G Huxley

In all fairness, this show is showcasing pre-communist China e.g. it is probably backed by the Old Chinese community which is antithetical to Beijing.

You said: "I don't really see where the pension plan is a ponzi scheme. Vast amounts of taxpayer money is invested to earn a return. That has nothing to do with corruption. The pensions, OAS and CPP, must be paid out to the pensioners and the more pensioners, the more money must be collected by incomes taxes. As the population ages, it costs the pension system more money and more working people must be brought into the system to pay for it. Hence, we have immigration. But the government had better be sure the immigrants they bring in are going to be working and paying income taxes." How is it not a ponzi scheme? As Cougar pointed out a ponzi scheme demands more and more new investors to pay into it for it to function, that is exactly what is happening with Canada's pension-immigration scheme.

"Why does Canada allow itself to be influenced and propagandized by Communist China?" Because both the corporate left and right outsourced our production there years ago and allowed free market neoliberal financial globalization to have Canada bought up by foreign interests. Now the pandemic has shown that we are like Cuba having to use the same used cars over and over again.

More socializing capitalism read: The Pension ponzi scheme: "CPP premiums are getting a bigger bump than planned. Here's why." "Why CPP premiums are going up The increase is part of a multi-year plan approved by provinces and the federal government five years ago to boost retirement benefits through the public plan by increasing contributions over time. The rises started in 2019. A KPMG note in November said the maximum employer and employee contributions will hit $3,499 each in 2022, an increase from the $3,166 this year. For self-employed contributions, the maximum amount will be $6,999, up from $6,332." https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/cpp-premiums-getting-bigger-bump-183618893.html If capitalism is so free blackbird how come I am being forced to pay thousands of dollars each year into a pension I don't want?

It depends on the forms of each and they are not opposites. Unfettered capitalism tramples on the rights of the individual. Freedom to experience clean water and a pristine environment? It isn't coming with pure capitalism. "Capitalism does not steal from everyone." No it steals from everyone and it gobbles everything in sight and eventually crushes its host with the cancerous tumour it depends on called economic growth. "Capitalism is a free system in the sense everyone is free to start or run their own business with little government interference." Capitalism inevitably leads to monopolization which crushes small business. "But there is an incentive to work in Capitalism because if you work you get paid and if you don't work, you don't get paid." Or as a huge portion of the populace does, they actually can't afford a million dollars for a house and food and commit suicide with opiates after being ground into dust by capitalism. "But Capitalism provides an incentive for those with some money to invest in it to develop industries and make a profit." Destroying the environment read our life support system in order to do so. "In Socialism there is no incentive for investors because government controls everything and reject the profit motive." I'm not for capitalism or socialism and as I pointed out I don't see them as opposites at all, but rather two sides of the same coin, but if you think that is an argument against socialism, I think it is an argument for socialism. Get rid of the profit motive. Profit corrupts absolutely. "In Capitalism, people with expertise make decisions about what is profitable to invest in." Often these 'experts' are sociopaths. "In Socialism government bureaucrats decide which industries should exist under government control and how everything should be run." In one it is sociopathic investors in the other sociopathic bureaucrats. "In the USSR, that is how things were run and there were tremendous shortage of essential products and supplies." As Zhukov pointed out in his memoirs, if they had invested in all those consumer products instead of their war machine they would have lost the war. "I heard of a telephone system in one of their satellite countries where it was very hard to get parts for the telephone system because anything ordered had to go through a huge bureaucracy under central control. That is why the system became antiquated and far behind the western world. They likely had dial phones and antiquated equipment in their telephone exchanges while the west had advanced electronic exchanges and touch-tone phones. It would have been the same problems in every industry in the USSR, including hospitals and medical technology. They would have been years, if not decades, behind the west." And yet the wonders of capitalism in Russia which followed were even far worse than that. Millions starved to death in the Yeltsin years and now you have Putin crony capitalist dictator and chief oligarch for life. "China changed to a certain degree in the 1980s with a new leader of the CCP. They decided to allow private corporations in China and abroad, but under the ultimate control of the CCP. Personal freedoms do not exist, but corporations were permitted because they created wealth for the country and the government. So it became a sort of hybrid system of Capitalism-Communism." Exactly as I was pointing out. Capitalism and Communism are not opposites, they are two sides of the same coin and the Politburo has utilized that to make it a world power and one that is gobbling up all around it as such systems do.

