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Author Topic: McQuaig - There is a deadly cost to cutting social programs
Michelle
Moderator
Babbler # 560

posted 04 January 2006 09:48 PM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Ten years ago, Mike Harris slashed Ontario's welfare rates by 22 per cent, thereby cutting by almost one-quarter the incomes of Ontario's most vulnerable families. The young kids in those vulnerable families are now teenagers. Recently, there's been an upsurge in violent crime by gangs of teenagers. Is it far-fetched to think there might be a connection?

Linda McQuaig


From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Aristotleded24
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 9327

posted 08 January 2006 01:40 AM      Profile for Aristotleded24   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
I liked this part:

quote:
Tax cuts may put more cash in our pockets. But are we really better off if we have more cash for shopping — yet no longer feel safe to go shopping?

And while I'm a little skeptical of her claim that poor people didn't turn to crime during the depression, she seemed to answer a question brought up last year by explaining that one difference between the Depression and now is that during the Depression, poverty was the norm, so relative to everyone else the poor weren't very poorly off materially.


From: Winnipeg | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 08 January 2006 04:28 AM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
I agree. Laissez-faire conservatism of the 1930's was so very boring for the average Canadian. While about two million workers lined up at soup kitchens and rode the rails in search of a life down there in that country, Canadian's couldn't get a drink anywhere and many resorted to poaching and trapping. Dollar a day average wages under liberal, then conservative, and back to the liberatives again was a see-saw battle of do-nothing government. Canadian's couldn't wait to go overseas just to see Europe and the world. RB Bennet said about make-work spending during the depression,

"Money doesn't grow on trees."

No less than the Second World War arrived right on time and money suddenly grew on trees for Keynesian-militarism. The invisible hand gave way to upside-down socialism after only 30 years. The right has always believed in the power of socialism.


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
rinne
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 9117

posted 08 January 2006 09:55 AM      Profile for rinne     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Perhaps the difference is that Conservatives/Corporations look at these consequences as positive in that they create further opportunities for control of the rabble. I don't know anymore, any other way to understand their actions except as war.
From: prairies | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
Fata Morgana
recent-rabble-rouser
Babbler # 6919

posted 08 January 2006 12:44 PM      Profile for Fata Morgana     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Aristotleded24:
And while I'm a little skeptical of her claim that poor people didn't turn to crime during the depression, she seemed to answer a question brought up last year by explaining that one difference between the Depression and now is that during the Depression, poverty was the norm, so relative to everyone else the poor weren't very poorly off materially.

From today's Toronto Star, from an article by Leslie Scrivener:

"One of the highlights was a 2001 study in the Canadian Journal of Criminology led by Martin Daly, a psychology professor at McMaster University, that shows a relationship between income inequality and homicide rates. Income inequality, Daly says, is a better predictor of homicide than other measures, such as level of income on its own."


From: in our collective imagination | Registered: Sep 2004  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 08 January 2006 05:23 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
I think it's all relative. Poor people make poor judgements when trying to cope. And in a world where there are no markets for affordable housing, and the percentage and numbers of full-time payroll jobs way down since NAFTA, frustration and despair could be an issue among an increasingly desperate poor class. Liberal democracy and free markets are creating pockets of prosperity in major cities surrounded by increasingly poorer layers of want and poverty.

But if its the measure of the value of crime and theft in general, then the annual value of white collar crime is said to be worth far more than blue collar street crime. In the United States,

quote:
The most common white-collar offenses include: antitrust violations, computer and internet fraud, credit card fraud, phone and telemarketing fraud, bankruptcy fraud, healthcare fraud, environmental law violations, insurance fraud, mail fraud, government fraud, tax evasion, financial fraud, securities fraud, insider trading, bribery, kickbacks, counterfeiting, public corruption, money laundering,embezzlement, economic espionage and trade secret theft. According to the federal bureau of investigation, white-collar crime is estimated to cost the United States more than $300 billion annually

Crime that Pays: The FBI

Wouldn't it make more dollars and cents to crackdown on white collar crime than to warehouse millions of poor people in what amount to modern day workhouses and gulags across America ?.

[ 08 January 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 09 January 2006 05:52 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
As Linda says, Mike Harris and his government adopted a welfare to work program similar to the American experiment in the 1990's.
Hundreds of thousands of Ontario's poor were thrown off welfare roles and never heard from again. The conservatives never bothered to complete surveys to enquire what had become of former social assistance recipients, naturally. They didn't do it because they, themselves, had no idea what would become of Ontario's poorest or where the extra jobs might come from. No sense in shooting themselves in the feet or doing follow up to find out how effective their policies would be. So Harris and his small army of darkness at Queens Park in Toronto declared the reforms a resounding success, but there is little evidence from either the US or Ontario to show that workfare creates anymore low wage jobs than already exists.

American Nobel laureate in economics, Robert Solow, says that pushing a million people off welfare into low wage work force has the net effect of pushing the same number, already in low wage work, into unemployment and poverty - a zero sum effort. Conservative work for welfare programs are long on Puritanism and dated conservative moralizing, and by all accounts tends to end up costing the public more in bloated, expensive welfare bureaucracy for the sake of politicizing the poor. Solow says its the public and the poor who end up paying for workfare. Meanwhile, political conservatives pat themselves on the backs for increasing public spending and doing nothing to solve real issues of poverty and unemployment.

[ 09 January 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged

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