I like Employment Insurance. I don’t mind paying it. I’ve collected it a few times but I’ve contributed more than I’ve drawn from it.
It is there so that if I end up jobless I will have some time to find other work without starving under a bridge. Everytime I hear of a surplus in EI I take some pleasure in it because - unlike the CPP - I can count on it being there when I need it.
Then I find out today that for a goodly number of years now those pasty, MBA assfucks in Ottawa have been taking the EI surplus and putting it into general revenue. Which means in effect that I’m paying another fucking tax on top of the taxes that I’m already paying. I don’t mind paying tax (the curse of being socialist I suppose) but I like to know when it’s happening to me.
So now I know how these preening, smarmy, meretricious dick-chimps have managed to balance the budget all these years: bleed-to-anemia every social program that makes Canada great and side-door burglarize to make up the difference.
Hey self-congratulating parlimentarian fucknuggets: sodomy is only permissable with consent (you should know you passed the fucking laws). Well my asshole’s real raw and I don’t recall saying, “Do me buckaroo.”
I don’t mean to be rude, but this is very old news, even if the Globe is pretending it’s not. EI has been essentially just a tax, with very little resemblance to an actual insurance program, for years. The Chretien administration was ripped every year for running a huge EI surplus, and the system has been designed such that people in some provinces are mostly paying for people in other provinces to go on EI.
Into the bargain, do you realize that not a single person I know has ever qualified for EI? Not a single one of them has ever worked the exact, meticulous combination of employment schedules necessary to successfully qualify. Only about 30% of workers ever do, according to figures I saw recently.
So yes, it is a tax. On workers (who are required to pay in, naively assuming they will eventually get the benefits they are promised, with those making the least the least likely ever to qualify), specifically. I can’t help thinking that at some point it sure would be nice to tax people who can actually spare the money.
Anyone who works regularly for a long period of time will qualify; there’s almost no way NOT to. If you’re putting in forty hours a week for a long time, no sweat.
Of course, those are the people who tend to either keep their jobs or find other jobs quickly.
RickyJay - Yeah, I know, I let this one slip by me. D’oh!
Euphonious polemic - Thank-you so much for my defense and the compliment
RickyJay - It took me a while to come up with that one. Thanks
I’ve never had much of a problem with collecting EI (even managed sick leave benefits once without the benefit of seeing a doctor).
It just really bothers me that I’ve been paying into this and that the money that is supposed to be there to cushion the impact of tough times (should they ever arise) has been pissed away on typical polifuckery.
It is worth noting that Parliament is no longer made up primarily of Lawyers. The majority are now Èbusiness peopleÈ. The same sort of myopic ass-clowns that led us blithely to the economic shit-slide the world now finds itself on.
If you have worked full time for 52 weeks you will qualify, but only up to a maximum of $435 per week, on which you still need to pay income tax. So what would your take-home be at that point? Something in the order of $600 bi-weekly? Yeah, thanks, but that might cover food, gas and phone. There’s this little thing about shelter, property taxes, and heat that I might need a hand with.
Note that the Supreme Court decision is essentially that the government used the wrong process for setting EI premiums for a while, not that there was anything inherently wrong in the premiums or the general management of the EI Account per se, and is ruling against the petitioners in favour of the government. The Globe and Mail apparently has a bad case of the reporter hearing about this for the first time and getting all worked up about it without taking the time to read for comprehension or actually research it in any depth.
While the siphoning off of the surplus in the EI Account was ethically scummy (although the Supreme Court ruled it as legal - essentially because the government passed a law that said they could do it), it should be noted that the surplus, massive as it was in absolute dollar amount, was no larger as a percentage of the annual EI payout than had been normal over the previous few decades, and grew simply because of the massive increase in payouts (partly due to benefit amounts growing due to normal inflation and partly due to new types of benefits being added). There is a strong argument that the surplus needed to be as large as it was for proper management of the EI Account, as a cushion in case of a strong recession or new depression (like now?) which resulted in greatly increased benefit payouts. Those who complained about its size didn’t understand what it was there for.
The future of the EI surplus should be less subject to the cash-hungriness of the government in power, however, as a new Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board is supposed to take over control of the premium rates and management of the surplus. This “hands off” management is apparently working OK for the CPP surplus, so hopefully will work for EI as well.
Same thing here in the US. I’ve worked since I was 14, which was mumble mumble ago, and I don’t qualify for unemployment because I had the gall to go on disability first. I don’t even want to think about the 100’s of thousands of my dollars they must have that they won’t let me even have $300 a week worth!