"Ponzi schemes fail, when they can no longer recruit new players, the number of which usually grows exponentially. " They also fail when those that allegedly come to join them don't actually pay their share into it. "Since we have an overpopulated world and producing new human units seems to be of little issue, our ponzi scheme will fail when we run out of space or resources, or when we change climate to the point of conditions becoming unlivable." Of course it is utterly unsustainable. "I am quite interested to see how this will play out, with the banking system failing in particular. Imagine the day, when your diamonds, platinum or gold become worthless, together with that Picaso picture. Just because people are in a survival mode and there is no food and no production, no clean water, no clean air." Maybe we are already entering that stage.

Then don't come crying to me that we need massive hoards of migrants in order to sustain it. "That has nothing to do with corruption. The pensions, OAS and CPP, must be paid out to the pensioners and the more pensioners, the more money must be collected by incomes taxes. As the population ages, it costs the pension system more money and more working people must be brought into the system to pay for it. Hence, we have immigration." Hence the ponzi scheme. "But the government had better be sure the immigrants they bring in are going to be working and paying income taxes. Otherwise it will be a drain on the system and just add more people who will collect pensions. There is also the medical system which takes a huge portion of government revenue to run. That too is now being stressed to the limit." Not just that you only need to live here 10 years to get the pension and medical benefits. So show up at 55 and cash in at 65 as 'family reunification' is often used for. The ponzi scheme never works, because it assumes that the vast hoards are just going to do what you want them to do, when in fact for the most part it is greed that drives them here and they don't care that you expect them to pay your debts for you. In fact they are quite happy for you to pay them in the form of thousands of dollars in Childcare Benefits etc. etc. Hence no matter how many migrants we bring in the debt spirals even further and faster into the abyss. And what do we get for the failed ponzi scheme? Over population and the massive problems that brings including unaffordable housing for the vast majority of actual Canadians.

They are planning to retire before that. It is the next generations that have to suffer for them.

This was already discussed in this thread. The whole pension scheme is a ponzi scheme. Depending on immigrants to pay our debts (which never actually happens and the debt just increases more as immigration itself is very costly and heavily subsidized) is frankly sick. Canadians are too lazy and self absorbed to become self sufficient so they expect others from other countries to come here and wipe our behinds for us so to speak. Pathetic. All it actually amounts to is subsidizing corporations with a cheap labour pool undercutting local labour and they couldn't care less if that actually increases the public debt load as long as they are raking in the millions. If they trick the populace into thinking that will actually decrease their debt load, they can laugh all the way to their banks. My solution? Get rid of inflation, so that working people can save actual money that retains its value instead of ponzi money in the form of weak government pensions which people and/or their employers are forced to pay into. "Canadians will also gradually lose their freedoms because that is necessary to maintain and expand a Socialist state. Freedom and Socialism cannot co-exist. It simply will not work. Socialism requires control of everyone so the system will in theory function without breaks or diversions from building the Socialist utopia. So fundamental freedoms cannot exist forever within a Socialist utopia. Orwell wrote about this in his famous book "1984". In order for the Socialist system to grow and entrench itself, it is necessary to have everyone walk, work, speak, think and live in lock step so the state's objective of a utopia can be achieved." Capitalism does essentially the same. You either march lockstep with the advance of capitalism or you starve in the street. Capitalism and socialism are not separate entities and they are not opposites. There is a reason that Marx saw capitalism as a revolutionary stage that led to socialism. "There are plenty of examples of freedom being eroded. The very existence of Human Rights Tribunals where people can be punished with heavy fines for exercising their freedom of speech if it offends someone is prime example." Agreed.

