"Steadily rising prosperity of Canadians"

[myata]

Sure, there are Canadians and Canadians. Let's examine the line we've been hearing so often though, factually and objectively.

Input: average wage in Canada, 2020 is $54,000. Let's take out of it the earnings of the top 1% that do nothing except inflating GDP as average Canadian isn't that likely to be an MP, public minister, private or public CEO or win a million prize lottery. Let's say $50,000 after adjustment. This is a realistic number I know recent university grads in a professional work with similar salary and about a half of Canadians has university education, not average yet.

Assume a one-income family with one child. With that income there will be tax, estimated at around $10,000 federal, provincial, CPP, EI and other. Down to around $3,500 monthly.

Now, a one-bedroom apartment in a city may go these days up to $2K and above. Let's be conservative and say, $1,600 also realistic. Down to under $2K monthly.

Food and basic supplies for a family of three, $1K. Mobile plans, Internet, some streaming or cable. Transit pass, around $100 or more. Car 2-3 times that. Major purchases, several hundred. Occasionally buying food at work. Personal care. Occasional coffee. And that's it we're done!

A hobby? Overseas or longer in-country vacation? Pension and savings contributions? After school sports programs, can go in the hundreds monthly?

Part-time university education program ($6,000 annually)?

Car loan? Mortgage? No way. Is it even called "prosperity" in your book? In mine, it basic sustenance aka survival level in this century.

Doing the logic: single-income family standard in the 1950-70s + "steadily rising prosperity" = what? So how did we buy into this steadily perpetuated fairy tale? Whose prosperity has been rising steadily? What Canadians?

Single-income prosperity for average Canadians? Check, no longer possible. Own you place dream? Check, gone from this generation. What's next? And what will be the destination?

 

Edited July 25, 2021 by myata

[Michael Hardner]

Your relationship with statistics is like mine with cigarettes. In your heart you want to quit, but you don't know how.

[QuebecOverCanada]

7 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

Your relationship with statistics is like mine with cigarettes. In your heart you want to quit, but you don't know how.

Switch to cigars, that's how you stop cigarettes. Sigmund Freud had the answer 100 years before you.

[myata]

23 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

Your relationship with statistics is like mine with cigarettes. In your heart you want to quit, but you don't know how.

If the eyes, and back wouldn't agree with "statistics" then both cannot be right. One only had to choose what they trust, own eyes or expert"'s statistic. And sure, there are accountants.

Edited July 25, 2021 by myata

[myata]

The tune isn't by far original, the whole of Latin America dances to it for centuries, and we only happened to have slightly less population with a bit more natural riches. Only a temporary problem, surely. Bye single-income family, bye own place, hello astronomical rental prices with temporary work with no job security or benefits and lower pay, now called "wonderfully rising prosperity" for many Canadians. But look, GDP! (rolled in rental prices, CEO and MP salaries) numbers wouldn't lie!

[Michael Hardner]

31 minutes ago, myata said:

 One only had to choose what they trust

Ok, that's how you do it. ?

[myata]

Society is a living organism in its environment. Can't program it once and sail on autopilot indefinitely and that's been Canada's story. The environment has changed in a major way, the management of public affairs still in the 19th century in spirit, forget the letter. And every small change causes cracks and breaks. Population increase, crack, housing and healthcare crises, budget problems. Budget problems, tuition increase, fewer graduates but this is the century of knowledge economy, need to import more immigrants, higher prices, higher deficits service degradation crack, crack. Housing market refocused on rich foreign and investment buying rental prices through the roof, crack. Fixing, patching, billions, trillions only new cracks develop faster than being fixed. Catching up, patching the status quo mode, but for how long?

Sure there's the pillow of the public service on all levels that was able to absorb some of the negative effects so far but it isn't given and won't last forever like natural riches - only to the next serious budget crisis. Big business grown lazy and uncompetitive internationally in protected market with regular government bailouts rewarding poor practices. Bells are tinkling not that I'd want to see it but it happens regularly in Latin America.

[Argus]

It is true that things like 'average' incomes can be thrown off by outliers. For example, if you have 99 people who earn 10k a year and one person who earns 1m a year the 'average' wage is 20k per year. Which is deceptive, at best.

As can be seen from this, real median incomes of people in Canada, and in particular in Ontario, haven't really budged in nearly forty years,

https://www.fao-on.org/en/Blog/Publications/income-report-2019

Edited July 25, 2021 by Argus

[myata]

However, an MP salary has moved whopping tenfold ($18K to 185) in this same period. What a wonderful rise in prosperity (and togetherness)!

