecurity compared to couple households without children.  In Alberta, single people represent five times more food bank users than couples without children.  The rate of poverty among single adults across Alberta is 28% whereas this value drops to only 6% for all couple families.

(Page 29) Single female – Unattached Canadian women are four times more likely than women in families to live in a low income household.  Sixty two per cent of minimum wage earners in Alberta are female.  Across Canada, 3 out of every 4 minimum wage earners older than 24 years of age are women.

(Page 30) Single adult 25–30 years old – Of all Canadian age groups, young adults between 20 and 34 years of age have the highest rates of moderate and severe food insecurity.  Both males and females between the ages of 20 and 29 have the highest nutrition needs of all adult groups and would therefore need to spend a greater proportion of their income on food to support their health and well-being.  By the time Albertans reach age 25, more than 83% are no longer living with their parents, so this age range would best reflect the reality of a young, single person at higher risk for food insecurity in Alberta.

(Page 31) Minimum wage – The percentage of 25–29 year olds who work for minimum wage in Alberta doubled between 2012 and 2014, and this is the largest jump for any working age group across the province.  More than 1 in 4 female minimum-wage earners and nearly 1 in 5 male minimum-wage earners are 25 years or older.  In Alberta, inflation has quickly eroded the contribution of every small increase to hourly minimum wage rates since the early 1980s.

(Page 39) Unattached persons in Canada experience three times the rate of overall food insecurity and seven times the rate of severe food insecurity when compared to couple households without children or with adult children. Single people represent the largest proportion in Canada, at 27.8% of all households, and they also constitute the largest share of food insecure homes at 38.2%. Single people without children also receive the least amount of government social support, as they are not eligible for the financial support of programs like family‑based tax credits and health benefits.

(Page 40) Single-person household based on the after-tax, low-income cutoff measure (LICO), the rate of low income in unattached male and female households has risen over the past decade while all other household categories have experienced a stabilized or decreased rate of low income.  Nearly 1 in 3 unattached people between ages 18 and 64 lives below the LICO in Canada, compared to only 1 in 20 of the same cohort living as part of an economic family.  An economic family refers to a group of two or more people who live in the same household and are related to each other by blood, marriage, common-law or adoption. The rate of poverty among single adults in Alberta is 28% but this value drops to only 6% for all couple families.  More than 40% of Albertans aged 15 and older are neither married nor living with a common‑law partner and nearly one quarter of all homes in the province are inhabited by only one person. Between 1961 and 2011, the proportion of one-person households in Alberta has more than doubled and now nearly matches the number of homes with families or couples without children.  Across the province, single people represent one third of all food bank users, and they outweigh couples without children by three and a half times.

(Page 40) Minimum wage is an important social policy because it intends to help lift low-paid workers above the poverty line so they have adequate income to meet basic needs for overall well-being.  However, unlike Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Old Age Security (OAS), minimum wage is not regularly indexed to inflation through adjustments to match the increase in the Consumer Price Index.  This can lead to a hidden erosion in the value of this social policy since the general public tends to be unaware of how governments calculate changes to minimum wage rates over time.  In 1965, Alberta’s minimum wage equalled 48.5% of the average provincial income, but by 2010 this proportion had declined to only 35.5%. Alberta’s hourly minimum wage rate had been the lowest of all provinces and territories for several years, but recent increases have raised low-paid workers’ earnings to a minimum of $11.20 per hour as of October 2015.

(Page 41) There is a widespread misconception that most Canadians who earn minimum wage are teenagers who live with their parents, but more than 1 in 4 female minimum wage earners and nearly 1 in 5 male minimum wage earners are actually 25 years old or older. In addition, individuals who are older than 24 years of age are the most likely to live alone while they earn minimum wage.

(Page 42) …. In fact, unattached Canadian men and women between the ages of 18 and 64 are five times more likely to live on a low income compared to their counterparts who live in economic families.  Although the probability of living in a food insecure household is higher for females than males across all age groups and household compositions, income-related food insecurity affects unattached men at the same rate as unattached women.

(Page 44) Among all unattached Canadians, there are twice as many single adults younger than 65 years of age living below the after‑tax LICO compared to single seniors who live below this income.  In addition, the prevalence of household food insecurity is two and a half times lower for the elderly who live alone than for unattached adults who are younger than 65 years old.  However, the likelihood that a single senior will live on a low income is 10 times the rate for seniors who live as part of an economic family. This is significant since 25% of Albertans aged 65 years old and older live alone and unattached individuals are the most likely to rely on OAS and GIS.

“Social assistance soaring in Alberta, even as economy improves”, 2017 – Number of claimants on provincial income assistance programs has climbed to 54,374 in January of 2017, about 20,000 higher than at the start of the recession in 2015.  Makeup of claimants include individuals 69%, lone-parent families 24%, couples with children 5%, and couples alone 3%.  (Note:  Couples with children and couples alone only equal 8% of the total).  The Calgary Food Bank served a record 171,000 clients in 2016.

The real truth about the financial lives of unattached (one person) household

A single person household has to make an extraordinarily high income to achieve the same level of wealth as married with and without children households. A minimum wage means they will be living in poverty and with a living wage barely able to meet the financial necessities of life with no ability to max out RRSP and TFSA contributions.

Example of approximate average cost of living for a single person household (easily obtained from Living Wage Research):  Rent for bachelor apartment (including water, electricity, tenant insurance) $1,000, food $400, vehicle (gas, repair and insurance) $200, phone/internet $300, clothing/footwear $100, dental/eyecare $100, house tax and insurance if a homeowner $250, contingency saving for emergencies and replacement of vehicle (10%) $300.  Total equals $2,650 or $31,800 per year ($16 per hour based on 2,000 work hours). Totals do not include other expenses like bank fees, personal care expenses, household operation and maintenance, pets, vacations, entertainment, computer purchases and expenses, gifts, condo fees and professional association and union fees, etc.  Note: this does not include saving for retirement beyond Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contributions. The living wage for Alberta is about $18 per hour based on 35 hour work week or 1,820 hrs per annum. Single person households receive very little income from government transfers (municipal, provincial and federal).

The following three examples, although simplistic, are real life examples for single persons:

  1. Single person private sector employee with $50,000 income ($25 per hour based on 2,000 worked hours) will pay about $11,000 for taxes, CPP and EI deductions.  This results in a only a barely survivable net or take home living wage income of $39,000 ($19.50 per hour based on 2,000 hrs. or $3,250 per month). Using average cost of living of $32,000 from above paragraph, this person only has a reserve of about $600 per month.  It is impossible for this person to maximize RRSP ($9,000) and TFSA ($6,000) contributions (about $1,200 per month) even though many financially illiterate believe $50,000 is a good income for unattached individuals.  Moreover, as seniors their standard of living will likely be frugal and less equal to that of married/common-law households.
  2. Single person private sector employee with $60,000 income ($30 per hour and 2,000 work hours) will pay about $14,500 in taxes, CPP and EI contributions.  This results in a net income of $45,500 ($22.75 per hour or $3,800 per month). This person will not be able to max out RRSP ($10,800) and TFSA ($6,000) contributions (about $1,400 per month).  This still equals a frugal lifestyle (note expenses like vacations and eating out are not included in the average cost of living).
  3. Single person public sector employee with $75,000 income ($37.50 per hour and 2,000 work hours) will pay about $17,000 in taxes, CPP and EI benefits plus pension plan contribution of $7,500 (10 per cent).  Union dues are not included here. This results in a net income of approx. $51,000 ($25.50 per hour or $4,200 per month). This person may be barely able to max out RRSP ($13,500) and TFSA ($6,000) accounts (about $1,541 per month) at the expense of no vacation and eating out expenses and will have a public pension on retirement, but still will not have a standard of living equal to that of married/coupled households since they pay more taxes than married households and will not receive benefits of married persons (spousal RRSP, pension splitting, etc.)  Market Basket Measure shows it costs single person household more to live than married households.

Lessons learned:  A minimum wage of $15 means single person households will live in poverty and a living wage equals a very frugal lifestyle with no frills.

‘Chickenshit Club of women being paid less for equal work

From the above Alberta Report and Canadian statistics it is evident that a major problem still  exists of women being paid less for equal  work.

From Global News, report finds that women in Canada earn just 84 cents for every $1 earned by men, a gap similar to the one reported in official statistics. In 2017, Statistics Canada said Canadian women were making 87 cents for every $1 earned by men.  [T]he Glassdoor study went one step further, finding a four per cent pay differential between men and women even when factors like education, years on the job, occupation and professional title are taken into account. In other words, Canadian women are making just 96 cents for every $1 earned by men with the same qualifications, job and experience, something Glassdoor is calling the “adjusted pay gap.”

How many years is it going to take before women receive equal social justice on pay equity?  Instead of being ‘chickenshit political parties’ which political party is going to take this issue on?

‘Chickenshit Club’ of Canada Child Benefit

The present day ‘chickenshit club’ Canada Child Benefit does help to bring low income households with children out of poverty and food insecurity (this is a good thing), but only during the first eighteen years of the household’s entire lifecycle.  When children are grown, low income single parent households are back to ‘square one’ of the adult probability of living in poverty.

The Canada Child Benefit was implemented by Stephen Harper, previous Conservative Prime Minister, and was taxed.  Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made it non taxable.

All political parties have been complicit in perpetuating financial policies that increase middle class wealth to upper middle class status while forcing poor families and single unmarried individuals further into poverty.

Financial Post “Couple needs to cash in rental condo gains to make retirement work” (ditch-rental-condo-to-get-ahead) details a couple age 42 and 43 already having a net worth of $1.8 million, take home pay of $10,936 per month and receiving $286 in Canada Child Benefits for three children.

In 2018, Ontario couple with a child under six years of age would stop receiving CCB payments with a net income reaching $188,437.50 without other deductions such as RRSP (canada-child-benefit-is-a-win-for-most-families).  $188,000??? This is not an income of poverty.

The inequality of family benefits for the upper middle class and wealthy families is perpetuated even further by the compounding of benefits on top of benefits.  The article “Supercharge your Canada Child Benefit by making an RRSP contribution” (supercharge-by-making-an-rrsp-contribution) outlines how RRSP contributions are considered to be a tax deduction; therefore, they lower taxable income and can increase the amount of CCB payments.  The example of Ontario family with 3 kids under age 6 years of age and a family net income of $75,000 with full $13,500 RRSP contribution for the year (18% X $75,000) can expect a CCB payment of $13,215 and will pay approx. $11,814 in taxes.  Because of RRSP contributions in the previous year, their CCB payments increased by $1,465 for the present year. Additionally, they will save $1,401 in taxes and at a marginal rate of 29.65%, their RRSP contribution will also result in a tax refund of about $4,000.  The compounding effects of benefits means they will pay less taxes, get larger CCB payment and increase their RRSP wealth. The total family income with CCB is $88,215 (combined after tax and tax free) and they have increased their wealth by $13,500 RRSP for the year of contribution).

Using turbotax calculator for Alberta family with $250,000 gross income or approx. $160,000 net income ($13,300 per month) they should be able to max out maximum allowable 2019 $45,000 for couple to their RRSPs and $12,000 TFSA for the year.  Through compounding effect of benefits, including marital, they will pay approx.$21,000 less taxes, get larger CCB payment, increase their RRSP and TFSA wealth, own their home, and have approx. $181,000 minus TFSA $12,000 contribution or $169,000 ($84.5/hr.) spending capability annually.

It should be noted that there may be other credits and deductions that can be used which will further increase income available for spending.

What would anyone think that unattached individuals with no children don’t deserve to be angry because they know their hard earned money is used to increase the wealth of upper middle class and wealthy families since these families never pay their fair share in taxes because they can avoid taxes through multiple compounded benefits ???

“Ontario woman’s problem is too much debt and too little income” (forced-to-retire) is a very good example of what singles might face (i.e. on $3,750 income per month) when they are forced to retire early due to illness (doesn’t say if she is divorced or widowed).

Solution:  As per above example of $50,000 income it is impossible for single person household to have a meaningful financial life equivalent to that of married no children households.

Politicians need to get off their chickenshit politics, stop taking the easy way out, and do the hard thing by including assets and Market Basket Measure calculations in financial formulas so that singles and low income households get financial social justice and equality equal to that of wealthy and married households.

How about implementing legislation where never married no children persons should not have to pay any income tax on incomes below $50,000 so that get a benefit equivalent to that CCB and multiple benefits to families with and without children?

