Growing gap between the rich and the poor

The same thing is happening in Canada: income inequality is increasing and it is increasingly inherited wealth. 

Fewer than 90 families in Canada hold roughly as much wealth as what everyone living in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island collectively owns. That’s the finding of a new report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), which compares the net worth of Canada’s 87 richest families to the wealth of average families since 1999.

“Canada’s dynastic families have got it all — more wealth, more inheritance, and are as lightly taxed as they were the last time we looked in 2014,” study author and CCPA senior economist David Macdonald said in a statement.

The country’s most affluent families are worth $3 billion on average, while the median net worth in Canada is just under $300,000, meaning that half of families own more and half less than that. And while wealth at the top grew by $800 million per family between 2012 and 2016, a rate of 37 per cent, Canada’s median net worth grew by only $37,000, an increase of 15 per cent. Net worth is the total value of a family’s assets minus any debts and other liabilities. Taken together, the country’s top 87 families hold $259 billion in wealth, just shy of the $269 billion in net assets collectively owned by everyone living in Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, including “all houses, cottages and other properties, all cars, every savings account in the region, RRSPs, pensions, etc.,” Macdonald writes.

The study analyzes wealth inequality using information on Canada’s richest dynasties as compiled by Canadian Business magazine and data on household net worth from Statistics Canada’s Survey of Financial Security.

While much of the current debate about inequality has been focused on the growing gap between the top one per cent of earners and the rest, wealth disparities are just as concerning, Macdonald argues. Wealth inequality is, in part, a by-product of income inequality. After all, the more you make, the more you can save, and the faster your net worth grows. “And since returns on larger sums of invested money are naturally higher, we should expect the growth in the net worth of the wealthiest Canadians to outpace everyone else by a larger and larger factor with each passing year,” Macdonald writes.

But the story doesn’t end there, he adds. Wealth is also accumulating at an increasing rate across generations, according to the report.  While in 1999 46 of Canada’s 87 wealthiest families were nouveau riche,by 2016 that number had gone down to 39, meaning that most of today’s top scions were born into wealth.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4360299/wealth-inequality-canada/

 

Toronto's Shelters Are Now Consistently Above 90% Capacity and that is Extremely Dangerous (and vid)

https://t.co/uaLMKBIsQV

"It's like a scene from a natural disaster - they are packed like sardines."

Nobody cares which is why it's like this. Fuck the poor is a widely held and practised belief in Canada and the evidence is all around us. Lots of virtue-signalling but not much beef and everybody knows it.

laine lowe wrote:

I read some rumblings on Facebook that the increase in homelessness in Canadian cities is correlated with the greater influx of illegal refugees. My kneee jerk reaction was that this is a racist reaction, more bullshit from anti-immigrant/refugee proponents. Next thing I hear on the news is Ottawa Mayor Watson asking for funding to offset the impact new refugees are having on the housing situation. Now I don't know if that constitutes a correlation or not but I would be curious to hear if my initial response was wrong.

I don't really see why it would make a difference one way or the other laine. They're homeless people, regardless of whether or not they're off-white homeless or Canadian homeless.

laine lowe wrote:

I read some rumblings on Facebook that the increase in homelessness in Canadian cities is correlated with the greater influx of illegal refugees. My kneee jerk reaction was that this is a racist reaction, more bullshit from anti-immigrant/refugee proponents. Next thing I hear on the news is Ottawa Mayor Watson asking for funding to offset the impact new refugees are having on the housing situation. Now I don't know if that constitutes a correlation or not but I would be curious to hear if my initial response was wrong.

I have heard that there is an issue here with homeless refugees being a substantial number of the homeless population at the moment.

It is being spun to a racist message. The people who do not care about our current homeless are now upset that they are being displaced in shelters for others they also do not care about.

There is also a problem here with the federal government: it has apparently not provided sufficient funding for the cities to cover costs or any plan to increase the shelters to accomodate the people. In other words the Liberals were extremly generous with other jurisdiction's resources without providing much to help them. Then the Liberals will whine about the racist comments generated through their incompetence and hope to win an election on fighting that.

The truth of course is that Canada could afford to take in the refugees so long as the resources are provided by the federal government rather than downloading the cost on the cities so that the people of Canada will see how nice the Liebrals are and vote for them.

Am I being too cynical?

Indeed all the stats on homelessness say it is cheaper to build houses and subsidize rents rather than any other option including doing nothing. However like all policies what it requires is the reallocation of resources and currently all our "national interest" money is going to ensure that oil patch workers continue to earn enough in the tar sands to buy property on the BC Coast as a second home.

Significant research has been done that explores the cost of housing someone in jail, hospitals or the shelter system compared to housing them in social or supportive housing – and the difference is quite shocking. In a 2005 study by Pomeroy which looked at costs in four Canadian cities, institutional responses (jails, hospitals, etc.) cost $66,000-$120,000 annually, emergency shelters cost $13,000-$42,000 annually whereas supportive and transitional housing cost $13,000-$18,000 and affordable housing without supports was a mere $5,000-$8,000. 

https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/homelessness-101/cost-anal...

You're both talking up the Norway model for the prison system, and more. That may be the happiest country in the entire world and it's representative of 'socially responsible capitalism'.

Kropotkin brushed the whole conversation off as an oxymoron a week ago and that was the end of that. Welcome back!