Statistics is not a wonderful paper in which one can wrap next to any implausible nonsense to look like new. If it was rising steadily then you have to find a family on single, average, CEO and MP excluded obviously, wage that is prospering now. Then, the number of such families in the country. Then compare the number, proportionally, with 1950s to 1970s. That would be honest statistics. And good luck with that as it was just shown it's impossible to prosper on a single average income only survive.

[Michael Hardner]

13 minutes ago, myata said:

However, an MP salary has moved whopping tenfold ($18K to 185) in this same period. 

Now you wouldn't be including the expense allowance in this would you? Because we already went through this and the way expenses were allocated changed in that time also.

[Michael Hardner]

You seem to be using the same numbers you claim from the 1972 to 2021 example. That would mean you're using the 2021 MP salary, not the one from 5 years ago. You're also shortening the inflation effect by 10 years and not even mentioning that the housing allowance was rolled in.

 

That's intellectual dishonesty, I'm thinking.

[myata]

4 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:

You seem to be using the same numbers you claim from the 1972 to 2021 example. That would mean you're using the 2021 MP salary, not the one from 5 years ago. You're also shortening the inflation effect by 10 years and not even mentioning that the housing allowance was rolled in.

 

That's intellectual dishonesty, I'm thinking.

OK here's 2016 five years ago: $170K. Does it make a lot of difference? And we already confirmed that it does not include allowances. Nowhere else folks can set their own salaries just so, enjoy equitability and whatever else blah-blah sorry no time for that nonsense. Sure compare them to CEO and hockey players and why not, like where is a limit, like who can set it or what.

[myata]

In biopsychology there's a well-known experiment: lab rats were given a tap with a lever that pumped sugar mix a dollop per squeeze. First rats were careful squeeze lick and run, wait for another turn. Then they saw there's no catch and no limit the squeeze became non-stop and the animals got grotesquely out of shape due to non-stop feeding and lack of exercise.

The writing is on the wall, the system has broken free of all bounds, moral, common sense, reality itself, it's not controlled by anything, can't be sustainable and so will collapse at some point. Too bad for us that it will collapse the last, after hospitals and schools, but OK that's how we made it. Or didn't make and just slept through while it made itself if it would make a grain of difference for the outcome.

[Michael Hardner]

53 minutes ago, myata said:

 And we already confirmed that it does not include allowances. 

I think we said that the old numbers did not and the new salaries do, right ?

[Michael Hardner]

57 minutes ago, myata said:

OK here's 2016 five years ago: $170K. Does it make a lot of difference? And we already confirmed that it does not include allowances. Nowhere else folks can set their own salaries just so, enjoy equitability and whatever else blah-blah sorry no time for that nonsense. Sure compare them to CEO and hockey players and why not, like where is a limit, like who can set it or what.

We talked about it already in this thread:
 

My suggestion for this post was that salaries doubled from 2000 to 2001 because they restructured how the payments worked.  So you go from 2001 to today and it's 1.8% per year.
 


https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/report/orp/2007/er-ed/vol2/vol212-eng.aspP

[CITIZEN_2015]

The housing prices in major Canadian cities have skyrocketed absolutely crazy so that a single incomer even with highest education and years of work experience cannot afford to buy even a small house. This is hardly real prosperity but fictitious prosperity. 

[Michael Hardner]

6 hours ago, CITIZEN_2015 said:

The housing prices in major Canadian cities have skyrocketed absolutely crazy so that a single incomer even with highest education and years of work experience cannot afford to buy even a small house. This is hardly real prosperity but fictitious prosperity. 

I agree with you but a certain strata of Canadians - and a large number - are doing well with this.

[myata]

9 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:

I think we said that the old numbers did not and the new salaries do, right ?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? The only difference seems to be that they were limited before and aren't now but good luck studying this manual of parliamentary wisdom and entitlement. Is it because there's absolutely nothing: moral, common sense, reality to justify this ongoing travesty? It's just disgusting, plain and obvious. These are no representatives that I care or want to think for a minute about, just employees of a giant corporation busily munching taxpayer budgets. And if they couldn't care, good luck to them, i.e. us in this century. These are already two completely disconnected realities.