Chickenship Club of Climate Change

The Green Party keeps talking about a climate change plan, but like other plans and environmentalists/protesters it is all talk with very little information.  When is the Green Party (they are after all the Green Party) going to come up with a plan, for example, a line graph that shows what will happen in year one, year two, etc.  What is going to happen to all the gas combustion vehicles, gas furnaces and water tank heaters. Where are you going to dump them?  Apparently some gas combustion vehicles can be converted to electric. What are you doing about that? Are you going to shut very expensive oil refineries down that are still able to be used for another fifty years?

Many green earth technologies use rare earth minerals some of which are very toxic.  At the present time China produces 80 per cent of the rare earth minerals.  Just how do some extreme environmentalists and politicians think rare earth minerals get to Canada from China to be used in production of wind turbines?  The answer is probably by tanker.

The hypocrisy of the tanker ban is that it is only one way?  Does the  ban on tanker traffic address the tankers coming into Canada?

Elizabeth May was so impressed with India’s climate change plan.  However, India has just voted in again an authoritarian government with the help of far right Hindu religious voters.  India at present time has no middle class and the highest rate of unemployment in forty five years.

Any plan that is implemented by any country has to provide 100% climate change funds to the poor to convert from gas to electricity instead of excessive compensation of the wealthy who are the highest emitters of energy and the biggest consumers of natural resources.

Elizabeth May since her marriage has upped her membership in the ranks of the wealthy high super emitters of energy and super users of natural resources. Those with multiple properties (examples: second property hop farm owned by Elizabeth’s husband, Arizona and other vacation properties that sit empty for six months of the year and excess travel between these properties, huge motorhomes, etc.) should pay more for this privilege afforded to them by their wealth.

Green Party Reform of spousal pensions for those who have married after the age of 60 or retirement

The Green Party and particularly Elizabeth May belong to the chickenshit club of married/coupled financially privileged households.

From the ‘Surviving Spouses Pension Fairness Coalition’ May states she has lobbied to repeal legislation that denies pension benefits to spouses who have married after the age of 60 or retirement.  In one of her letters she states:  …The Green Party supports deleting these restrictive clauses in the Federal Superannuation Acts which penalize pensioners who have remarried or married for the first time after age 60 after retiring….these clauses serve to unfairly deny hard earned pension benefits to deserving partners.  These….clauses are causing great hardship to the survivor whose spouse gave a life in service to our country.”

Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau in his letter also supports this –  “I and the entire Liberal Caucus, believe that Canadian seniors are entitled to a dignified, secure, and healthy retirement. Retirees deserve financial security; they deserve a strong Canadian Pension Plan, and a government who is not only committed to protecting the CPP, but is dedicated to improving its benefits.  A secure and comfortable retirement is essential to achieving middle-class success, and Liberals believe that the federal government must do more to fulfill this promise. While the Conservative Government has left Canadians and the provinces to fend for themselves, Liberals support working with the provinces to create legislation that will make retirement security easier, not harder for all Canadians to achieve.”  (Shouldn’t the same apply to never married no children senior households?)

Tom Mulcair, NDP letter states – “New Democrats want to acknowledge the debt we owe our seniors and reward the years of hard work and dedication to our country.  That’s why we are committed to ending these archaic restrictions on benefits for pensions and their spouses.”

This is not the only pension plan where marriage for only a few years privileges the surviving spouse who hasn’t made any contributions to the pension.

Why, why, why do married persons believe they are entitled to benefits they haven’t earned?  These newly married persons never worked for and never made contributions to the pension of their spouses.  The reform of all spouses pensions similar to the above promotes the financial discrimination of never married, no children persons.  Why do these married persons who never worked for these pensions deserve to have a better lifestyle than never married, no children persons?  Never married, no children persons can never access another person’s pensions. As stated above, it has been shown that it costs more for never married, no children persons to live.  Why can’t a new widow because of death of the spouse live with the same financial realities as a never married, no children person? Afterall, the widow is now ‘single’.

Solution:  A proper financial justice solution would be to pay whatever is left in deceased spouse’s pension to the surviving spouse in the same way that whatever is left in the never married, no children person’s pension is paid to the listed benefactor.  If benefit after benefit is given to widows, equal financial remuneration equivalent to these benefits should also be given to never married, no children seniors.

Chickenshit Club of Conservatives Jason Kenney (Alberta) and Doug Ford (Ontario)

Jason Kenney is already showing his true Trumpian values by targeting most vulnerable residents at the lower end of the financial scale.  He is doing this by lowering corporate taxes and reducing teen minimum wage instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. Just waiting for him to reduce progressive taxes back to a flat tax!  Doug Ford continues to do his damage by breaking election promises, attacking healthcare and public sectors and employees of these sectors, and implementing retroactive financial policies on budgets that have already been planned.

Where are the ‘Elizabeth Warren’ and ‘Bernie Sanders’ of Canadian politics that will promote social justice and financial equality by ensuring corporations and upper middle class families and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes without the compounding of benefits that make them wealthier than single person and low income households?

Chickenshit Club of Liberal Party

The Liberals also belong to the Chickenshit Club of politics as they have done very little to promote social justice and equality where wealthy and corporations pay their fair share.  They are promoting ideas for the elderly to receive benefits if they have to work over the age of 65. How nice – make the senior poor work longer while giving benefits to the wealthy and married who have multiple compounding of benefits which allow them to retire at age 55.

Liberals keep talking about helping the middle class – the real truth is they are pushing the middle class up to the upper middle class while keeping unattached persons and low income families at the lower end of the financial scale.  With their plans there will be no middle class.

The Liberals have done nothing to mitigate the financial injustice and inequality of Conservative Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) which benefit wealthy the most.

The following  was published in the Calgary Herald as this blog author’s opinion letter on TFSAs – ( Ted Rechtshaffen and Fraser Institute are telling half truths since only child rearing years are discussed on who is paying more taxes.  Wealthy Canadians with TFSA accounts pay no tax on investments earned; therefore, someone else is indeed picking up the bill, i.e. those who can’t afford TFSA accounts. Singles pay more taxes throughout entire lifetime).

“TAX LOOPHOLES NEED TO BE CLOSED”

Re: “Trudeau is right, 40 per cent of Canadians pay no income tax, Opinion, Feb. 8, 2019 (someone-else-is-picking-up-the-bill) ”

Ted Rechtshaffen and the Fraser Institute once again tell half-truths about who pays the most income tax.  Conservatives have created a TFSA monster at home (not offshore) tax loophole.

“They Want To Spend $50,000 In Retirement, Did They Save Enough?”(did-they-save-enough) outlines how an Ontario couple with large TFSA, RRSP accounts and a $600,000 house can retire at 55 and evade income taxes for 15 years while using benefits intended for low-income persons.

Canada, one of the few countries with TFSAs, has the most generous plan with the only limit being annual contribution amounts. Others (example Roth IRA) impose age, income and lifetime limits on contributions.

Without further addition of TFSA limits, the wealthy will pay less income tax than those who cannot afford TFSAs.

Chickenshit Club of Drug Cost and Advertising

All political parties are lobbying to cut drug costs.  Has anyone thought of limiting the amount of advertising drug companies can do?  Advertising is very expensive. Surely, this money could be used to decrease drug costs and to promote research for new drugs.  Why does one have to listen to advertisements on Peyronie’s disease, hemorrhoids, female and male sexual drive dysfunction, etc. over and over again.  Information on benefits of drugs should occur from discussion between the doctor and patient, not from advertisements. One solution would be to limit the amount of times each drug company can advertise in a given time period.

Chickenshit Club of Issues like Tanker Traffic Ban, Money Laundering, etc.

It doesn’t matter which political party it is – Liberal, Conservative, Green Party, BC NDP party, etc., all political parties with their chickenshit politics are trying as hard as they can to harm certain provinces and low income citizens in any way they can.  Governments at all levels have failed in controlling ‘dirty money’ and indeed have been complicit in promoting it. Some have hypocritically implemented legislation that negatively impacts only certain parts of the country.

Tanker Traffic Ban – on west coast, but not the east coast while increasing other revenue generating traffic such as cruise ships, ferry traffic and sightseeing boat traffic on the west coast.

Money Laundering in BC and Canada – The money laundering problem is prevalent across Canada but the egregious case of the ‘Vancouver Model’ of money laundering in BC shows how greed of chickenshit government overtakes the moral and ethical logic of doing the right thing.  BC governments failed to address the problem because of the huge amounts of money generated for the BC Lottery Corporation to be used for government programs. Since this also apparently involved real estate, housing prices rose to an exponential level.  Who is affected most of all? – low income persons who can’t afford housing, be it rental or ownership.

CONCLUSION:

Unless there is a major change to the upside down financial situation of politics and government where the wealthy, married and corporations stand to financially benefit the most (selective socialism for the rich), there is little hope that single person households and low income families will ever reach the middle class status so hypocritically touted by governments, politicians, families, and the elite. They should seek to right the biggest social injustices and financial inequalities, not go after the easiest solutions.

(Updated June 8, 2019)

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

PUBLIC SECTOR JOBS DO NOT EQUAL SOCIALISM

PUBLIC SECTOR JOBS DO NOT EQUAL SOCIALISM

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

This blog post was prompted by an opinion letter in a local newspaper where certain conservative persons continue to demonize public sector jobs.  The opinion letter below was submitted to the local newspaper in response, but in a shortened format since only so many words can be submitted to newspapers.  The Fraser Institute report consists of blatant gaslighting since what is left out of the report is the fact that the population growth of Alberta in 2014 to 2018 was 223,000 in comparison to Saskatchewan’s 49,000 increase.

April 18, 2019 opinion letter “Public sector jobs not equal to private” again equates public sector jobs to socialism.  Quoted Fraser Institute, (right-wing think tank) report “The Illusion of Alberta’s Job Recovery” (jobs) has to be one of the most gaslighting reports ever produced.

Report states from 2014 to 2018 Alberta’s employment growth has increased by 79,000 new government jobs (23% increase) while private sector jobs have decreased by 3%. Government’s share of total employment is 23%, private sector and self-employed 77%. They then compare this to Saskatchewan’s government jobs increase of 2.1%.

Fact check:  Alberta population 4.084 million in 2014, 4.307 million in 2018 (223,000 increase).  Alta. births 55,574 in 2014, 56,239 in 2018. Saskatchewan population 2014 1.113 million, 2018 1.162 million (49,000 increase) .  Sask. births in fiscal 2014 15,157, fiscal 2018 15,693.

In entire Fraser Institute report it failed to mention that the population of Alberta increased by almost a quarter of a million persons in 2014 to 2018 while Saskatchewan’s population increased by only 50,000 persons.

Alberta birth and population growth rates have been increasing while death rates are declining.  In first twenty years of life education and medical care are not mutually exclusive but both must occur simultaneously thus requiring more employees. Death rates are declining so people living longer with greater medical needs require more medical care.

Alberta comparison to Saskatchewan is moronic.  Ever increasing population and birth rates (second highest birth rate in Canada) require increases in education, medical care, police, firefighter services to support that population.  It has nothing to do with socialism.

While we are at it, why don’t we talk about job inequity of a different kind, that is, the pay inequity of women to men.  (Canada is ranked as having the 8th highest gender pay gap out of a list of 43 countries in 2016 ….. earn approximately $7,200 less annually than their male counterparts the-wage-gap).

The Alberta employment crisis affects everyone in different ways. Public sector employees are not immune. They also have problems selling their houses.  Education and medical care employees suffer emotional and psychological stress in their jobs when they come in contact with the pain of unemployed private sector persons and children. While private sector unemployed with children will receive higher Canada Child Benefits private sector unemployed unattached persons with no children receive nothing in comparable benefits.  Families with combined private and public sector spouses likely still have one person employed. Public sector employed help support private sector unemployed by paying taxes.

The opinion writer on public sector socialism states jobs growth via socialism is trying to magically make unemployment disappear by simply having 100% government jobs. This is a false because some would be very unhappy that they couldn’t increase their incomes and benefit levels to that of corporate and wealthy private sector elites.

To prevent chaos there are vital services for the public good like airline safety, food inspection, disease control (measles), etc. that should be free of entrepreneurship and shareholder ideology.  These public services are not defined by socialism.

CONCLUSION

Many who talk about the public sector being equal to socialism do not understand what socialism is all about and incorrectly label many things as socialism when they are not. Much more public work needs to done to correct inequality and promote social justice for all workers.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

HOW THE ELITE SABOTAGE BUSINESS, POLITICS AND HIGHER LEARNING

HOW THE ELITE SABOTAGE BUSINESS, POLITICS AND HIGHER LEARNING

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.