1. We're talking about two different things. Agreed on what you are saying, but what I'm suggesting is take that money and use it to invest in a renewable energy grid. 2. I don't have any official numbers. Those are simply my estimates based on personal experience, e.g. discussions I have had with the general populace. A considerable portion of the populace will say they are for population decrease, but when you delve deeper asking the right questions it turns out they actually support population growth through their support of mass migration, which is actually the only thing driving it in Canada. Their reasons often differ for mass migration. The modern left will generally play the humanitarian pity card or claim that they are helping to advance suffering peoples, while the corporate right will claim that we need mass migration for economic growth. Both are two sides of the same coin advancing the same anti-environmental anthropocentric agenda. There is a reason we have never seen a referendum on immigration strategy and that is because it is the government against its own populace as Plato warned about tyranny in The Republic. The last thing they want is the populace actually questioning their Neo-colonization business strategy to keep the locals down and in line.

They shouldn't have taken on so much debt then. "We’ll have low interest rates or higher interest rates and a massive recession." A recession would incidentally decrease economic growth, which is the actual goal. However a recession or a serious recession could be avoided by an actual wealth tax. Inflation is a wealth tax as well (a hidden one), but the problem with inflation is it hits workers just as hard if not much more than it hits the wealthy, as worker's meager savings and wages continuously depreciate. An actual overt wealth tax avoids that problem as it would only affect people hoarding wealth, rather than workers and small business owners just trying to save money to buy a home, vehicle, education for their kids, for a retirement etc. "The central banks actually will have to raise rates slightly and gradually because at some point people and government’s overspending will need to be reigned in." Indeed. "At least if there’s a recession when interest rates are higher you can lower them. If we get a recession when interest rates are low, all governments can do is print money and buy debt, otherwise known as quantitative easing." aka exactly what is happening now. So we should be increasing interest rates instead of keeping them absurdly low.

Carbon tax would make more sense to me if they actually took the money generated from it and put into specific things to lower carbon emissions e.g. into renewable energy etc., Instead they mail a lot of it back as cheques to buy votes. "You mean 90% are pro-immigration and population increase and 10% are against? " Yeah. "This makes absolutely no sense considering what immigration does to the general population - pressure on jobs, frozen wages, housing affordability let alone cultural background related reasons. " Of course, but the general populace has been so brainwashed to believe the opposite that they can't even imagine a lowering population.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Completely agree with you, as I am sure 90% of Canadian would agree too. So why are we welcoming new record numbers of immigrants and this doesn't seem to have an end in sight? (I know the answer; what I don't know is how we turn things around to stop the flow; let alone "lower the population") - Cougar I've actually found from experience that only about 25% of Canadians at best are in agreement with our position, which is pretty sad. Even 25% I think is a stretch. My first inclination is to put the number at around 10%. "So why are we welcoming new record numbers of immigrants and this doesn't seem to have an end in sight?" Because as you know economic growth is hardwired into our political model and I haven't seen a single elected politician willing to and/or having the guts to challenge that. "what I don't know is how we turn things around to stop the flow; let alone "lower the population"" Provided that the politicians did have the principle and the guts to do the right thing. All it takes to lower the population is to drastically curtail the immigration numbers. Stop economic expansion? Raise interest rates, eliminate inflation. It's actually pretty simple if there was the political willpower there.

"I have a $33,000.00 solar system that generates $1200.00 a year at a heavily subsidized rate. Trying to supply our energy needs with wind and solar is like trying to put out a fire with a squirt gun, unless everyone is mandated through building codes to have solar squirt guns. Even then I’m doubtful. " Depends the type of solar you use. Spain uses concentrated solar which is much more efficient. At any rate. Lowering the population is a must to reduce energy consumption. "You’re right, the planet is going to fry. In a few billion years the sun will supernova and engulf Earth. Hide in your basement. " We are already frying right now. Just look at the heat dome. "Americans don’t pay carbon taxes. Those are for sucker Canadians. Think of the subjects in the Roman provinces enjoying fewer freedoms than Roman citizens. That’s us. " Americans have 5 years less of life expectancy than Canadians. I'll take the carbon taxes and 5 extra years of life any day. If you'd prefer the trade off you could always live in America.

