i know this is off topic...but..
i know this is off topic from the ORIGINAL POST, however now that its gotten down to this, i feel like i have to chime in a little...
ok guys, hear me out. i'm not speaking on any type of historical perspective. nor am i claiming any expert point of view. heck, i'm just saying this based on life experiences, and comparing a country that has been hijacked by conservatives, vs this country, a country that gets labeled extrememly liberal and socialist....
so, here's my analysis.
i lived in the states for over 18 years. i watched my family struggle to make ends meet. there was no "help" for working families. my mom worked at an insurance agency, making a modest $11/hour wage which mind you was a tremendous amount of money for that particular area in the country. it was an area where anything over $10 an hour was considered a "great job".
anyway, when it came to daycare, the government wanted to subsidize it and give her a whopping $30 a month, oh thanks...that really takes the edge off. NOT! (this province will give up to as much as 90%, i think thats insane... I think 50% would be more reasonable.)
In PA, there was NO SUCH THING as a child tax benefit. NO SUCH THING as employment supplment. hell, if it wasn't for my state taking the initiative to offer some health care to children under 18 in poor families, we wouldn't have even had that, mind you there was a co-pay for prescriptions as well.
i lived in a country where the rich used their accountants to get around paying all kinds of taxes, and bitched about the poor saying "pull yourself up by your bootstaps then". yeah, well sometimes bootsraps just aren't big enough. i saw families giving it all they got, living under tremendous stress, getting things repossessed with no chance of owning a damned thing in their poor, miserable, over-worked and underpaid lives. my family, in particular, did a rent-to-own just so we could have a computer to do our school work. yeah...do you have any idea what the interest rates are like at those places? but in the spirit of needing a computer, they did it for us so we could type our reports and keep our grades high enough to have a better life for ourselves someday....
in my opinion, the poor were just beaten more than they could take. for most, once you were at the bottom, there was just no chance. no way to save. no way to move up. thats an ambition killer! whoa, just remembering it makes me scratch my head and feel shamed for my countries inexcusable behavior. lol...but hey, thats how they kept their army enlistments. get the poor to join because you can offer to pay for school for them, and a crappy $1,200 a month lol.
canada, in my opinion... seems to be the great equalizer. if you're a poor, young family, you have a chance to get on your feet, take advantage of the fact that the basics are covered, and move on with your life to bigger and better things. you have a chance to take your productivity and move outside of the brackets where you need assistance. anything is possible here, it just takes some will.
where the problem lies, of course, is that some citizens take the governments handouts for granted. rather than work to get a BETTER job, they say "no, i'm ok living in income based housing, receiving $250/mo per child. i have welfare, who cares..." but you know what, those people would do the same, regardless where you put them. even if they were in the worst parts of africa where everyone had to work to eat for the day, they would be the ones robbing the other people, or not doing the work and suffering... point being. don't think its gonna change with those ones any time soon!
there are people who want to move forward, and there are people who dont. you put someone like my mom up here in canada, she'd be in a higher tax bracket, giving canada some great income to tax and be darn proud of her OPPORTUNITY to move up and do so. she would've had us out of that situation in no time. guaranteed! thats just how she was.
So thank you canada. People can bitch all they want, but you know what... this country gives you a fighting chance. And thats what people deserve. Guess what my moms income situation still is today? Any guessers? Yeah...same... but now its even worse because she is damn near being diagnosed with MS but until she gets the diagnosis she's been denied Social Security Disability. THANKS AGAIN USA! F*ckin kick in the face once again to a woman who worked for years PAYING INTO THAT so that IF she got sick it would be available to her....
Moving forward...You risk crossing the line of "rewarding someone" for having children vs. not PENALIZING them, as if having a child should now doom you to poverty for their entire existance, as my state did.
So, what do I think Canada could do different, to balance out a little, be less "socialist" and more "balanced"...I'd say to maybe bring co-pays to the province of SK so people weren't using the hell out of the health care system unneccessarily (where I'm from, you dont go to the emergency room unless, hello....its a FREAKING EMERGENCY. a cough at 2 Am just doesn't cut it...and then people wonder why 2 year olds with open cuts on the head are waiting there for 2 hours before they get in...)
Anyway, back to my point, make welfare something you can only use for 2 year periods before you're required to go back to work. Start cutting some of the lazy bastards off at the source, make them work once in a while, and maybe they'll remember what it was like to be proud of themselves and earn a paycheck. Maybe put a cap on the child tax benefit for people who have 3 kids with no clear intention of stopping even though they can't support the ones they got... etc.... Hey, I believe in helping people, but people have to use a little of their own judgement once in a while, right? This isn't about one side versus the other, this is about BALANCE.
Then no one has to feel like they're giving anyone a free ride, but its still a humane country where people can get ahead and not fall into the razor-sharp teeth of a society that underpays some of the hardest workers we have. Thats fair, that logical....
Just my 2 cents!