(The following is a comment on and summary of the excellent book “Winners Take All” and how the elites have taken over the business, political and higher learning institutions of the world.  Following this blog post are important pieces of discussion pulled from the book-forewarning: this is about 25 pages long)

Many are disillusioned by the all powerful control elites seem to have both politically and financially on the world.  The book “Winners Take All-the elite charade of changing the world” by Anand Giriharadas provides thought provoking ideas (as presented below) on how elites have been able to achieve their goals.

The Gilded Age and major changes in citizens’ financial lives helped to propel the advent of elite MarketWorld thought leaders who believe and promote ideas that social change should be pursued principally through free market and voluntary actions, not public life, the law and reform of systems that people share in common.

MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.  It consists of enlightened business people and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action.  MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and a state of mind.

There are two kinds of thinkers who share a common desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach broader audiences.

First are “thought leader” thinkers who tend to know one big thing and believe their important idea will change the world.  Thought leaders use spreadsheets and statistical analyses to share their ideas which are often in the future tense like Venn diagrams without noting that the lion’s share of each circle (have and have-nots) remains outside the overlap of win-win.  They give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change while taking little risk.

Thought leaders have often presented problems in precisely opposite ways by using their power to cause us to “zoom in” and think smaller.  They focus on vulnerability of poverty, not the wage of inequality. They don’t like “social justice” and “inequality” words, but rather use “poverty” and “fairness” while speaking of “opportunity”.

It is possible to counteract thought leader thinking by getting people to care about problems first by “zooming in” on a vivid person and then getting them to care by “zooming out” from person to see a system.  These thinkers are the “public intellectuals” who as wide-ranging ‘critics’ feel they bear a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes”. They are the ones who might give some hope to changing the trajectory of elite MarketWorld thought leaders.

“Zooming in” is known as the “identifiable-victim effect”…..People react differently toward identifiable victims than to statistical victims who have not yet been identified.

The social psychological concept, the one involving “zooming out” is the formal term for the concept “assimilation effect”, and it occurs when people link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context.

Re poverty, inequality and charity:  poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fingers, but inequality is something more worrying:  It speaks of what some have and others lack; it flirts with ideas of injustice and wrongdoing; it leaves many chasing work instead of building livelihoods; it is rational.

MarketWorlders believe poverty can be addressed via charity by writing cheques to reduce that poverty.  “But inequality you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back, but about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.”  Inequality is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change systems as a group of people. With charity the elite work ALONE.

The changes of feudal financial and Gilded Age systems helped to develop organized philanthropy (whose leaders earn million dollar salaries and get tax credits for their charities while getting to keep their wealth) and ideas that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism.  The elites today do this from behind private gates, schools, jets: private world-saving behind the backs of those to be saved. Passively they do not reject public solutions in theory, but pursue private ones in practice. The private sector doesn’t merely add to public spheres, they change the language in which public spheres think and act.  This market-based, monetized thinking over all other disciplines and conceptions of value have helped to quickly spur a rising anger, nationalism and right-wing populism.

Thought leader ideas have permeated higher learning institutions.  Young people are taught to see social problems in a “zoom in” fashion by confining questioning to what socially minded businesses they can start up (buy one, give one), but not inequality.  They are persuaded by surrounding cultures that only by learning higher learning protocols can they help millions of people.

The question that elites refuse to ask is:  Why are there in the world so many people that you need to help in the first place?  The very problems elites have self righteously only partially solved have caused unrest because they act and talk in ways that insult, alienate, and energize many of their fellow citizens.

And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also marred by its own “narcissism.”

When society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality.  Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how. Those who receive help are not only objects of the transactions, but also subjects of it–citizens with agency. When help is moved into private spheres, no matter how efficient , the context of the helping is still a relationship of inequality:  the giver and the taker, helper and helped, donor and recipient.

History is not a straight line but a circle of events which repeat themselves such as the Gilded Age.  Many right and left political leaders have bought into the elite thought leader mythology. Are we being moved again to a Gilded age scenario?

To counteract MarketWorld our political institutions–laws, constitutions, regulations, taxes, shared infrastructure:  these million little pieces provide a counterbalance to help hold our democratic (capitalist) civilization together.

CONCLUSION

The one sided financial hegemony that elites have created has been helped by cutting funding to IRS and CRA budgets.  This means there is less money to prosecute financial high crimes of the elite. Shared economies–like Airbnb–do not help those persons of race, singles and poor who do not own homes. The present day college financial scandal provides evidence to the elite greed and graft.   The FAA allowing Boeing to “self-inspect” and SNC Lavalin corruption are clear examples of the private sector going amuck in the absence of laws and regulations counterbalance.

One word comes to the mind of this opinion writer-”brainwashing”. The elites have done a very good job of ‘brainwashing’ the political, financial and higher learning powers that be. At the very least it is “gaslighting”.

Counterbalance of MarketWorlders requires major public action for inequality and social justice change.  It is all about balance between MarketWord and government/politic worlds.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

 

WINNERS TAKE ALL-The elite charade of changing the world (Anand Giriharadas) Book

MARKETWORLD DEFINITION

Page 30 MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.  It consists of enlightened business people and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks.  It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action.  MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and a state of mind.

HOW DID WE GET TO WHERE WE ARE

P. 18  …In the years since, though, Georgetown and the US and the world at large have been taken over by an ascendent ideology of how best to change the world.  That ideology is often called neoliberalism, and it is, in the framing of the anthropologist David Harvey, “ a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”  Where the theory goes, “deregulation, privatization,and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” tend to follow, Harvey writes.  “While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and wellbeing.  This principle extends into the realms of welfare, education, health care, and even pensions.” The political philosopher Yascha Mounk captures the cultural consequences of this ideology when he says it has ushered in a new ‘age of responsibility,” in which “responsibility – which once meant the moral duty to help and support others – has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient”.

P. 19 ….Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as political figures rose to power by besmirching the role of government.  Reagan declared that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. Two centuries earlier, the founding fathers had created a constitutional government in order to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Now the instrument had been created, an instrument that helped to make the United States one of the most successful societies in history, was declared the enemy of these things….What their revolution amounted to in practice in America and elsewhere was lower taxes, weakened regulation and vastly reduced public spending on schools, job retraining, parks, and the commons at large.

The political right couldn’t pull off its revolution alone, however.  That is where the need for a loyal opposition comes in. Thus neoliberals cultivated the left half of the political spectrum a tribe they could work with.  This liberal subcaste would retain the left’s traditional goals of bettering the world and attending to underdogs, but it would increasingly pursue these aims in market-friendly ways.  Bill Clinton would become the paterfamilias of this tribe, with his so called Third Way between left and right, and his famous declaration, regarded as historic from the moment it was uttered in 1996, that ‘the era of government is over.”

P. 20 …stirred by a desire to change things, their own ideas and the resources available to them tended to steer them toward the market rather than the government as the place where problems were best solved…that if you really wanted to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism.

P. 26….Sonal Shaw…. established the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation under President Obama.  That office, according to its website, was “based on a simple idea: we cannot drive lasting change by creating top-down programs from Washington.”  It was striking statement from a liberal government – but not an uncommon one in an age dominated by market thinking – and it reflected a theory of progress that the rich and powerful could embrace.

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL (CRITIC) VERSUS THOUGHT LEADER

P.91-92….Two kinds of thinkers, who share in common a desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach a broad audience.  One of these types, the dying one, is the public intellectual whom as a wide-ranging ‘critic’ and a foe of power, ….perhaps stays ‘aloof from the market, society, or the state,” and ….proudly bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.”  The ascendant type is the thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend…to “know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world”; they are not skeptics but “true believers”; they are optimists, telling uplifting stories; they reason inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from authority. They go easy on the powerful…..

Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change.  Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners; thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.”

THREE FACTORS THAT EXPLAIN THE DECLINE OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AND THE RISE OF THE THOUGHT LEADER

P. 92 Three factors explain the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader.[1] one is political polarization….[2] another factor is a generalized loss of trust in authority…[3] the rising inequality has most altered the sphere of ideas.

….get pulled into MarketWorld’s orbit, how thinkers…are coaxed to abandon their roles as potential critics and instead to become fellow travelers of the winners….. Thinkers are invited to become the elite’s teachers on the circuit of “Big Idea”–TED, South by Southwest, the Aspen Ideas Festival….anything sponsored by The Atlantic.”  These thinkers often find themselves having become thought leaders without realizing it, after “a slow accretion of opportunities that are hard to refuse”.

P. 93 It could be…that even as plutocrats were providing these alluring incentives, less corrupting sources of intellectual patronage were dwindling.  On American campuses in recent decades, the fraction of academics on tenure track has collapsed by half. Newsrooms, another source of support for those in the ideas game, have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1990.  The publishing industry has suffered as bookstores vanish and print runs dwindle.

MARKETWORLD IDEOLOGY

P. 27 …[History] Today’s problems were too hard for the government.  They had therefore to be solved through partnerships among rich donors, NGOs, and the public sector.  There was no mention of the fact that this method, by putting the moneyed into a leadership position on public problem-solving, gave them the power to thwart solutions that threatened them.

The solution of public problems through public action – changing the law, going to court, organizing citizens, petitioning the government with grievances went all but unmentioned.

P. 30 These elites [thought leaders] believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

P. 31….So successful is the belief in business as the universal access card for making progress, helping people, and changing the world that even the White House, with its pick of the nation’s talent, under Republicans and Democrats alike, grew dependent on the special talents and consultants and financiers in making decisions about how to run the nation.

P. 32 There was a case to be made that the very people being brought in to advise the government on the public good was implicated in many of the public’s most urgent problems.  Management consultants and financiers were critical protagonists in the story of how a small band of elites, including them, had captured most of the spoils of a generation’s worth of innovation.  The financial sector had extracted more and more value from the American economy, at the expense not only of consumers and workers but also of industry itself. More and more of the nation’s financial resources were swilled around Wall Street without taking the form of new investments by companies or higher wages for workers…..[Businesses had been taught] to optimize everything which made their supply chains leaner and their income statements less volatile.  This optimization, of course, made companies less hospitable to workers, who faced things such as layoffs,offshoring, dynamic scheduling, and automation as the downside of corporate progress.  This was part of why their wages stagnated while companies’ profits and productivity rose.

P. 33…. [This] seemed to contribute to the business world’s growing influence over social change.

P. 34….Many of them are trapped in what they cannot fully see. Many of them believe that they are changing the world when they may instead – or also – be protecting a system that is at the root of the problems they wish to solve.  Many of them quietly wonder whether there is another way, and what their place in it might be.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE FINANCIAL WORLDS OF THE ELITES AND THEIR PHILANTHROPY

P. 26...Wealthy donors [like the Beecks who made their money in mining business in South America]often had a financial interest in the world being changed in ways that left things like taxation, redistribution, labor laws, and mining regulations off the table.

P. 35…A charity called Portfolios with Purpose calls itself  “ a powerful platform combining healthy competition with giving” – a short phrase that manages to hit the notes of techno-utopianism, capitalism, and charity.

P. 36 (It goes without saying, for example, that if hedge funders hadn’t been enormously creative in dodging taxes, the income available to foreign aid would have been greater).

P. 40 The increasingly extractive financial sector is in part responsible.  That sector could be arranged in other ways, including tighter regulations on trading, higher taxes on financiers, stronger labor protections to protect works from layoffs and pension raiding by private equity owners, and incentives favoring job-creating investment over mere speculation.  Such measures should help to solve the underlying problem by preventing the capture of the gains from growing productivity….It would serve to further increase an abundant thing likely to be hoarded by elites (productivity), instead of a scarce thing that millions need more of (wages).

P. 41…”-there’s a lot of things for-profit end endeavors are not suited to do, where you need the nonprofit sector, you need the government sector.  But one of the things the for-profit section is great at is self-sustaining because you don’t have to be constantly fund-raising”.

P. 45 The new win-win-ism is arguably a far more radical theory than the “invisible hand”. That old idea merely implied that capitalists should not be excessively regulated, lest the happy by products of their greed not reach the poor.  The new idea goes further, in suggesting that capitalists are more capable than any government could ever be of solving the underdog’s problems.

P. 46 …They describe “philanthrocapitalists” as “hyper agents” who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else.

