grumpy old man wrote:It amazes me whenthe left sh1ts on the Harper government for their "draconian" measures to manage pensions et al.
The only thing that should amaze anyone is why these "draconian" measures were not undertaken years ago.
The fact Canada is aging has not been a secret.
Why weren't they undertaken years ago? Because the boomers only cared about themselves. Way easier to pass the buck to their grandkids and tell them to stop being so "entitled", despite being the most entitled generation in history. Now that the rooster is coming home to roost they look the other way and who is going to pay the bills.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/joshua-ostroff/quebec-protest_b_1553213.html?ref=canada-politics "
Canada's census just pegged the baby boom generation at 9.6 million, nearly 30 per cent of the population. They represent 42.4 per cent of working age Canadians, up from 28.6 percent in 1991. They also cast a startling
60 per cent of all election ballots.
And now that they're entering retirement age, they've decided to pay their bills by robbing their children of the, yes, entitlements they themselves have enjoyed.
So boomer politicians beholden to boomer voters are hiking tuition, slashing education, decreasing
Employment Insurance and cutting childcare, none of which have an impact upon them. They're then justifying these cuts with a deficit crisis that is partly created by concurrent tax cutting, including dramatically reducing the corporate tax rate to the lowest in the G7. This benefits only the people, predominantly boomers, who can afford to invest in these corporations and will cost
$11.5 billion in lost revenue in 2012-2013 alone.
But wait, aren't they trying to save Old Age Security at least? Actually, Canada's 2012 budget is pushing eligibility back to 67, but that won't begin until 2023 and will conclude in 2029, at which point the last baby boomers (born in 1964) will have retired. Well played.
Harper could have pushed the eligibility back as of last year, when the first boomers turned 65, but that would risk losing the votes of the country's dominant demographic. It's more politically savvy to punish subsequent (smaller) generations.
Democracy has broken down because the unsympathetic and unprecedented Boomer voting block has made the young feel disenfranchised, driving them to demonstrate in numbers not seen since, well, the 60s
These policies purposefully increase income inequality by reducing social services for the young and poor without increasing tax revenue via the wealthy and corporations. But when that austerity-driven gap reaches its breaking point -- as it did during England's riots last summer -- an underclass of young people who feel like they have no future also have no qualms about burning their towns down."
It's all about priorities GOM, and basically both the CRAP party and the boomers themselves have them all wrong. frick the boomers, and frick Harper. Kinda ironic that in all this fabricated crisis regarding OAS the simple FACT that get's missed is that while costs are indeed expecting to triple in todays dollars, when you account for projected growth in GDP the difference is not such an emerency...OAS is currently 1.6% of GDP and is projected to increases to 2.3% of GDP by the time it peaks. Doesn't look nearly as unmanagable now does it? Unless of course your goal is to ensure that any increase's the economy are continually sucked up by an ever shrinking slice of society.
Of course if your a party hell bent on driving social safety nets that have been enjoyed for decades by Canadians (boomers) into the ground because of your fricked up neo-con ideologies, then I guess it's all good.
How the frick can anybody who voted for these a$$holes look their children or grandchildren in the eyes?
