CPCFTW

Don't forget Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Belgium (aka every country involved in the European sovereign debt crisis). Pic of PR awesomeness The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence when your neighbor is borrowing money from China to buy the best fertilizer and pay for landscaping. Is that how the saying goes?

The GTA is projected to grow from 6 to about 9-10mil in the next 25 years. We'll be happy furher Ford put our LRT underground then. Thank god for conservatives and their forward thinking minds.

And you would fit in nicely with the overdosing heroine addicts crowd.

Yes if I had lived through the Russian or French Revolutions like you I suppose? Hippies are so cute!

Of course wealth is power. Why would someone who employs hundreds or thousands of Canadians with his own business, and who has millions of dollars invested in other Canadians businesses, land, real estate, and other assets have the same power as a hobo who begs for change outside Tim Horton's? I much prefer wealth is power to the alternative: everyone has equal power whether rich or poor, smart or dumb, lazy or productive. And there's a simple solution for anyone who wants more power: acquire wealth. What's the solution for the 1% when the lazy, but equally empowered majority votes to seize their wealth for "equitable" redistribution? I'll choose wealth is power over mob rule every time.

I don't care how many hemp and bong stores you own.

Oh great, another hippy semanticsathon. I'm sorry, is implied better?

I said hippies and communists.. You're free to associate yourself with hippies instead. Sad that we can't be content with our system and our freedom to earn an unseized income without being called "retards" or told that we live in a full on aristocracy. The funniest part is crying about being called a communist while claiming that those who don't support the occupy movement are supporters of a full on aristocracy. Keep the laughs coming hippies!

No one asked for their help or for them to claim to speak for us. Many people are content to compete and live in our current economic system and don't need hippies and drug addicts to "help" us move towards communism.

That's like saying it's smith & wesson's fault that people shoot each other, and ford's fault that people drive drunk, and McDonald's fault that people are fat, and teletubbies fault that people are gay. Loans and other financial instruments are just tools. It's the people's fault if they choose to elect leaders who spend the most borrowed money and make the most empty promises (cough McGuinty cough).

I disagree. The people who favour endless public debt are mostly the ones who favour the occupy movement. I'd frame it as people who believe that: 1. corporations creates jobs and taxpayers and is the most efficient production method. And 2. that capitalism and globalization are the most impartial allocators of wealth and scarce resources. vs People who believe that there are enough resources in the world for everyone to have guaranteed jobs for life, free health care and education, and have a home, food, clothing, etc. And if there isn't enough resources for that, then we should at least keep borrowing from Chinese relative slave labour to construct our fantasy utopian society until it all collapses spectacularly in a massive default on our debts. And if borrowing from China isn't enough, then we should seize the wealth of the top 1% to pay for it too. Oh and the billions of 99% outside of the developed world don't matter, they're not people. Aka people who want to live the good life now and let their children and grandchildren suffer.

99.92763% of all stats are made up.

That's funny, I don't recall market demand signing my cheque.

You mean Ottawa taxpayers and OC transpo riders should pay for his singing lessons? How about he pay for his own damn singing lessons with the $20+/hr he's making? Note: I wouldn't really mind a bus driver singing (I think it would be an entertaining distraction), but I can see how others would be annoyed.

Lefty talking points: "Why jail a murderer when we can release them and have them pay taxes? A fate far worse than jail!! P.S. Raise taxes!!"

More like if you collected all your little brother's personal information (address, DOB, full name, SIN, etc.) then someone was saying "come on give me his personal information, you already collected it!" I don't know why it's so hard to understand this is a privacy/ideology issue and not a spite issue. If we had a dictatorship that collected data on everyone's political beliefs, credit reports, and internet browsing history, then a new democratic government came to power and said it was destroying that information, would it make sense to release that information to provinces who thought it was still useful? The conservative government doesn't believe in government collection of this kind of information. It's as simple as that.

I'm sorry but what? That is exactly along the lines of thinking of Jacee, not Blueblood. Everyone is a victim of the 1% according to Jacee. If it weren't for the 1%, those drug dealers wouldn't need to deal drugs, but the 1% took all their rightful wealth!!

Typical lefty, don't know what you're protesting or arguing. Just making noise.

I was also very confused by that statement.. Too confused to even bother asking about it. I figure it is the tried and tested "the 1% are hoarding all their money under their mattresses instead of being overtaxed to pay for the defined benefit pensions of high school dropouts working in the public sector" (aka the let the government pick winners and losers and fabricate a "strong middle class") argument. But you know what they say about assumptions. Btw you seem to be playing devil's advocate to your own views more often these days.. Thank you for stimulating discussion from both sides!

How are the "results" of that study "skewed"?

How does that skew the results? Are liberal arts professors not part of the 1% because they teach a subject hippies like? Let's not forget offsetting ndp cabinet members, and hippy celebrities with those on welfare and the handicapped!! Also that brett guy and the chick from dragon's den! So skewed!! More ridiculous lefty reasoning of anything that doesn't conform to their a priori beliefs.

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tumbling down to where we are now...

They went from an agrarian economy to one of the wealthiest nations in the world (in terms of per capita GDP) in a matter of decades... Ireland's GDP per capita was less than 1/2 of Canada's in 1985, now it is equal (yes even after the massive collapse). http://www.google.ca/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_pcap_cd&idim=country:IRL&dl=en&hl=en&q=ireland+gdp+per+capita#ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_pcap_cd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:IRL:CAN&ifdim=country&hl=en&dl=en

Do you even know what you are looking at? "% change in distributions of $100 per person since 1979" Oooooh a scary looking chart. How about you go ahead and explain the Y-axis now if you're going to base your argument on this chart? Now when you figure that out, here's a thought: What if there are more $100s to go around now? For example, at time = 0, 2 people in the world and $200 to go around, and each person had $100. at time = 1, 2 people in the world and $1000 to go around, one person has $300 and the other person has $700. How does the chart look? Top 50% percentile has gone from 50% of society's wealth to 70%. Bottom 50% percentile has gone from 50% of society's wealth to 30%. Bottom 50% is getting screwed? Nope, they have tripled their networth. Another meaningless chart courtesy of Jacee. In the real world, the growth in wealth is being distributed to harder working and more productive (in terms of cost) labour in developing nations and smarter/harder working wealthy people in developed nations. The middle/lower class (and I hesitate to use these terms because people are constantly moving between "classes") of developed nations is being screwed but only because it refuses to adapt to a globalized economy. The "1%" is comprised of people that began in a variety of classes (yes even the lower class) and have best adapted to their economic situation.