P. 47 ….the founder of the Collaborative Fund, a venture capital firm in New York [writes] – Once seen as sacrificial to growth and returns, pursuing a social mission now plays a role when attracting both customers and employees.” [He] used a Venn diagram to illustrate the investment thesis that his firm has created in view of this trend.  One circle was labeled “Better for me (self interest)”; the other was labeled ”better for the world” (broader interest).  The overlap was labelled “exponential opportunity.” A charitable interpretation of this idea is that the world deserves to benefit from flourishing business.  A more sinister interpretation is that the business deserves to benefit from any attempt to better the condition of the world…..P.53 But in…. Venn diagram, it is worth noting that the lion’s share of each circle remains outside of the overlap of the win-win –what mathematicians call the relative complement.

P. 51 …[leader of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation] he was told to stop using the phrase “social justice”.  [So he started to use the word “fairness”].

P. 52 ….Fairness seemed to be more about how people were treated by abstract systems than about the possibility of the winner’s own complicity.

….What these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in – think charter schools over more equal public schools funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies.  The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them. Win-win.

….leaves many chasing working instead of building livelihoods.

P. 54 …. the effects of a generation’s worth of changes in the lives of working class Americans, rooted in policy choices and shifts in technology and the world situation–including outsourcing, stagnant wages, erratic hours, defanged unions, deindustrialization, ballooning debt, nonexistent sick leave, dismal schools, predatory lending, and dynamic scheduling while doing nothing about these underlying problems.

P. 57 [quote from real life example] “Society tells me that I have to  go to school, get a good job, and then I’ll get a salary, because I am in America….And that’s what I did, and now I’m in debt.  And now I’m suffocating”. [Psychological stress and physical illness].

[Real life] story exposed multiple malfunctions in the machinery of American progress.  It implicated the country’s health care system and the problem of unaffordable drugs, its public transport system, its wage and labor laws; its food system and food deserts, its student debt crisis, its so-called great risk shift, through which corporate America has stabilized its own income statements over a generation of off-loading uncertainty onto workers, and the ways in which shareholders were running companies more and more for themselves, to the detriment of every other stakeholder.

P. 64 …VCs [venture capitalists] and entrepreneurs are considered by many to be thinkers these days, their commercial utterances treated like ideas, and these ideas are often in the future tense: claims about the next world, forged by adding up the theses of their portfolio companies or extrapolating from their own start-up’s mission statement.  That people listened to their ideas gave them a chance to lauder their self-interested hopes into more selfless-sounding predictions about the world. For example, a baron wishing to withhold benefits from workers might reframe that desire as a prediction about a future in which every human being is a solo entrepreneur.  A social media billionaire keen to profit from the higher advertising revenue that video posts draw, compared to text ones, might recast that interest–and his rewriting of the powerful algorithms he owns to get what he wants–as a prediction that “I just think that we are going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.” [Mark Zuckerberg did this].

P. 67 …[Shervin Pishevar, a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley] was not only casting venture capitalists and billionaire company founders as rebels against the establishment, fighting the powers that be on behalf of ordinary people.  He was also maligning the very institutions that are meant to care for ordinary people and promote equality. He referred to unions as ‘cartels’…..

P. 74 ….the Ubers and Airbnbs and Facebooks and Googles of the world are at once radically democratic and dangerously oligarchic….

P. 77 As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out.  Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good. Diverting the public’s attention from an issue like offshore banking worsens the big problems, even as these MarketWorlders shower attention on niche causes.

P. 82 [Silicon Valley]….proposing “a new kind of economy,” as one of its digital pamphlets put it: For all the wonders the Internet brings us, it is dominated by an economics of monopoly, extraction, and surveillance.  Ordinary users retain little control over their personal data, and the digital workplace is creeping into every corner of workers’ lives. Online platforms often exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities in society, even while promising to be the great equalizers.  Could the Internet be owned and governed differently?

“PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL” THINKERS

P. 82…..One heard from speakers ways of thinking that were all but barred from MarketWorld:  the idea that there were such things as power and privilege; that some people had them in every era and some people didn’t; that this power and privilege demanded wariness; that progress was not inevitable, and that history was not a line but a wheel; that sometimes astonishing new tools were used in ways that worsened the world; that places of darkness often persisted even under new light; that people had a long habit of exploiting one another, no matter how selfless they and their ideas seem; that the powerful are your equals as citizens, not your representatives.

The attendees didn’t confine their speech to win-wins.  They spoke of exploitation and abuse and solidarity. They spoke of problems.  They were not bound by the genteel MarketWorld consensus.

THE CRITIC AND THE THOUGHT LEADER

P. 87 …[Amy Cuddy, social psychologist at Harvard] …continued to work on….project to study how men’s hegemony, that most global of phenomena, adapts to local conditions so as to enroot itself.

P. 91-92 [Cuddy – with her Wonder Woman pose]…Without necessarily intending to, she was giving MarketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without taking power away from those who hold it.  She was, to use a metaphor she would later employ, giving people a ladder up across a forbidding wall–without proposing to tear down the wall.

HOW TO MOVE TOWARDS THOUGHT LEADER AND AWAY FROM CRITICAL THINKING

P. 97-100 …The culture was full of instruction….about how to become more hearable as a thinker–how to move toward the thought-leader end of the critic/thought leader continuum….You start to see a few basic dance steps in common–what we call the thought-leader three-step.

“Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator” is first of these steps…..the second step is to personalize the political….This second step was, in a sense, to do the opposite of what a generation of feminists had taught us to do.  That movement had given the culture the phrase “the personal is political”….”Personal problems are political problems”

…In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way.  They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic–injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives–but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller.  The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress.  The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his vulnerability because at least he is alive.  They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.

The third move is to be constructively actionable.  It is fine and good to write and say critical things without giving solutions–but not if you want to be a thought leader….

P. 103 [paid speeches]…may be right that each speech is its own thing, not enough to corrupt an honest person on its own.  But can a speaking career as a whole never form something like “ties” that have some degree of permanence and a two-way flow of influence and information?

P. 104 The idea that thought leaders are unaffected by their patrons is also contradicted by their very own speakers bureau website, which illustrate how the peddlers of potentially menacing ideas are rendered less scary to gatherings of the rich and powerful.

P. 106 Thought leaders can find themselves becoming like poets speaking a tax collector’s language, saying what they might not say or believe on their own.  And the danger isn’t only in what they say in this new language, but also in the possibility that they might somewhere down the line stop thinking in their native one.

CAN THOUGHT LEADERS TRANSCEND THE PITFALLS OF THOUGHT LEADERSHIP?

P. 117 Amy Cuddy wants to believe the thought leader can use the tricks of her trade to transcend the pitfalls of thought leadership.  She wants to believe there is a micro way into the macro….She thinks the secret to cajoling them toward systemic reform may lie in blending two disparate concepts from her field.  One is about how to get people to care about a problem by zooming in on a vivid person.  The other is about how to get them to care by zooming out from person to see a system.

The first of these concepts is known as the “identifiable-victim effect”…..People react differently toward identifiable victims than to statistical victims who have not yet been identified.  Specific victims of misfortune often draw extraordinary attention and resources. But, it is often difficult to draw attention to, or raise money for, interventions that would prevent people from becoming victims in the first place.

P. 118 …Wondered if a thought leader could use feedback like this to her advantage.  If you want to talk about the structural power of sexism, first make people think of their daughters.

P. 119 ….possibilities of the second social psychological concept, the one involving zooming out.  She felt it might break up this limiting symbiosis. The formal term for the concept is the “assimilation effect”, and it occurs when people link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context.

P. 120 When a thought leader strips politics and perpetrators from a problem, she often gains a access to a bigger platform to influence change-makers–but she also adds to the vast pile of stories promoted by MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is a win-win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.

POVERTY VERSUS INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CHARITY

P. 120 What the thought leaders offer Market World’s winners, wittingly or unwittingly, is the semblance of being on the right side of change.  The kinds of change favored by the public in an age of inequality, as reflected from time to time in some electoral platforms, are usually unacceptable to elites….

P. 122 [Bruno Giussani, curator of TED organization].For example, ideas framed as being about “poverty” are more acceptable than ideas framed as being about “inequality”. The two ideas are related. But poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fingers, and inequality is something more worrying:  It speaks of what some have and others lack; it flirts with the idea of injustice and wrongdoing; it is rational. “Poverty is essentially a question that you can address via charity.”  A person of means, seeing poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. “But inequality you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.”  Inequality is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a privileged person, it means to look into one’s own privilege. And, “you cannot change it by yourself. You can change the system only together.  With charity, essentially, if you have money, you can do a lot of things alone.”

PROGRESSION OF THOUGHT LEADER THINKING

P. 124 Many thinkers cut these moral corners and contort themselves in these ways because they are so reliant on the assent of MarketWorld for building their careers….”If they want to make potential benefactors happy, they cannot necessarily afford to speak truth to money.”

P. 125 It wasn’t necessarily malice or cynicism that sustained these patterns, but something more banal.  The people who served as tastemakers for the global elite were, like many, in an intellectual bubble…the sole way of thinking?  Everybody thinks the same way. In his world, he [Giussani] said, that meant an unspoken consensus (widespread but not total) on certain ideas:  Progressive views are preferable to conservative ones; globalization, though choppy, is ultimately a win-win-win-win; most long term trends are positive for humanity; making many supposed short-term problems ultimately inconsequential; diversity and cosmopolitanism and the free flow of human beings are always better than the alternatives; markets are the most realistic way to get things done.

What this…did was cause his tribe to “ignore a lot of issues that were relevant to other people and not to  us”, culture in a broad sense that then came back and is haunting us [in the form of] rising populist anger.

P. 139  [Sean Hinton, Economic Advancement Program]…..was learning the protocols to work his way into the arena of business….The protocols had grown out of corporate problem-solving, but increasingly MarketWorlders were employing them to elbow into the solution of social problems traditionally considered in other ways, by more public-spirited actors.  And the more people accepted the idea of the protocols as essential to public problem-solving, the more MarketWorld was elevated over government and civil society as the best engine of change and progress.

P. 140 ….young people…..are persuaded by the surrounding culture that only by learning the protocols can they help millions of people…..the bearers of the protocols elbow their way into the solution of social problems simply by offering their own style of diagnoses.

.It is possible to read into this that people are poor because of the absence of these linkages, not because of caste, race, land, hoarding, wages, labor conditions, and plunder, not because of anything anyone did–or is doing–to anyone else; not because of reversible decisions societies have taken.

[TechnoServe] Its managers come, in the main, from corporations, in areas such as investment banking, management consulting, health care, and fund management.

P. 141….Perhaps the clearest signal of…..faith in the power of the protocols to cure injustice–rather than, say, life experience–is the constitution of its board.  Of 28 board members listed online, 26 are white as of last check.

….If TechnoServe emphasizes the missing linkages between poor people and the right information, a rival firm…argues that too many good solutions are too small–another theory of what keeps people poor that, usefully, does not implicate the rich.

WHAT TO DO  ABOUT THE CRISIS OF INEQUALITY AND THE RISE OF ORGANIZED PHILANTHROPY

P. 154 …Ford Foundation and thus in the social justice business….

[from President of Ford Foundation]….letter….had raised, in sharp and provocative language, the question of what to do about the crisis of inequality.  This in itself was disturbing to many rich people, who preferred to talk about reducing poverty or extending opportunity, not about more thoroughgoing reforms that would perhaps require sacrifice….letter squarely blamed the very elites who give back to philanthropy for ignoring their complicity in causing the problems they later seek to solve.

P. 155….had broken what in his circles were important taboos:  Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.

….He was attempting to revise and update–or perhaps overturn–an old gospel that dates back to an era much like ours, a gospel that had itself transformed earlier American ideas of helping other people.

The late historian Peter Dobkin Hall….an authority on the American giving tradition, traces it back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the colonial trade in commodities magnified differences in wealth and created “an increasingly visible population of poor and dependent people for whom the public was expected to take responsibility.”

P. 156 A marked feature of American giving before the big age of philanthropy was the helping of the many by the many….

As the nineteenth century drew down, major changes in American life helped to develop this early tendencies into what is today called organized philanthropy.