"No matter what price we pay, the damage done to the environment will always be greater. Why ? Because you need to destroy the environment to pay the tax. " Such is the nature of sin taxes in general. It is much like the concept of paying for indulgences. That said I prefer a carbon tax to no carbon tax, although I would much prefer carbon caps and not just talking about them.

"Unfortunately much of current green energy tech simply can’t provide the essential heating, food production, and transportation that we need to survive in our highly populated world (electric vehicles need to get their electricity from somewhere!)." Then lower the population. "Humans require energy to exist. Taxing energy is taxing existence." All tax is a tax on energy. "EV’s have their own giant environmental footprints." Again lower the population. "People who think that subsidizing the hell out of ineffectual green energy" Cite your claim that Green energy is ineffectual "while other bandit countries supply the world’s energy needs are on a path to self-destruction." Put tariffs on them. Don't tell me the Arabs don't understand the word. It comes from Arabic. "Better planning and building can make important reductions in emissions, but carbon taxes mostly just add to the cost of living for working people." If working people are making bad choices then tax them for it. "Prediction: Emissions rise along with carbon taxes and the cost of living." That is certain with population rise. So reduce population. "We better plan better, which basically means adapt." How long do you think it will take to evolve gills? "Thankfully Canada will be a net beneficiary of climate change as more land becomes arable and trade expands in the north ports, but expect mass migrations." That isn't a benefit for Canada. It reminds me of when Harper and the American politicians were denying a warming arctic, while at the same time talking about how we can cash in when the Northwest Passage becomes ice free soon. I remember Hillary Clinton ranting about how the Arctic is America's as well and that America has rights to the new ice free NW Passage. Even China is now trying to get in on the Arctic action now. How on earth does that improve Canada's position? "Canada better think carefully about how many people we want to take on and where they settle. " How about none? Better the current population learns to adapt as you are so enamoured by that turn instead of depending on other populations to adapt for us.

"Most of the climate change narrative is overblown. A more crowded Earth means that we’re more impacted by our own actions." Agreed on the second part, which actually makes the climate change narrative underblown, because overcrowding is hardly ever mentioned and only when they are saying that we need to densify more in order to save the planet (political double think). "Basically it becomes harder not to shit on our doorsteps." Indeed. "Carbon tax is absolutely a tax on existence because every action requires energy (even physical labour requires food, which must be produced and delivered somehow)." All tax is a tax on energy. The point is that not all energy need be derived from carbon and carbon based energy should be discouraged. "In Canada we must heat our homes. Our sources for energy can only shift to renewables with improved capacitors and a massive infusion of solar, wind, geothermal, deep water cooling, etc., and this is only possible by requiring it in the building codes." Good point. "Basically all new roofs become solar. All buildings are equipped with batteries, etc. The unit costs would become massively cheaper once green tech becomes mass-produced." Good points again. " Even then we’ll need nuclear and/or more hydro plants (concrete production). " Why would we need those if we are reducing our population as we should be? " At that point governments can look at the expense of retrofitting existing buildings once the unit costs are lower. Our governments are too dumb and beholden to developers to do this, so all the poor bastard workers who have no choice but to commute to work in this vast land must pay carbon taxes that will have no measurable impact on emissions. " Or they use electric vehicles. "They’re another ineffectual “Drive Clean” scheme. No matter what, some climate change is unstoppable. Get over it and adapt. " See Cougar's point. We can only adapt so much before we start dying in droves as is already happening, see the heat dome in B.C.

Cougar good posts.

