[QUOTE=Muffin]
Rickjay, I never suggested that Harris should have done nothing at all and just rolled out the same budget that the NDP had used. Flopping from one extreme to another was a bad move, but not moving at all would also have been bad.
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I don’t quite grasp what “extremes” you’re saying the Harris government flopped between. The Rae government rolled up big deficits, and the Harris government rolled up slightly less big deficits. That’s not a move from one extreme to another. Most of the Harris government’s so-called deficit reduction strategies were, truth be told, window dressing.
For that matter, your saying they “cut the tax base” baffles me. I assume you mean they cut taxes, which isn’t the same thing. Even that, however, is a dubious claim, since tax hikes or cuts cannot be viewed in a vacuum; you can’t simply assume that all economic activity would have proceeded unchanged if tax rates had been different. This is rather quickly apparent if one examines Ontario provincial revenue in the years transitioning from the Rae to the Harris government, as it didn’t really go down; the first full FY under Harris saw MORE revenue, not less. the secnd saw a but less than the first but still more than any year of Rae’s administration except the last (if you adjust for inflation.)
The main reason Harris’s government didn’t meet its deficit reduction promises is that they didn’t cut spending much. Program expenditures went down at first but by a fraction of what was needed. They did mean-spirited but visible things like cutting welfare rates that really had little discernible effect on the deficit.
A somewhat more logical approach, IMHO, is
Let people retire whenever they want, but their benefits are adjusted accordingly. If you want to retire at 65, great, but you don’t collect quite as much as you would if you retired at 66. Hell, you can retire at 50 if you want a really small CPP payment every month.
Cut back OAS significantly. Currently old people are eligible to collect OAS at income levels that are ludicrously high; OAS is in many cases welfare for people who don’t need it. Giving OAS to a senior citizen who’s making $55,000 a year is ridiculous. I realize this isn’t connected directly to CPP but it’d sure help federal finances. Finally,
**Raise the CPP rate and contribution limit. ** If we’re collecting more, make us pay more.
All good ideas. Letting people retire whenever they want would be problematic, because people would be complaining that the government didn’t do enough to protect them from their own stupidity, but too bad.
I had forgotten about the OAS and how ridiculously high the income has to be before people don’t collect it. Yeah, definitely lower that threshold.
It’s a persistent myth that when pensions were first thought about, the expectation was that people only lived a few years past retirement because of life expectancies. What people are typically looking at when they see those figures of a 67 year life expectancy is “life expectancy at birth”, which is a very different animal than “life expectancy at age 65”. While it’s true that life expectancy has increased significantly, that’s because of a decrease in child mortality in large part. Once people got out of childhood, that was the hard part and they generally lived to a good ripe old age. There has been some improvement in life expectancy past age 65, but it amounts to about 4 or so years since the 1930/40s. That’s probably worth accounting for, but it’s not as if there’s been some dramatic shift in the ability of people to live a long time. (I can look up the cites for this later if anyone’s interested, but I’m not in a convenient spot to do so right now).
What’s much more significant is that the baby boomers are hitting retirement age - they’re not living that much longer than old people in the past, but there’s a heck of a lot more of them than there ever has been.
People DO retire whenever they want, there’s nothing stopping them. Both my parents retired young, and it’s clear to me, anyway, that my mother was far, far too quick to retire.
Having CPP payable immediately upon one’s decision to retire could quite possibly make people more responsible, inasmuch as they’d see the result of retirement immediately, rather than waiting six years only to find out then how shockingly paltry their CPP cheques are. Something years away is less influential on your behaviour than something immediate.
Setting retirement at 67 strikes me as being a sort of weird, arbitrary hike. I can see the “more money in, less out” logic but you accomplish the same thing by simply hiking CPP rates, raising the income limit, or changing payouts depending on retirement age. What I like about having a sliding scale of monthly payout based on one’s retirement age is that it places the decision in the hands of the individual.
To use my Dad as an example, his health is poor, and was poor when he retired. It is completely inconceivable to me that he could have worked until he was 67. It’d have killed him. So he retired at 61, which was the right decision for him. On the other hand I know people who choose to work until 75, and are happy to do it, but they’re forced to become “contractors” and draw on CPP and account for income and all that nonsense before they really retire. Why not give that choice to the retiree?
So far, so good. A few good shots intermixed with a lot of lousy shots. I started wearing progressive lenses a year ago, and I’m not sure if I should wear my glasses while golfing, or not.
Of course I can see the ball, but I can’t read the make and number from 5 feet away without glasses. Golfing with progressive lenses sucks though.
We put our house on the market here in Calgary today. Our real estate agent gave us some numbers for sales - the average sale price was $473,315 in April, 2014. Crazy. So close to half a million dollars just for an average bungalow type house. By the time you’ve finished paying for that house, you will have spent almost a million dollars, just for your house.
+1 to the good bike shop! A properly fitted bike should be painless and fun, spending a bit more money to get a decent bike is almost always a wise investment. I have done my own maintenance for 20 years now, and am in the process of building a carbon fiber recumbent bike, something like the link. I am just waiting for things to slow down a bit so I’ll have time! I am always interested in what others are riding as it gives me ideas and I like hearing about people rediscovering the joy of being on two wheels.
I’m not saying there has to be a Toronto Dopefest at my first headlining comedy show at Comedy Bar on June 8 at 7 PM, the show being called “42 Years An Idiot.” But there COULD be.
I’m not even sure if I should post this yet, but we have a conditional offer on our house! We have a week for the conditions to be met, and we’ll see how it goes - I’ve sold three houses now, and the first two had the first offers fall through. I’m not breaking out the champagne until this deal is a lot more solid, but we’ve had our first offer at least! Yay!
True fact; a par is actually better than what used to be considered a good score.
The term “Bogey” actually comes from “Bogey man” and was originally meant to signify a normal score. The idea was that your score is being compared against an imaginary player, e.g. a bogey man. It was only in the 20th century that score standards become tighter as professional golf took off and their scores regularly beat bogey.
So in fact, if you can average a bogey round (a 90 on most courses) you are rightly considered a very capable golfer. Not a pro, but perfectly good.
On the return from Marathon today: 1 bear, 1 moose, 3 turkey vultures (a pair at Jackfish Beach and one alone west of Nipigon), and two out-of-province RVs. Spring has arrived, despite the snowstorm last night – the doddering RVs are a sure sign.
Par, bogey, birdie, eagle, albatross? Hell, I once shot a beaver.
My drive went further than expected, and landed on a beaver wandering across the fairway. Coincidentally, the next day it’s dam burst and washed out the Hwy 69 section of the Trans-Canada. Or at least one hopes the breach was accidental.
Our weather was nice enough today to get some yard work done. I cleaned up a bunch of fir cones and needles from the two big fir trees in the front yard, but much remains: the side garden needs to be cleared of weeds (why do they grow more readily than nice plants?), the backyard gardens need edging, and I may need to build a new gate.
It was a beautiful day, pretty much summer-like. I guess we had our Spring for 15 minutes on Thursday.
Great news! Do you have a place lined up? That was our problem back when the Ottawa market was going from hot to massively stupid. Our houses sold in a few days but everytime we tried to make an offer the place had been sold while we were looking at it.