P. 157 Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a new industrial capitalism flourished. Incredible fortunes were made in railroad, steel, oil, and other factors of a booming nation’s growth.  Much as is the case today, inequality widened as some seized on the new possibilities and others were displaced.  Anger bubbled, and populist impulses surged. The money that was being made in this earlier gilded age was, in the view of the many, unseemly in its quantities, unjust in its provenance, untenable in the power it conferred over a republic breaking out in new populist sentiments.  It was also fuel for new ideas about giving: “Growth in inequality might be a foe to civic comity, but it is a friend to private philanthropy. [Robert Reich].

The new form of charity birthed by this era was the private foundation, which, Reich argues, was different from the charities of the past, both in its scale and in nature.  It was an entity with broad and general purposes, intended to support other institutions and indeed to create and fund new organizations (e.g., research institutes), seeking to address root causes of social  problems rather than deliver direct services (work “wholesale” rather than “retail”), and designed to be administered by private, self-governing trustees, with paid professional staff, who would act on behalf of a public mission.  One other aspect of these foundations was new: their vast resources enabled them to operate on a scale unlike other, more ordinary endowments.

P. 158 These foundations, were, in other words, allowing a small handful of wealthy people like Carnegie and Rockefeller to commit monumental sums of money to the public good and thus gain a say in the nation’s affairs that rivaled that of many public officials….

Despite the scale of the new generosity, there were criticisms.  One had to do with how the money being given had been made.  The new foundations were troubling, as Reich puts it,”because they represented the wealth, potentially ill-gotten, of Gilded Age robber barons.”No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in inquiring them, said President Theodore Roosevelt.  Memories remained fresh of Rockefeller’s less than benevolent monopoly in oil and less than benevolent allergy to labor unions.

P. 159 Other criticism focused on how the new philanthropy not only laundered cruelly earned money but also converted it into influence over a democratic society. Reich writes that the new foundations “were troubling because they were considered a deeply anti-democratic institution, an entity that could exist in perpetuity and that was accountable except to a hand-picked assemblage of trustees.”

P. 160-162 Andrew Carnegie…helped to found a new vision of philanthropy that not only rebutted the kinds of criticisms that he and others had faced, but effectively delegitimized critics and questioned their right to question….he argued that inequality was the undesirable but inevitable cost of genuine progress.  The “conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized,” he wrote. Inequality is a better thing than it may seem.

P. 161 This is the first step of the Carnegie’s intellectual two-step:  If you want progress, you have to let the rich people make their money however they can, even if it widens inequality.

P. 164 This is the compromise, the truce, distilled:  Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won.  The money will be spent more wisely on you than by you.  You will have your chance to enjoy our wealth, in the way we think you should enjoy it.

Here lay the almost constitutional principles that one day would govern MarketWorld giving: the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism; that callousness and injustice in the cutthroat souk are excused by later philanthropy; that giving should not only help the underdogs but also, and more important, serve to keep them out of the top dog’s hair–and above all, that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power.

P. 165 (gala for charity) ….The whole night is divided into two types of performances from the stage.  The young and the helped, mostly black and brown, repeatedly dance for their donors. Then, between performances, older white men are brought up to praise them and to talk about, and be applauded for, their generosity to the program.

Most of the [older white] men work in finance. They include the corporate raiders who, seeking to raise profits by cutting costs, having helped to do away with stable employment. They are the gentrifiers who have pushed real estate prices through the roof and made it harder for families like those of the young dancers to maintain a livelihood in the city.  They are the beneficiaries of tax laws that give carried interest a major break and help to keep the public coffers low and the schools attended by the city’s poor underfunded, thus driving them into the streets and occasionally, when they are lucky, into the charity’s arms.  But these men have been generous, and in exchange for their generosity, these issues will not come up.  No one will say what could be said:  that these precarious lives could be made less precarious if the kind of men who donated to this program made investments differently, operated companies differently, managed wealth differently,  donated to politicians differently, lobbied differently, thought differently about pretending to live in Florida to avoid a minor New York City tax–if, in other words they were willing to let go of anything dear.  It is one night in one city, but it speaks of a broad, unstated immunity deal: Generosity entitles the winners to exemption from questions like these.

WHAT ABOUT CORPORATIONS WHOSE PRACTICES ARE HARMFUL WHILE GIVING HUGE SUMS TO PHILANTHROPY?

P. 176 The Sacklers, Purdue Pharma, developers of OxyContin.

P. 180 Contrary to the picture of helpfulness and cooperation Purdue attempted to paint, Purdue’s employees were actively and secretly trying to prevent West Virginia from imposing any control on the sale of OxyContin.

P.182 ….How did the Sacklers build the 16th largest fortune in the country?…Another answer to that question might be:  by thwarting the guardians of the public good every time they tried to protect citizens….[John Brownlee, U.S. Attorney in Roanoke, Virginia] It was later reported that Brownlee had received an unusual phone call the night before securing Purdue’s guilty plea.  A senior Justice Department official had called Brownlee ..and “urged him to slow down”…Brownlee rebuffed his superior.  “Eight days later,” the Washington Post said, “his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.”….It was part of a larger attempted purge of prosecutors by the administration of George W. Bush.  Brownlee kept his job; Elston (senior Justice Department official) lost his amid the controversy of the lists becoming public. And what had occasioned the phone call? According to Elston, his boss, a deputy attorney general name Paul McNulty, had asked him to place the call to Brownlee after receiving a request for more time from a defense lawyer representing a Purdue executive.

P. 185 Hooters [exploitation of women, but many, like Cole who started in Hooters restaurant would progress to upper management]

P. 187 This rather audacious rationalization mingled with other, more plausible-sounding ones such as that if there were going to be bad industries, good people should run them. “If in a free-market society there will be demand, whether it is for sugary products or alcohol or scantily clad waitresses in a restaurant concept, then it will exist.”

P. 188 Cole’s [Hooters] rationalization were strongly and sincerely held.  [If the President of the Ford Foundation] wanted to change the money-making system itself, to change how business is conducted, he was not only up against powerful corporate interests and their lobbyists.  He was up against the psychologies of thousands of people like Cole, and a way of looking at life that didn’t require cynicism or callousness to commit harm.  It was a way of viewing things that inured the viewer to the larger system around you, that made these systems not your problem.

P. 190-195   Laurie Tisch [heiress to Loews Corporation–Loews also purchased a cigarette company]

P .194 This difficulty in escaping the status quo was especially evident in Tisch when it came to the aspect of her fortune that gave her the greatest guilt: her cigarette money.

BRIDGING MARKETWORLD AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL WORLD

P. 171 At the heart of Carnegie’s message, as Walker [President of Ford Foundation] read it, was the idea of extreme inequality as “an unavoidable condition of the free market system” and of philanthropy as an effective remedy.,,,But then Walker began to go off script.  The giving world, he wrote, needed “to openly acknowledge and confront the tension inherent in a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system.”

P. 173 “….In most areas of life, we have raised market-based, monetized thinking over all other disciplines and conceptions of value.

P.174 …Walker pondered at the pushback he got..–the pleas to “stop ranting at inequality,” to speak of “opportunity” instead.

P. 196 …Walker spoke highly of his own experience in the financial services industry.  It had given him ‘skills’–some of which, presumably, were the protocols he could now tell himself he had redeployed in service of the weak.  It taught him how to multitask, manage a complex portfolio of projects, assimilate data and turn it into insight, have discipline. He wasn’t flattering his audience.  He was reciting the reasons why so many people…, who aspired to help millions of people, went to places like KKR before embarking on their work of changing the world.

P. 197 Eventually, he got to subject at hand.  “We have in America and in the world a level of extreme inequality that–I don’t mean to be hyperbolic–but I think really threatens our democracy.  Because at the core of the American narrative, in our democracy, is a very simple idea of opportunity.”  That’s how he did it: poking them with a thought that might not have been their favorite, and then quickly meeting them where they were, with the language of opportunity, that MarketWorld staple.

…Now, in front of a new generation of the “barbarians at the gate,” he was meeting them where they were.  “The more inequality we get in our system, the less opportunity there is.” he said….

P. 198 [from audience questions] And his subtlety and their imperviousness had conspired to ensure that he was not really heard.

He had been addressing people still in the fearful, climbing season of their lives [young professionals trying to establish themselves].  To get to the “rainmakers’, he said, you had to be in more private settings….

This thought led Walker to the observation that America was becoming privatized now. The American public had their big conversation out there in the messy democracy, and the elite had its own ongoing intramural chat….

P. 199  Walker looked at America today and saw his rich friends building their metaphorical buildings with gates on the outside and discos indoors.  Gated communities. Home theatres. Private schools. Private jets. Privately run public parks. Private world-saving behind the backs of those to be saved.  “Life goes more and more behind the gate,” he said. “More and more of our civic activities and public activities become private activities.”

P. 200 [Walker, President of Ford Foundation joining PepsiCo board] …..The move attracted some criticism, in part because this warrior against inequality would now be earning more than a million dollars a year from the Ford Presidency and this new, very occasional role, and in part because he now bore formal responsibility for what Pepsi did, including the company’s continuing choice to sell its harmful sugary drinks.  The critics could console, or depress, themselves with the thought that he was far from alone: Several of his counterparts at the major foundations served on the boards of firms like Citigroup and Facebook. The fear was that, yet again, MarketWorld would infiltrate and win…But Walker promised and seemed to believe that he would change them, not the other way around.  “I will bring my perspective as the leader of a social justice organization.”

P. 206 ….Walker (said)…. the new UN Week (Clinton Global Initiative) lived at “this intersection of doing well and doing well was doing good.”

P.207 However, Walker said, it was also the case that “philanthropists and commercial enterprises saw in CGI a platform that they could leverage for both doing good and building their brands.”  As a result, self-service flirted dangerously with altruism at CGI, in Walker’s view.

P. 209 ….Eight events had free registration, eight sold paid registration, and forty-eight were invitation-only.  The ratio told a truth about the new MarketWorld UN week: When private actors move into the solution of public problems, it becomes less and less of the public’s business.

FORMER PRESIDENT CLINTON’S PROGRESSION TO LIBERALISM

P. 201 Many of these people had been coming to Bill Clinton’s conference for years. Though they tended to label themselves as givers, philanthropists, social innovators, impact investors, at and the like, recent political upheavals has given their tribe a new name that was sticking.  They were coming to be known, by their friends and enemies alike, as globalists….Around the world, a suspicion seemed to be taking hold that jet-setters solving humanity’s problems in private conclaves was as much a problem as it was a solution.

P. 204  Clinton …(Yale Law School) …had embraced a liberalism that was….a “systems-building philosophy,” whose revelation was “that society, left alone, tended towards entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally.” Private individuals couldn’t be relied to see the big picture of their society…but “a larger entity such as government could.” When he started in public office, Clinton believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action. During the White House years, though, and even more decisively afterward, he had been won over by theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets and partnerships among entities private and public, which would find areas of common cause and work together on win-win solutions.

P. 235 ….Clinton’s globalist dream was admirable, but it was also intolerant of other dreams.  It sought to make hard choices seem inevitable and uncomplicated. It sought to blur what happened to be good for the plutocrats in the room with was was good for ordinary people…It was among the things inspiring the revolt by making so many people feel barred from decision-making about the future of their own world.

P. 238 Still, his political opposition as president does not tell the full story of why recent decades have been so gruelling for millions of Americans.  Clinton, like Obama after him, was up against militant conservatives and libertarians, backed by plutocratic donors, who loathed the very idea of public, governmental problem-solving.  To be clear, that is the movement chiefly responsible for market supremacy’s takeover of America and the bleak prospects of millions of Americans. Yet the Republican party represented less than half of the nation, and the Democratic Party had a chance to stand for a robust alternative to market hegemony.  And you could say that it did to an extent–but it often did, under Clinton, and Obama, in a tepid, market-friendly, donor-approved way that conceded so much to government’s haters that the cause lost the fire of purpose.

……Jacob Hacker, Yale political scientist, who was once described as “an intellectual ‘It boy’ in the Democratic Party said, “Many progressives still believe in a role for government that is pretty fundamental, but they have lost faith in the capacity to achieve it, and they’ve in many cases lost the language for talking about it.”  Republicans, he said, are straight forward in their contempt for government. Democrats, especially those of the Clinton school of centrist, triangulating, market-friendly politics, don’t counter the contempt with a vigorous embrace of government…instead speak in a “gauzy” language….Even their proposed policies, though, reflect ambivalence:  health care for all, but not through public provision; help paying for college, but not free college; charter schools, but not equal schools….

