Archive for the ‘Social Security Debates’ Category
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Welfare reform roadmap
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Jun 15 2010
As for the scope of the review, the panel says it should be comprehensive and not focused exclusively on welfare, per se, which accounts for just 23 per cent of all income support programs. Other relevant programs include child tax benefits, employment insurance, and CPP disability payments. Of course, all these fall under federal jurisdiction, and the Harper government has no apparent interest in the file.
Tags: poverty, standard of living
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Breakthrough on pensions?
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Jun 16 2010
the politicians did a dramatic about-face and emerged with a consensus for a beefed-up Canada Pension Plan. Ontario’s Dwight Duncan took the lead by calling for an expanded, mandatory CPP — rather than taking the path of least resistance with merely voluntary schemes that would benefit only workers with the means to pay more.
Tags: pensions, standard of living
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The national security shell game
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
June 15, 2010
The National Security Strategy doesn’t mention either Medicare or Social Security by name. But the code words “medium-term deficit reduction” are there, and they are today’s stand-in for cuts in those programs… But why?… They are successful, popular programs that protect America’s elderly from poverty. Cutting them would be devastating… The “national security” case for cutting Social Security and Medicare is bogus. In economic terms, it’s just a smokescreen for those who would like to transfer the cost of all those bank failures onto the elderly and the sick.
Tags: budget, standard of living
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The roots of poverty and the importance of long-term records
Monday, June 14th, 2010
14 June 2010
The anti-poverty target requires the government to increase the lowest incomes until no child lives in a household with a net income less than 60% of the median. This can be achieved when the government chooses to raise minimum wage rates and tax credits for those who work for poverty wages (more than half of children in poverty live in working households), and all the benefits for children and those who cannot find work or who are not able to take it.
Tags: ideology, poverty
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Social Assistance Advisory Council Report’s Bold Vision for Tomorrow Does Not Put Food on the Table Today
Monday, June 14th, 2010
14 Jun 2010
“The Ontario Government has ignored the needs of the most vulnerable in the province. It sets up a panel on social assistance and shortly thereafter cuts the Special Diet Allowance, reneges on the dental program for adult recipients, and reduces the woefully inadequate real income of recipients by 1% in the latest budget. While the panel claims to promote long-term reform, the real situation with people on the ground is deteriorating rapidly.”
Tags: poverty, standard of living
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Ontario should adopt bold vision for welfare reform
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Jun 14 2010
Ontario should adopt a bold vision for welfare reform that includes new income supports and services for all low-income residents, says a government-appointed panel in a report being released Monday. “We are currently investing billions into federal and provincial programs that too often trap people in poverty and fail to offer alternatives to social assistance,” said Gail Nyberg of the Daily Bread Food Bank who chaired the panel of anti-poverty experts. “Tinkering with a broken system will not lead to different outcomes. It’s time to unleash a bold review,” she said.
Tags: featured, standard of living
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How to build a bigger, safer nest egg
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Jun 13 2010
The current average wage in Canada is approximately $41,000 per year, and the maximum CPP benefit is about $11,500. Our proposal to expand CPP benefits over time to more than $21,000 a year is financially sound and a practical solution to the retirement security crisis. Expansion of benefits would be phased in and financed by a modest increase in the premiums paid by workers and employers. For someone earning $30,000 a year, the increase would amount to just 6 cents per working hour annually.
Tags: pensions, standard of living
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Ottawa and Ontario call for higher CPP benefits
Friday, June 11th, 2010
Jun 10 2010
“I believe that we should consider a modest, phased-in and fully funded enhancement to defined benefits under the Canada Pension Plan in order to increase savings adequacy in the future,” federal Finance Minister James Flaherty says in a letter to Ontario’s Finance Minister Dwight Duncan Thursday. The Flaherty letter was released late in the day after Duncan made public a letter he had earlier sent to his provincial and federal counterparts calling for similar enhancements to the CPP.
Tags: pensions, standard of living
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Ontario to urge expansion of Canada Pension Plan
Friday, June 11th, 2010
Jun 10 2010
… the province is urging all governments to agree to a modest expansion of the Canada Pension Plan… In coming years, the share of retirees failing to meet the desired savings for 70 per cent income replacement is projected to rise from 15 per cent for those born in the 1940s to just over 24 per cent for those born in the 1980s, the report says. And the findings show that a disproportionate number of middle-income Canadians will end up in this group of 24 per cent who face a declining standard of living when retired.
Tags: pensions, standard of living
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Canada, cuts and communities
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
9 June 201o
The lesson from the “Canadian-style star chamber” of the 1990s is that it is brutally easy to make swingeing cuts to public social expenditures, but that those cuts have deep and long-term consequences for people, communities, the entire society and the economy.
Tags: budget, standard of living
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