"None of the draconian carbon taxes that are raising transportation and food costs for workers will make any measurable alteration to climate change. " Please don't abuse the word draconian. It increases costs for everyone using carbon. That is good, people should pay a premium for global environmental destruction. Albeit what you end up getting is a sort of sin tax that doesn't actually address the underlying problem that is at least also true. "They’re taxes on existence." No a tax on existence would be a head tax. "Canada is resource rich." And balance book poor. "The world buys them from Russia, the Saudis, and other bandits when we cut supply. Don’t be so naive." I'm not naive about that, I'm well aware. That can also be carbon taxed through tariffs. "Climate activists are destroying Canada." Anti-climate activists are destroying the World. "We can reduce emissions much more than we are without adding to the cost of living, but that requires intelligence. " That is true. How would you do that? "As for thinking that your savings will carry you from retirement to death without some kind of investment vehicle, good luck with that." It won't as long as we have inflation. That is why I am saying that we should be getting rid of inflation, so that people can save for their retirement without relying on ponzi scheme pensions which don't actually amount to much anyway.

Why grow the economy at all? Even mass cleanup causes environmental destruction e.g. the vast amounts of carbon it takes to do so. Too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing. Moderation and balance are better.

Indeed.

Merry Christmas!

"There's nothing I can see that differentiates the core message." See the Forbes article I just posted. "If something is looking for a reason to blame him, they can find them. But given that inflation is happening everywhere, it's pretty clear that to blame Trudeau is a political tactic. " Trudeau being the PRIME MINISTER, not the office secretary, he does actually have a lot of power over how inflation takes place in CANADA. He is not the only driver of inflation globally of course and no one is claiming that he is. I am blaming him for being dishonest about the complexities involved with inflation and negating his own role in Canada's. Don't tell me the 77% rise in Canadian house prices during his tenure as mentioned in the interview was the result of COVID.

Case in point here are some economists pointing out that the supply chain disruption from COVID is not the only factor: "This reduction in supply, coupled with increased consumer demand, are major catalysts for the recent spike in inflation. But there is another significant cause, namely government spending. Government Spending: Stimulus, Pork, or Catalyst for Inflation? When the federal government passed the CARES Act in March 2020, there was a strong justification for doing so. For without it, the U.S. would have faced a very dark economic period, some even say a depression. Regardless, federal spending has created the largest government deficit in U.S. history. The following chart tells the story. In the most recent fiscal year ending September 30, 2020, the U.S. had a $3.129 trillion budget shortfall, more than twice the $1.4 trillion deficit during the 2008 financial crisis. A year after the CARES Act, Congress passed, and President Biden signed, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, with a hefty $1.9 trillion price tag. But that’s not the end of the spending if the Democratic majority has their way. On August 11, Senate Democrats approved a budget resolution, paving the way for an additional $3.5 trillion spending bill, just hours after passing a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan. Democrats in Washington are taking full advantage of their majority to transform America into a deeply socialistic country. What is yet to be seen is the impact this excessive spending will have on inflation. What is certain is that this mounting debt burden will be problematic in the future. But I digress. Sure, the economy is doing well, but it is largely due to the excessive spending in Washington. If you put enough money into the hands of consumers, coupled with the stress of the pandemic, they will spend. This has caused an increase in demand, which has served to push inflation higher. If the government continues to spend at the same rate, and the supply chain problems persist, inflation will continue to rise. The Federal Reserve is another, albeit secondary player cause of the recent inflationary spike. The Fed: The Only Adult in the Room? It’s not very common to find Washington (fiscal policy) and the Fed (monetary policy) working in sync. During the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, the Fed was dramatically expanding the monetary base while Washington was mired in politics. Currently, the Federal Reserve continues to buy Treasury Bonds and mortgage-backed securities to the tune of $120 billion per month. In other words, the Fed has been adding $120 billion per month to the money supply. The Fed is also considering reducing this amid inflation concerns. One key difference between Washington and the Federal Reserve is that decisions from Washington have a political component whereas the Fed acts without such interference. It’s hard to say how long inflation might persist or how far it will rise. Nonetheless, with a pandemic that is surging, a Democratic majority in Washington intent on spending excessively, continuing supply chain constraints due to the pandemic, and an over stressed consumer that has been spending, it’s likely inflation will rise much more in the coming months. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2021/08/18/inflation-surge-to-continue-here-are-3-reasons-why/ Also this one: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/business/economy/fed-inflation-stimulus-biden.html Again the elephant in the room. Government over spending/printing money.