P. 239 [Yale political scientist]...this hesitancy and “loss of faith” in government” has “hugely asymmetric effects on the two parties.”  He said, “For Republicans and the right, it is–for the most part, though not always–conducive to their aims, because if the government doesn’t do things, it can often be consistent with what they would like to see happen.  But for the left and the Democrats, it’s a huge loss, because their vision of a good society is one in which a lot of valuable public goods and benefits have their foundations in government action.”

….From an ex-president without legal power but still with the ability to galvanize a movement one could imagine a campaign, modeled on the Progressive Era, to pressure the government to put an end to this abusive profiteering.  Yet his proposed answer was to make it easier for the offending companies to make money selling healthy products.

“If you want to get them to do less harm, it requires innovation, because they will still have to make money, especially for publicly held companies,” Clinton said….The needs of the market came first.  Even a man who had spent his lifetime in politics felt a duty to be solicitous of the business person’s concerns…..

P. 241 Such attempts to work with government, though, were not the same as a conviction in the power of government, the supreme power of government, to better people’s lives….

P. 244 Through it all, Clinton saw truths in the anger bubbling up around him.  He saw how MarketWorld-style change crowded out the habit of democracy. He genuinely worried about young people seeing social problems and, unlike in his activist-prone generation, confining their questioning to what socially minded business they could start up.

CONFLICTS WITHIN MARKETWORLD

P. 210 …the question being asked was: Why do they hate us?  The “they” were the rootless cosmopolitans’ less-rarified fellow citizens, who in one place after another were gravitating to nationalism, demagogy, and resentful exclusion–and rejected some of the elites’ most cherished beliefs:  borderless, market cures for all diseases, inevitable technological progress, benign technocratic stewardship.

…..fellow MarketWorld elites had been drafted into a new class war.  It was no longer rich versus poor but rather people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck  somewhere–echoing his colleague’s notion of somewhere people and everywhere companies…What went wrong was that the Somewheres were simply no longer fooled by the Everywhere’s performance of concern and charity, and the numbers finally caught up with the Everywheres:  “No prizes for guessing which group is more numerous. No matter how many donations the global elite made, philanthropic and political, we could never quite compensate for that disparity.”

P. 212 [suggestion for change] A new approach has to start from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good.  People also want to feel that they are shaping the societies in which they live.

Jonathan Haidt [psychology professor, New York University] offered another theory of what went wrong in an essay…”If you want to understand why nationalism and right-wing populism have grown so strong and so quickly, you must start by looking at the actions of the globalists…In a sense, the globalists ‘started it.’”  They started it…because the “new cosmopolitan elite”…acts and talks in ways that insult, alienate, and energize many of their fellow citizens, particularly those who a psychological predisposition to authoritarianism.”

[This blog author’s words–The very problems the elites have self righteously only partially solved have caused the unrest].

P. 213 In Haidt’s analysis, globalism and anti-globalism are both cogent worldviews with valid concerns and data behind them.  There are advantages to a world of free and rampant human mingling and motion, and there are different advantages to stable, tightly bound communities. But…the globalists had so convinced themselves of the moral superiority of openness, freedom, and One World that they were unable to process the genuine fear these things aroused in millions of people.

P. 215-219 [examples of five political figures (Including Clinton)]  P. 220 It was striking to have five political figures share a stage and have not one moment of real argument.  They all seemed to suppose that the good society of entrepreneurs, whose success was tantamount to that of the society itself…

THE ARGUMENT FOR POLITICS

P. 220 One could forget, watching such a civilized group, that traditional politics is argumentative for a reason.  It isn’t that politicians don’t know how to be nice, but rather that politics is rooted in the idea of a big, motley people taking their fate into their own hands.  Politics is the inherently messy business of negotiating and reconciling incompatible interests and coming up with a decent plan, designed to be liked but difficult to love.  It solves problems in a context in which everyone is invited to the table and everyone is equal and everyone has the right to complain about being underserved and unseen. Politics, in bringing together people of divergent interests, necessarily puts sacrifice on the table.  It is easier to conjure win-wins in forums like this one, where everyone is a winner. The consensus was a reminder of all the kinds of people and perspectives that had not been invited in.

P. 222 Had the organizators of CGI truly been interested in why people resented the globalists, they could have invited…Dani Rodrik…an economist at Harvard….he had become one of the more incisive critics of how the globalists’ noble intentions undermine democracy.

”Today,” she [Theresa May, British Prime Minister] said, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street.  But if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.  You don’t understand what citizenship means.

P. 223 …In other words, politics is about actual places, with actual shared histories. Globalism, chasing a dream of everyone, risks belonging to no one.

For Rodrik, it isn’t just that solving things at the global level (which, in the absence of world government, often means privately, which often means plutocratically) lacks legitimacy. Pushing things up into that realm gives globalists “moral cover or ethical cover for escaping their domestic obligations as citizens of their own national setting.” It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well. Or, even more simply, it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges–as opposed to  universal challenges ‘like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations.  In such cases, diffuseness or distance can spare one the feeling of having a finger jabbed in one’s face.

P. 225 …”In an ideal democratic world, where citizenship is fully exercised and participatory, it’s a process of domestic deliberation where you’re testing your idea against other domestic citizens…”

P. 226 …”The locus of politics, I think, is the key issue here,” he said.  “What is the right locus of politics, and who are the decision-making authorities?  Is it these networks and these global get-togethers? Or is it at the national level?”  Who should make change, and where should they make it?

P. 227 …..’Probably people who get together in these congregations [CGI] don’t think of what they are doing as politics,” Rodrik said.  “But of course it’s politics. It’s just politics of a different focus and has a different view of who matters and how you can change things, and has different theory of change and who the agents of change are.”…The problem with the globalists’ vision of world citizens changing the world through partnerships, Rodrik said, is that “you’re not accountable to anyone, because it is just a bunch of other global citizens like you as their audience.”  He added, “The whole idea about having a polity, having a demos, is that there’s accountability within that demos.  That’s what a political system ensures and these mechanisms don’t.”

The political system that Rodrik speaks of is not just Congress or the Supreme court or governorships.  It is all of these things and other things. It is civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society.  It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions, that offer that say in equal measure to every citizen, that allow some kind of access to your deliberations or at least provide a meaningful feedback mechanism to tell you it isn’t working.  It is not reimagining the world at conferences.

P. 228 It isn’t necessarily that simple.  A pair of Stanford sociologists...investigated the question and came up with a surprising answer.  When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that disrupt it.  The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.”  But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.”  These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and the markets.”

WOMEN’S EQUALITY

P. 232 Women’s equality, it was now said, was a $28 trillion opportunity.  This had become a near-constant refrain in the MarketWorld–some permutation of the words “women”, “equality”, and “trillion”.  If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing the trade deficit.  “Of course, you should do it because it was the right thing to do, but there’s a strong business case.”…..In other words, of course you should do it because morality is enough, but since we all know morality isn’t actually enough, you should know that the business case is fantastic.

HOW THE PRIVATE SECTION CHANGED THE PUBLIC SPHERE

P. 234 ….The private sector didn’t merely add to the public sphere activities.  It got to change the language in which the public sphere thought and acted.

P. 247 [Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute] …The fellowship is a prestigious finishing school to assist the transition from making it in business to making the world a better place.  Its mission is to mobilize a “new breed of leaders” to “tackle the world’s most intractable problems.” But it defines leader in a particular way:  “All are proven entrepreneurs, mostly from the world of business, who have reached a point in their lives where having achieve success, they are ready to apply their creative talents to building a better society.”

P. 248 [Founder of Freelancers Union]…She originally wanted to serve as a broker to help these workers [Uber drivers and magazine writers] buy health insurance as a group.  Then she realized it would be easier and more effective if she simply created the health insurance company herself.  But the economy wasn’t set up for people like (her). A company not run purely in shareholders’ interests risked lawsuits from its investors.  The dominant interpretations of corporate law,….has since the 1970s came to regard companies’ first duty as being to earn a profit from shareholders.

THE RISE OF B CORPORATIONS (BENEFIT)

P. 249 (B corporations) ….do business in a different way….Andrew Kassoy…batted around ideas for addressing this problem, and at last alighted on the vision of creating a parallel capitalist infrastructure, next to the traditional one, in which companies could be more responsible and conscious, and nonetheless raise money from capital markets and comply with the law.  Thus was born the B Corporation, or benefit corporation, as it is also known….

P. 250 …started a nonprofit called B Lab, which gives better-behaved businesses a certification based on a rigorous analysis of their social and environmental practices …Ben and Jerry’s….

…hoped that by certifying conscious companies, they could change the larger system of business….but in the MarketWorld way, they didn’t take on the system directly.  They simply sought to cultivate examples of a different way….

….But now,….B Lab was in the midst of a rethinking process, which was guided by his conviction that “what got us here is not going to get us where we’re going.”

P. 251 The thorniest questions…involved whether to stick to the MarketWorld mantra of “make good easier,” or whether instead to seek to make those who commit harm to pay a higher price–which meant changing the system of business for everyone, fighting in the arena of politics and law rather than the market, and elevating the stopping of bad business over the encouragement of good business….

For example, one of B Lab’s great victories had been the creation of a parallel corporate law, first enacted in Maryland and then adopted in other states, that allowed companies to embed a social mission into their work without fear of legal trouble such as shareholder complaints…Was it more important to make it easier for Etsy to do good, or rather to make it harder for ExxonMobil to do harm?  Was it possible to do both?

Kassoy felt drawn toward the systems work, even though he had devoted the last decade to the other approach.  “I’m not be sure everybody would say this, but I believe there’s a huge role for government regulation of business.  We’re not going to change everybody. We’re not changing human greed. Businesses act badly.”  There were, in particular, “extractive industries where just the existence of the industry” means harm and social costs being dumped on humanity.  “We’re not getting rid of all of those things”…

The United States had millions of corporations and, after a decade of B Lab’s evangelizing, just hundreds of B Corps.  Kasoy, saw now, more clearly than he did at the company’s founding, that solving problems like inequality, greed, and pollution would require more than making good easier.

P. 253 …B Corps were championed all over MarketWorld….the founders were regularly praised by recognized “thought leaders”.

CONFLICT BETWEEN POLITICAL LIBERALS AND MARKET SOLUTIONS

P. 252 He [Andrew Kassoy] was not the only MarketWorlder coming around to the thought that their ways of operating might be inadequate to the actual work of changing the world, or even just one’s own country.  These MarketWorlders, though, often lacked an understanding of how actual change did work, or they felt, sometimes dubiously, that pursuing the other kind of change called upon skills they lacked.  If government was the place you went to change systems, what could they as individuals do? They could petition the government.  They could join movements fighting to change law and policy.  But,…many in MarketWorld were daunted by this approach. He had the feeling that many in MarketWorld do that in their grounding in the norms of business made them ill-equipped for the realm of politics, where win-lose was normal and where fights often had to be picked instead of mutually agreeable deals being struck….It was peculiar, this idea of activism as manipulation; it sounded more like an excuse for not working on systems than a reason.

…..I don’t think that what we’re doing can change capitalism by itself.  But I do believe that what this does is creates a model.” On other days, Kassoy wasn’t so sure about this logic.  He kept coming backing to regulation. “I’m a big-government kind of a person,” he said.  “I believe there’s a very strong role for the state. And I don’t know how to make that happen.”

P. 253 Kassoy’s ambivalence is what Jacob Hacker, the Yale political scientist, seems to have in mind when he speaks of political liberals who are philosophically committed to government, to the public solution of public problems, but who have absorbed, like secondhand smoke, the right’s contempt for public action.  While people on the right believe actively in the superiority of market solutions, liberals like Kassoy do so passively–passively in that they do not reject a public solution in theory, but pursue a private one in practice….And so no one’s really told us government is a good thing for a very long time.” Saying this seemed to make Kassoy reflect on whether he had unwittingly become the last link in this change of liberals consolidating the war on government by proffering private solutions to public problems.

P. 255-256 failure of big banks

CRITIQUE OF MARKETWORLD

P. 256  Chiara Cordelli, an Italian political philosopher at the University of Chicago….sought to unravel some of MarketWorld’s self-justifications.

Take, for instance, the view that MarketWorld has a duty, and right, to address public problems–and indeed, to take a lead in developing private solutions to them.  This…was like putting the accused in change of the court system. The questions that elites refuse to ask, she said, is: Why are there in the world so many people that you need to help in the first place?  You should ask yourself: Have your actions contributed at all to that?….And, if yes, the fact that now you are helping some people, however, effectively, doesn’t seem to be enough to compensate.”

