A battle is brewing between Canada's generations. Max Fawcett writes:
Young Canadians can be forgiven for being a bit confused by the latest federal budget. For the first time in their lives, they’re looking at a budget that explicitly tries to cater to their needs and interests — and listening to politicians fighting for their votes. If their growing political power wasn’t apparent to them before, it should be now.
As Generation Squeeze noted in its analysis, “Never before has the Government of Canada formally acknowledged that hard work isn’t paying off for younger Canadians today the way it did for previous generations. Budget 2024 labels this sad reality as the starting point for a new economic framework to achieve ‘Fairness for Every Generation.’” At long last, young Canadians are getting their moment in the political sun.
The problem is that the budget doesn't do enough:
While the Liberal budget does more to address intergenerational inequality for younger people than any in Canadian history, it still doesn’t do nearly enough. According to Generation Squeeze, Budget 2024 increases spending for Old Age Security by $31 billion and sends an additional $17 billion toward health care, which is used disproportionately by those over 65. But it only allocates $2 billion towards housing, with an additional $8 billion for measures aimed at building a clean economy. The intergenerational balance is still badly skewed, in other words.
It may yet get worse, too. As more boomers exit the workforce and the ratio of working-age residents to retirees continues to decline from the high of seven-to-one in the 1970s to just three-to-one today, the pressure on today’s taxpayers will only continue to grow. Young Canadians are paying the price for the failure of previous generations to properly plan for this demographic inevitability, and it’s one the Conservative Party of Canada seems determined to ignore. As Generation Squeeze’s analysis concluded, “Any party promising to balance the budget easily without tax increases or gutting spending on retirees ignores this hard truth.”
The result seems to be that no one is happy:
Derek Holt, the vice-president and head of capital markets at Scotiabank, went even further than that. “[Justin] Trudeau and [Chrystia] Freeland are ripping off Canada’s youth who will be the ones left to face the bills for many years to come,” he wrote in a recent column in the Globe and Mail, one of many he’s written of late attacking the government. “It’s an insult to portray such a budget as being in the best interests of Canada’s youth who have fled from the Liberals in droves.”
The bigger insult, though, is older Canadians using the supposed long-term well-being of young people as a stalking horse for their own near-term self-interest. Conservatives have been doing this for decades, of course, talking up the risks associated with deficits and debts while studiously ignoring the ever-expanding price tag associated with climate change.
How will this be resolved? I confess I don't know.
Image: Quote Fancy
10 comments:
In a country not so far away, Mark Cuban pays $288M in 2023 tax and says:
“I pay what I owe,” Cuban wrote on social media site X on Sunday. “This country has done so much for me, I’m proud to pay my taxes every single year.”
We need a 1950's tax structure and then have rich folks bragging about how much tax they pay ... rather than the whining we hear about them not liking (and often dodging) ridiculously low taxes.
It is unfettered capitalism itself that has brought economies to their knees.
Add to it the somewhat recent insane increases in real estate possibly driven by provincial governments that are beholding to the real-estate industry who actively encouraged rich foreign buyers to invest or hide their monies in BC or Ontario!
And thus the real estate cost explosion started.
Let us not forget the country wide loss of good paying full time jobs where benefits have to be paid.
No , it's not us old farts that screwed up its our collective indifference to the worlds realities.
TB
If only people felt a sense of social responsibility, PoV.
We are paying for our indifference, TB.
Responsibility is a word long removed from our dictionaries!
TB
Too many syllables, TB.
Derek Holt, the vice-president and head of capital markets at Scotiabank,
Clearly a concerned socialist.
I wonder if Pierre Poilievre has spoken to him, jrk.
Boomers are not more selfish than those of other generations; there are just more of them. By sheer numbers they get their way. This will pass.
Boomers are retiring en masse. One would expect that there would be opportunities for younger workers to step in to the good jobs but many of those jobs are being erased. That's a problem with run away, rapacious, unregulated capitalism. In stead of blaming people who just happened to be born in the post WWII years we should point our fingers at the ultra rich and powerful.
The problem is a policy problem, Toby. Policymakers made deliberate decisions that have brought us to this place.
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