[Michael Hardner]

1 hour ago, myata said:

Are you being deliberately obtuse? The only difference seems to be that they were limited before and aren't now but good luck studying this manual of parliamentary wisdom and entitlement. Is it because there's absolutely nothing: moral, common sense, reality to justify this ongoing travesty? It's just disgusting, plain and obvious. These are no representatives that I care or want to think for a minute about, just employees of a giant corporation busily munching taxpayer budgets. And if they couldn't care, good luck to them, i.e. us in this century. These are already two completely disconnected realities.

Will you come down off your grandstand and address the numbers ?  Or not ?

[Michael Hardner]

You can simultaneously say the salaries are too high, and maintain the reality that increases have followed inflation since 2001.  If you did that, then nobody could accuse you of grandstanding and exaggerating and therefore joining in on the hysterical hypocrisy wagon like the people you criticize with such ritual sanctimony.

The numbers might even be wrong, but you have to do at least as much work as I did in looking them up.

Or you can be lazy and preachy and throw your white gloves down in the sand, repeatedly declaring "HOW DARE YOU SIR ?" ?

[myata]

The MP salary was $68,200 plus fixed allowances in 2000 vs. $185,000 plus unlimited allowances in 2020.

However one wants to stretch and munch it "inflation", "rollation" etc in this reality,  is that there's no regular Canadian job that has seen 2.5 times raise in two decades, in the same position. This is completely different, detached and alternate reality. And it's right there to see. And it's inexcusable and disgusting, like sugar experiment.

Not sustainable either, so there will be the music in one form or the other. Too bad the hospitals would have to go first.

[Michael Hardner]

54 minutes ago, myata said:

The MP salary was $68,200 plus fixed allowances in 2000  

Yeah, so you ignored the fact that from 2000 to 2001 salaries were restructured and - despite my pointing it out at least twice.  This tells me that you are indeed behaving hypocritically.  So ... as the saying goes "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"

You decry MPs for slinging bullshit and here you show up... all bright and sparkling in your stinking bullshit suit.

-> Ignore List <-

[CITIZEN_2015]

4 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:

I agree with you but a certain strata of Canadians - and a large number - are doing well with this.

I agree with you that for the home owners it may appear as prosperity but even that is fictitious as their home value has gone up artificially and can come down back again any time. Home is not a kind of equity like cash in savings account that one can use to have prosperous life like travelling, buying furniture, appliances, eat in expensive restaurants, etc, unless they wish yo borrow against home equity and spend but as i said that brings over only fictitious prosperity as loans have to be paid back and when the crash comes then they will be in big trouble.

Edited July 26, 2021 by CITIZEN_2015

[myata]

Sure "restructuring" just explained everything, and if not add just "inflation". Seriously, if it all coming out of bottomless well somewhere far, far away why not "inflation"?

Wait, if inflation is 5% does it mean that public budget automatically increased by the same amount? Maybe it does - in Venezuela and Argentina.

And wait, even if it did increase, does it mean that it has to be spent automatically on salaries and entitlements of ministers and "representatives" and not for example, healthcare and education in permanent deficit mode?

And wait again, if something increased somewhere, does it mean that as an owner you have to pay more to everyone, automatically and regardless of what you want and can? Is that how it works with your car mechanic, home renovator, Internet provider (if not one of big three whose CEO play golf with "representatives" only for you benefit of triple, quadruple and so on rates elsewhere)?

This is not about numbers and statistics. "Travel from Wuhan", "restructuring" and "inflation" there you go now get lost asap and here's the bill. This is about citizens, what they own and control in their country. To citizens and owners there's nothing automatic and all is explained and proven. To peasants, handed down bills with automatic annual raises with "Not to worries" and "there's always next time". To each their own and little new in this old, old story.

There's a way to settle this question though, practical and factual. Let's come back to it by 2090, seventy years not that long for a thriving democracy. We will record, then:

- the annual amount of UBI

- average salary in the country, minus 1% outliers

- the salary of MP and ministers, in UBI

- the average university tuition, per year

- the standard of public healthcare, compared to world best.

If it still exists, the standard. That should settle it.

Edited July 26, 2021 by myata

[myata]

6 minutes ago, CITIZEN_2015 said:

I agree with you that for the home owners it may appear as prosperity but even that is fictitious

Maybe what was meant is the caste whose compensation and entitlements are automatically tied to "inflation" however they choose to define and calculate it. Hard to see many problems with prosperity in this case, if one manages to make it there.

P.S. while the party lasts, of course.

Edited July 26, 2021 by myata