P. 257 Cordelli was speaking of both the active committers of harm and the passive permitters of it.  The committers are what she calls “the easy cases.”…”If you have campaigned against inheritance tax, if you have directly tried to avoid paying taxes, if you supported and directly, voluntarily benefitted from a system where there were low labor regulations and increased precarity,” then, she argues, “you have directly contributed to a structure that foreseeably and avoidably harmed people.”  That is “direct complicity.”

As for the people who don’t help run Goldman Sachs or Purdue Pharma, who live decent lives and attempt to make the world slightly better through the market, Cordelli called them the harder cases….She saw in each of these types of efforts not a single moral act but two.  Alongside the act of helping was a parallel act of acceptance.

P. 258-260…. Economic reasoning dominates our age, and we may be tempted to focus on the first half of each of the above sentences–a marginal contribution you can see and touch–and to ignore the second half, involving a vaguer thing called complicity….

P. 261 As harsh as her criticisms might sound to  them, Cordelli is giving…. others in MarketWorld a way out.  She is confessing, on their behalf, what some of them privately fear to be true: that they are debtors who need society’s mercy and not saviors who need its followership.  She is offering what MarketWorlders so adore: a solution. The solution is to return, against their instincts and even perhaps against their interests, to politics as the place we go to shape the world.

P. 262-263 ….Businesspersons calling themselves “leaders” and naming themselves solvers of the most intractable social problems represent a worrisome way of erasing their role in causing them.  Seen through Cordelli’s lens, it is indeed strange that the people with the most to lose from social reform are so often placed on the board of it. And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also, for Cordelli, marred by its own “narcissism.”…..

When society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality.  Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how. Those who receive help are not only objects of the transactions, but also subjects of it–citizens with agency. When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality:  the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient.

When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen.  It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues that this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen.  “You are an individual”, she said. “You cannot speak in their name.  I can maybe speak in the name of my child, but other people are not your children.”

“This is what it means to be free and equal and independent individuals and, for better or for worse, share common institutions,” she said.  Our political institutions–our laws, our constitutions, our regulations, our taxes, our shared infrastructure:  the million little pieces that uphold our civilization and that we own together–only these, Cordelli said, “can act and speak on behalf of everyone.”  She admitted, “They often don’t do that.” But that isn’t the way out that MarketWorld so often makes it out to be.  “It’s our job,” Cordelli said, “to make them do that, rather than working to weaken and destroy those institutions by thinking that we can effectuate change by ourselves.  Let’s start working to create the conditions to make those institutions better.”

P. 266 …Goldman Sachs- sponsored lunch…in which the company’s do-gooding was trumpeted and its role in causing the financial crisis went unexamined.

AUTHOR ANAND GIRIDHARADAS’ REMARKS

P. 267 This book is the work of a critic, but it is also the work of an insider-outsider to that which it takes on….

P. 268 (His Professor at Harvard)….was the first to plant in me the the thought that money had transcended being currency to become our very culture, conquering our imaginations and infiltrating domains that had nothing to do with it. (END OF POST)

FAILURE TO PROVIDE LIVING WAGE ENSURES UNEQUAL SUBSIDIZATION OF MANY GROUPS OF SOCIETY

FAILURE TO PROVIDE LIVING WAGE ENSURES UNEQUAL SUBSIDIZATION OF MANY GROUPS OF SOCIETY

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

Many including conservative and far right leaning political views imply that a living wage or even a $15 minimum wage is unsustainable even while ensuring the financial privileging of the wealthy.  The following article was published in local newspapers and states much more eloquently than this author can the financial harm and discrimination that low minimum wages cause.

“Low Wages are a subsidy”  opinion letter gives an accurate summation of subsidies experienced when minimum wage does not equal what it costs to live.

Article quoted in its entirety:

“I understand the minimum wage is a very contentious issue but I would just like give my thoughts on this.

If a person is on minimum wage and does not earn enough to survive then they must have their wages topped up be it either state welfare, charity, parents or working another job.  If it is by state welfare then the business is receiving a subsidy through my taxes. If it is by charity, then the business is receiving a subsidy through the charitable donations to the worker.  If the working lives at home then it is by the parents.

If the worker takes on another job, the subsidy is through his low wages.  The simple truth is that by paying minimum wage someone is making up the difference to a living wage and someone is benefiting from the low wage.  We as consumers should feel guilty that these workers are subsidizing our lifestyle by us not paying the real price for the goods or service.”

CONCLUSION

Editorials and opinion letters to local newspapers in the recent past have dissed raising the minimum wage and climate pricing while praising charitable organizations.  Some spout biblical verses while stating there always will be poverty. Charity touted as panacea for poverty does not solve poverty problem. Charity only masks poverty and should be viewed as sinful when it replaces paying a decent living wage or pushes poor further into poverty while financially privileging the wealthy and fleecing the poor.

TFSA (CANADA) – RAMIFICATIONS OF FINANCIAL DISCRIMINATION AND ABUSE OF THE PLAN

TFSA (CANADA) – RAMIFICATIONS OF FINANCIAL DISCRIMINATION AND ABUSE OF THE PLAN

(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)

This case study outlines how a financial advisor has shown it is possible for Canadian TFSA holders with large accounts to evade paying income tax for a number of years (15) and use benefits intended for low income persons by circumventing the low income assistance programs.

HISTORY OF TAX FREE SAVINGS ACCOUNT (TFSA)

The TFSA was introduced in 2009 by Stephen Harper, Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party, and Jim Flaherty, Minister of Finance.

The maximum annual contribution room at present is $6,000 per year and is indexed to the Consumer Price Index in $500 increments to account for inflation.  The 2015 Progressive Conservatives raised the contribution limit to $10,000 and eliminated indexation for inflation.  However, the newly elected Liberal government re-implemented the pre-2015 contribution limit of $5,500 for 2016 which will be indexed for inflation after that.  As of January 1, 2019, the total cumulative contribution room for a TFSA is $63,500 per person and $127,000 for couples and for those who have been 18 years or older and residents of Canada for all eligible years. Any unused contribution room under the cap can be carried forward to subsequent years, without any upward limit.  There are no limits on withdrawals from TFSA accounts. TFSAs are not declared as income and, therefore, are not taxed.

CASE STUDIES FOR COUPLE MICHAEL AND JULIE,  UNATTACHED PERSON MICHEL AND UNATTACHED PERSON PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEE

(1) THEY WANT TO SPEND $50,000 PER YEAR IN RETIREMENT.  DID THEY SAVE ENOUGH? By Mark Seed, My Own Advisor and Owen Winkelmolen, PlanEasy) LINKS

Michael and Julie (they-want-to-spend-50000-per-year-in-retirement-did-they-save-enough)  $600,000 paid for home and a million dollars in retirement savings.

Sources of Income chart for Michael and Julie (Sources-of-Income-50000-per-year-.png) – they want to retire on $50,000 per year at age 55 – shows how they can avoid paying taxes for 15 years while using benefits intended for low income persons.

Net Worth chart for Michael and Julie (Net-Worth-50000-per-year-post-September-5-2018.png) at age 100 they will still have an enormous amount of wealth, especially in TFSA accounts.

(2) ALL THE FRUGALITY IN THE WORLD WON’T LET THIS 34 YEAR OLD RETIRE AT 45 by Allen Allentuck LINK                                                                                Michel (all-the-frugality-in-the-world-wont-let-this-34-year-old-retire-at-45)

(3) PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEE BASED ON THE REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE (SINGLE)

Financial Profile Page 1 revised Jan. 2019 post

Financial profile TFSA holder2 page 2 revised Jan. 2019

CAVEATS – Financial information for couple in this report is limited.  It is difficult to determine if this is a real life case scenario or an example made up to illustrate what is possible for $50,000 retirement income.  As stated in the report the investment returns for TFSA remains constant for each year which is not the case in real life. It also is not possible to assess if real estate value will go up or down. It appears the couple have no children.

Financial profile for unattached individuals –  Michel’s food cost seems high (unless he requires a special diet and males require more calories). It appears he has no condo fees so he probably has expenses like condo maintenance.  Public service employee profile is based on snapshots of real life experiences of unattached persons. For the most part it closely matches the financial profile of Michel.  Food costs are replaced by mortgage costs.

Financial profiles are incomplete.  For example, expenses like medical eye and dental care and saving for vehicle replacement are not listed.

DETAILS OF CASE STUDIES FOR MARRIED COUPLE MICHAEL AND JULIE (Ontario), AGE 35 AND UNATTACHED INDIVIDUAL MICHEL, AGE 34 (Quebec)

Retirement age – Michael and Julie want to retire at age 55.  Michel wants to know if he can retire at age 45 and travel the world.  Many married couples have the ability to retire at age 55. Some would say Michel’s desire to retire at age 45 is unrealistic.  His financial advisor states that regardless of how frugal Michel is he will not be able to retire before the age of 60. Why is that unattached persons always have to be frugal and work longer?

Retirement income – Michael and Julie want a retirement after tax income of $50,000 at age 55.  Michel’s financial advisor states he unequivocally has to work to age 60 to achieve a retirement after tax income of $40,000.  There is that frugality once again!

Investment Amounts at present time – Michael and Julie’s account at present time totals $570,623 in TFSA and $423,706 in RRSP.  They have continually maxed out their TFSA accounts. Overall their portfolio has a 70/30 mix of stocks and fixed income.  A 6% rate of return on stocks and a 2.5% rate of return on fixed income is assumed for the article. They already have at age 35 a total close to a million dollars so it is difficult to figure why the amount wouldn’t be in excess of well over a million dollars in twenty years time at age 55.

Michel has $24,329 in TFSA and $90,701 in RRSP.  Calculations for retirement income are based on a 3% rate of return.

Investment Amounts at time of retirement – Estimate for Michael and Julie is stated in 2018 dollar value, not value at time of retirement, so value at retirement should be well over $1 million.  Total capital estimates for Michel at age 60 are $895,000.

Housing – Michael and Julie own a $600,000 house which they expect to own outright at time of retirement at age 55.  They plan on selling their home around age 80 and moving into an apartment or condo to rent. That might add $30,000/year to their expenses but they will have freed up almost $600,000 in real estate assets (minus 5% transaction fees).

Michel has a $165,000 condo.  He has a $97,000 mortgage with 24 years remaining amortization. At present rates, the mortgage will be paid when Michel is 58.

Income – Michael and Julie’s income is not stated, but it must be quite high to achieve the investments and $600,000  house they have at the present time. Michel has an income of $70,000 which is well above the median and average incomes for unattached individuals.

Vehicle –   Value of vehicle for couple is not stated.  The value of Michel’s vehicle is $2,500 which must be pretty much a “junker”.

How Michael and Julie will achieve their goal of retirement income of $50,000 as outlined in article

Because all their retirement savings are inside registered accounts such as their TFSAs and RRSPs, Michael and Julie have a lot of control over withdrawals and allows them to reduce taxes and optimize government benefits like CPP, OAS, and GIS.

To start, Michael and Julie will withdraw just enough from their RRSP to maximize the basic tax exemption, the rest of their income will come from their TFSA. This mix of RRSP and TFSA withdrawals (with no other income sources) will help them pay virtually zero taxes for the first 15 years of their retirement.  This will take them from ages 55 to ~ age 70.  (In the process they will have gained  almost $135,000 in benefits from paying no taxes for 15 years and reduced the income taxes on their estate to nearly zero.  At time of death their investment portfolio will consists mainly of TFSA.)

There are two other ways they can optimize their taxes and benefits during retirement.

The first is to reduce their taxable income between ages 64 and 71 by drawing primarily from TFSA. By starting OAS at age 65, but delaying CPP to age 70, their TFSA withdrawals will allow them to be eligible for GIS, GAINS, GST and Trillium benefits which are supposed to be only for low income persons (definitions provided below). Between ages 65 and 72 these benefits meant for low income persons will add $108,305 to their retirement income.

The second way they can optimize their taxes and benefits is to slowly shift their RRSPs into their TFSA each year. By taking advantage of the lowest tax bracket, they can slowly draw down their RRSPs at a low tax rate and shift these investments into their TFSA. Moving money into their TFSA makes these funds easily available in the future and reduces the taxes on their final estate.

Once they reach age 65 their withdrawal rate on investment will drop dramatically as Old Age Security (OAS) and other government benefits kick in. Then it drops again at age 70 when their Canada Pension Plan benefits begin.  By delaying withdrawal of CPP at 65 years to 70 years the rate of return on CPP will increase by 8.4% per year. By delaying CPP to age 70, they will receive 42% more than if taken at 65.

