Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1380-1382

The Dutch city of Utrecht recently announced an experiment to determine whether introducing a basic income produces a more effective society. Joseph Ceci, Alberta’s new Finance Minister, proposed a guaranteed income program last year on the election campaign trail. Both Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson have touted similar programs. Now, medical officers of health and boards of health members across Ontario are officially calling for provincial and federal governments to bring in a basic income guarantee.

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So why are such a broad group of people – finance ministers, mayors and medical officers of health – pushing such a program? Poverty, substantial evidence now tells us, is one of the best predictors of poor health. And poor health costs everyone.

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According to several Queen’s University professors, the cost of replacing social assistance (which includes welfare and disability support) and Old Age Security (which includes a top-up for low-income seniors), plus providing every adult with an annual income of $20,000 and children with an income guarantee of $6,000, would be $40-billion. The Fraser Institute calculates the total cost of Canada’s current income support system (payout plus administrative costs) at $185-billion in 2013.

The Time for a Guaranteed Annual Income Might Finally Have Come
Noralou Roos, Evelyn Forget
Globe and Mail
Tuesday, August 04, 2015

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 Despite strong economic growth, over 100,000 British Columbians needed food banks and other food programs in March 2015, an increase of close to 3 per cent since the previous year. Food bank use rose faster in B.C. than in Canada as a whole, despite stronger than average economic growth in 2014.

Why? The answer becomes clear when we look at who are the people needing food banks. In B.C., 33 per cent of people who resorted to food banks in March 2015 received social assistance as their primary source of income and another 32 per cent received disability-related income support.

This is hardly surprising, considering that welfare rates in B.C. (including disability assistance) have been frozen since 2007. Since then, food costs have risen by 18 per cent and housing costs grew fast too.

… the B.C. government can no longer plead poverty after running budget surpluses for two consecutive years, including a surplus of $1.7 billion in 2014/15.
Why do so many people need food banks when the B.C. economy is growing?
By Iglika Ivanova
rabble.ca
November 19, 2015
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 Children are much more likely than not to grow up in a household in which their parents work, and in nearly half of all two-parent families today, both parents work full time, a sharp increase from previous decades.

What hasn’t changed: the difficulty of balancing it all. Working parents say they feel stressed, tired, rushed and short on quality time with their children, friends, partners or hobbies, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The survey found something of a stress gap by race and education. College-educated parents and white parents were significantly more likely than other parents to say work-family balance is difficult.

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“This is not an individual problem, it is a social problem,” said Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist and the founding director of the Center for Research on Gender in the Professions at the University of California, San Diego. “This is creating a stress for working parents that is affecting life at home and for children, and we need a societal-wide response.”

Stressed, Tired, Rushed: A Portrait of the Modern Family
Claire Cain Miller
New York Times
NOV. 4, 2015
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