How Michel will achieve his goal of retirement income of $40,000 at age 60

From the article:  “The problem of early retirement is twofold: Not only must one build up savings faster, but those savings have to last a longer time than they would with later retirement.

In Quebec, a man we’ll call Michel, 34, works in financial services. He earns $70,000 a year and takes home $3,640 per month after many deductions for taxes and benefits. Frugal in his spending, cautious in his investing, he wants to retire at age 45 with $40,000 income per year after tax. Assuming a 3 per cent return rate after inflation, that implies he will be able to add $1 million to present savings in 11 years. On present income, it’s unlikely.

Michel’s goals will be hard to achieve even by 50, the planner says. The earliest he can retire with a $40,000 income after tax is 60. Assuming that he can achieve and maintain a 3 per cent annual return after inflation, then in 26 years his RRSP with a present value of $90,701 and $10,800 annual contributions will have risen to a value of $612,000. With the same assumptions, his TFSA with a present value of $24,329 and $6,000 annual contributions including catch-up additions to fill space will have risen to a value of $283,800. His total capital available for retirement income will total $895,800.

Assuming a 3 per cent return before tax, his RRSP and TFSA capital at 60 would generate $40,475 per year based on an annuitized payout that would exhaust all capital and income in the following 35 years to his age 95.

If he waits until age 65 and were to draw QPP (Quebec Pension Plan) of 64 per cent of a theoretical maximum benefit of $13,600 in 2019 dollars per year at age 65, $8,704, his total income would be $49,179. Retiring early makes attaining this maximum unlikely even with scheduled increases in CPP/QPP contributions and benefits, a planned 52 per cent boost to be phased in starting Jan. 1, 2019. After 20 per cent average tax, he would have $39,343 per year or $3,280 per month. At age 65, he could add Old Age Security benefits, currently $7,210 per year for total income of $56,389 before tax. Still using the 20 per cent rate, he would have post-tax income of $3,760 per month.

Calculations show that even if Michel retires at age 60, 26 years from now, he would have to live very modestly. Retiring at 60 and starting QPP benefits with a 36 per cent discount would have a drastic cost on his total lifetime benefit from CPP. The amount he will give up each month compared to the full age 65 benefit, about $5,000 per year, will have cost him $171,500 with no compounding for the following 35 years. It is a very high price to pay for what amounts to a five year bridge to full benefits at 65.”

ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL PROFILES

Housing – Couple has $600,000 house and Michel has $165,000 condo.  Depending on what part of Ontario couple is from this is probably par for housing.  For Michel it is possible that in parts of Quebec housing can be purchased for lower prices. However, Michael and Julie will probably have much higher investment possibilities when they sell their house versus when Michael sells his condo.  One can bet that couple has a better lifestyle in their house than Michel in his condo. In many parts of Canada it would extremely difficult for an unattached individual to purchase housing under $200,000.

Accumulation of wealth – It is unmistakable that couple is able to achieve so much more in wealth than unattached individual even when unattached individual has a relatively high income and is frugal in his spending.  At age 35 they are already millionaires. The net worth information in the article is not clear on how much net worth is expected to increase between present date and retirement at age 55. The Net Worth table appears to use the same net worth at present and at age 55 – about $1 million in real estate and RRSP and $600,000 in TFSA.  At age 75, after paying no income tax for 15 years and using benefits that are supposed to be for low income persons, values appear to be about the same. However, what is shocking is how even though RRSP and non registered accounts have virtually been depleted at age 100 the TFSA has increased in value to over $2 million. The reader is encouraged to view the tables at the links provided above.  They provide a striking picture of how income tax collection is flatlined at $0 and how net worth increases over time to age 100 instead of being depleted.

It is impossible for unattached persons, no matter how wealthy they are, to ever achieve the wealth that is possible for couples because it costs more for singles to live and they must save a greater retirement amount for one person as opposed to two persons.

Taxes – Many of the financial profiles of unattached individuals with Michel’s income show he would probably pay a rate of 20%.  Couples who are able to use tax avoidance vehicles like pension splitting are often shown to pay income tax at rates as low as 10%.  For Michael and Julie they are able to not pay income tax for 15 years. It is an understatement to say that couples, even wealthy ones, seem to pay less income tax because of manipulation of marital benefits, pension splitting, etc.  Unattached individuals are bearing the brunt of the Canadian tax system which purposely favors married persons over unattached persons.

LESSONS LEARNED

Financial advantages of couples over unattached individualsJust how many times can it be said that according to Market Basket Measure it costs more for unattached individuals to live than couples without children (if single has value of 1.0, the value for a couple without children is 1.4, not 2.0).  Couples without children are able to maximize their net worth over unattached individuals because of marital benefits, ability to multiply wealth times two (TFSA) and compounding of investments times two. All things being equal it is virtually impossible for unattached individuals to achieve the same financial wealth as couples even though it costs more for singles to live.

TFSA revised 2019 copy 1

TFSA outrageously is a goldmine for the wealthy and the married – TFSA has been in place for ten years.  Maxed out TFSA now total $127,000 for couples and $63,500 for unattached individuals.

It is astonishing how Michael and Julie and Michel have been able to reach their TFSA amounts at present time with maxed out contributions.

It stands to reason that the wealthy are more likely to exponentially increase the value of their TFSAs especially if they are more risk tolerant in investment plans than low income persons.

Vetting of Income for GIS and other low income applications – Interest and investment income does have to be declared on low income applications.  However, TFSA investments are not declared as income ever. This is what allows the wealthy to circumvent the financial restrictions on who can receive assistance the low income assistance programs.

Hypocrisy of TFSA declaration of non income –  This may be harsh but TFSA not needing to be declared as income creates anger and despair for those who do not have the means to contribute to TFSA.  TFSA holders who purposefully use benefits not intended for the wealthy could be called TFSA grifters or chiselers – grifters or chiselers are con artists; in this case they swindle people and governments out of money but all within legal limits of the law.

Hypocrisy of those who demonize public pensions – Many, including far right Conservatives and proponents of private enterprise versus government jobs, berate those who receive public pensions, especially defined benefit plans .  Many of these persons are financially illiterate by stating the taxpayers pay for these systems. The real truth is that defined benefit plans are made up of employee, employer contributions and well managed investments.

Persons who are members of public pension plans must contribute a substantial amount (10%) of their income to the plan, pay taxes as contributors and pay taxes when benefits are received.  Many who do not have a choice or choose to contribute to public pension plans cannot contribute fully to TFSAs because their incomes do not allow them to contribute to both pension plans and TFSAs.

Public pensions are not a given.  They can fail if investment managers make bad decisions and if companies decide to abandon public pensions in bankruptcy.

The Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) is a defined benefit plan, so do these same beraters want to abolish CPP?

Those who are able to maximize their TFSA should also pay taxes on their TFSA investments before they demonize public pensions.

Future consequences and collateral damage if TFSA remains the same – Ability to contribute to TFSAs have now been in place for eleven years.  If the plan is not changed so TFSA is declared as income and taxed then the wealth spread between the rich and poor will increase exponentially.  Only the need to help the middle class is being discussed by some political parties. The middle class is already being transformed into the upper middle class and wealthy while singles and the poor (boondoggle-for-singles-and-low-income) are being pushed further into poverty by the actions of these same political parties.  There will be no middle class.

Every year that goes by with no revisions to the TFSA will ensure elimination of the middle class and singles and poor families getting poorer.  Every year that goes by with the upper middle class and wealthy not paying any tax on TFSA investments and these accounts growing to incredible wealth will ensure bankruptcy of the Canadian economy.  How are schools, hospitals, roads going to be built if there is an insufficient tax base to support the building of these projects?

COMPARISON OF TFSA TO OTHER PLANS (how-does-the-tfsa-stack-up)

All TFSA plans are designed to supplement and manage income from other forms of savings.  It appears only the USA, UK, South Africa and Canada have tax free savings plans.  It also appears Canada has the most generous plan with the only limit being annual contribution limit.

The USA Roth IRA has similar contribution limits ($6,000 for those under 50 and $7,000 age 50 and over) but Americans can only make the maximum contribution if their gross income is below a specific threshold – in 2019 the threshold for unattached person modified adjusted gross income limit is $122,000 or less.  Contributions limit is reduced for income between $122,000 to $136,999 and is completely eliminated for income over $137,000. For joint filers (couples) the income limit is $193,000. Contribution limit is reduced for incomes $193,000 to $202,999 or less and is completely reduced for incomes $203,000 or more. US residents have to wait a ‘seasoning’ period of five years, and be at least 59-½ years of age, before they can withdraw tax-free from a Roth IRA.  TFSAs are primarily multi-purpose vehicles while Roth IRAs are primarily meant for retirement savings.

The fine print on Roth IRA contributions limits (roth-ira-contribution-limits) is that contributions cannot be more than individual’s taxable compensation for the year. That means that if taxable income is $3,000, the cap on Roth IRA contributions is also $3,000 for that year. If there aren’t any taxable earnings during the year, there can’t be any contributions.  The one exception is the spousal IRA which allows a nonworking spouse to contribute to an IRA based on the taxable income of the working spouse.  Roth IRA distributions aren’t included in income in retirement so are not taxable. Monies earned from investment are tax-free.

Persons age  59½ or over may withdraw as much as wanted as long as Roth IRA has been open for at least 5 years.  Persons under 59½ years of age may withdraw the exact amount of Roth IRA contributions with no penalties.  However, the earnings from the principal cannot normally be withdrawn prior to age 59½ without paying the 10% early withdrawal penalty.

It should be noted that the Roth IRA has an equivalence scale method built in similar to the Market Basket Measure.  The couple limit of $193,000 to $202,999 is not twice that of the unattached person limit of $122,000 to $136,999.

SOLUTIONS

If Canada as a country does not want to go bankrupt as a result of tax not being collected on TFSAs it is incumbent upon government and politicians to change policies so that TFSA cannot grow to unabated levels.  Also, Market Basket Measure (MBM) must be applied to TFSA formulas so that income does not benefit married persons over single unattached persons. The US Roth IRA does this. Why can’t the same be done for the Canadian plan?  The US Roth IRA does not allow the wealthy over specified limits to have a Roth IRA at all. Also, change the plan so that only contributions can be withdrawn early without penalty like the Roth IRA. Lastly, the nonsensical ability to withdraw contributions from the plan and then at a later top them up again benefits only the wealthy.  Once a contribution is made it should be not able to be topped up again when withdrawn.

Donald Trump’s ignorance on MBM and similar equivalence scale measures is demonstrated by his income tax amount reductions to double for couples to that of unattached persons instead of applying equivalence scale values of 1.0 for singles and 1.4 for couples.

It is unfathomable that Stephen Harper, an economist and Leader of the Progressive Conservatives and the PC Party, would not have taken into account the future ramifications and collateral damage that this plan would cause in creating every widening separation of the rich from the poor as the years go by.

How do governments and politicians change discriminatory financial plans that have been in place for many years without backlash from the privileged and those who feel entitled even with the discrimination?  Which political party will take this on?

For God’s sake, politicians, political parties and those who demonize social programs need to educate themselves on costs of living for unattached persons and poor families versus wealthy couples and consider full ramifications of how to avoid financial discrimination now and into the future.  If heed is not taken to the above then be prepared for the anger as has already been displayed by the poor throughout the world. You have been forewarned!

DEFINITIONS

GAINS – Ontario Guaranteed Annual  Income System may provide a monthly, non-taxable benefit to low-income seniors to between $2.50 and $83 in 2018.

GIS benefit – Guaranteed Income Supplement provides a monthly non-taxable benefit to Old Age Security (OAS) pension recipients who have a low income and are living in Canada.

GST credit – The goods and services tax/harmonized sales tax (GST/HST) credit is a tax-free quarterly payment that helps individuals and families with low and modest incomes offset all or part of the GST or HST that they pay. It may also include payments from provincial programs.

Trillium benefits – Ontario Trillium Benefit combines three credits to help pay for energy costs as well as sales and property tax: Northern Ontario Energy Credit, Ontario Energy and Property Tax Credit, Ontario Sales Tax Credit.  Beneficiaries need to be eligible for at least one of the three credits to receive the benefit.

(This blog is of a general nature about financial discrimination of individuals/singles.  It is not intended to provide personal or financial advice.)