Links - 15th September 2023 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

- "Two of the province’s largest teaching unions have already staked out their position. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) issued a joint release this week claiming a new provincial program designed to help struggling readers will violate teachers’ collective bargaining rights. Now, one might think helping struggling students would be a priority for teachers. After all, the new provincial program is in response to an Ontario Human Rights Commission report last year that said Ontario is failing students when it comes to reading, especially special education students... Chief commissioner Patricia DeGuire said at least one-third of students graduate without reaching the level of literacy that the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development says is necessary in today’s economy. To its credit, the province immediately announced a reading-improvement program. This was in February 2022. The unions were subsequently consulted on how the program should work. Now, the two unions say the program “was released Friday without notice.” The unions attempted, rather lamely, to play off the government’s oft-repeated statement about creating stability in education. They claim that the government is destabilizing education by bringing in “sweeping changes without providing the necessary time and resources for proper implementation.” And yet the government will spend $25 million on new reading resources, the change was announced 18 months ago and the unions participated in consultation on it. ETFO told the government that their members would require two years to make this single change. So for the unions, stability at a low level of performance is preferable to the unpleasantness of having to do a better job more quickly than they’d like. Too bad about the kids who can’t read. ETFO, by the way, describes itself as an organization whose goal is to “advance a social justice agenda.”... Introducing a culture of accountability into public education is a major change and not one that’s easy to make. For example, the province’s standardized testing program has been in place since 1996, but the elementary teachers’ union is still fighting it."
Too bad liberal love unions and hate conservatives more than they love children

Meme - "Edward Sichel: Jesus christ, the commies are shilling for megacorps now
Jacobin @jacobinmag We shouldn't fetishize mom and pops. They offer lower wages, skimpier benefits, and inferior labor protections.
Small Businesses Are Overrated"

Vancouver daycare rejected after neighbours organize to fight it | Vancouver Sun - "The tenor during parts of this meeting almost sounded as if the city was considering building a chemical plant in a residential neighbourhood or bulldozing homes to build a freeway.  What was actually so vehemently opposed by an organized neighbourhood campaign was a proposal for a daycare for eight children.  The board of variance ruled unanimously against the daycare.  City representatives said the decision was not based on concerns about the daycare operator or the facility. Instead, the daycare’s rejection was due, in part, to opposition from neighbours. The applicant, Lisa McCormick, has been operating a daycare since last year, with eight kids, in her family’s house across the street from Douglas Park in Vancouver. She and her spouse wanted to open a second, eight-child daycare in the house’s upper floor.  Bylaws permit this kind of child-care use. But it is a conditional use, meaning it must be considered and approved by city hall.  McCormick applied for the expansion in January. The city’s licensing department rejected it in May, citing objections from neighbours.  Those objections mostly focused on parking, but also touched on the noise of children playing and effects on the neighbourhood’s “unique charm, character and vitality.”... Peers said: “If this precedent is set, there is nothing stopping another homeowner to convert their house into a funeral home, motorcycle repair shop, corner store, gym, dry-cleaner etc. Should this application be granted, you can expect legal action against the city on behalf of the neighbourhood. … Govern yourselves accordingly and deny this application.”...   Another neighbour printed brochures and pushed them through mail slots of nearby houses, asking neighbours to “please help us stop her from turning her home into a commercial business” and offering suggested comments to send to city hall to register their opposition.  That neighbour, Carol Nest, told the board of variance meeting about the noise made by the eight children currently enrolled there. “When the kids are outside between 11 and 12, and between 4 and 5, I cannot have my windows open,” Nest told the meeting. “I can’t escape the noise currently, so if she were to expand this daycare, we would have no peace.”  At the board meeting, a municipal staffer said city hall had never received complaints about the existing daycare. Vancouver Coastal Health inspection records show they’ve never found any critical infractions.  The board of variance members provided no reason in the meeting for rejecting McCormick’s appeal."
Damm greedy capitalists keeping childcare expensive!

Make the rich pay? They already do — study - "“Measuring Progressivity in Canada’s Tax System, 2023” by Jake Fuss and Nathaniel Li, says the top 20% of Canadian families with incomes of more than $243,799 annually pay almost two-thirds (61.9%) of federal and provincial personal income taxes and more than half (53.1%) of total taxes. By contrast, the bottom 20% of income-earning families are estimated to pay 0.7% of all federal and provincial personal income taxes and 2.0% of total taxes. The study also says only the highest 20% of income earning families pay a larger share of total taxes than their share of total income, compared to other families."
Many leftists are very open that a primary purpose of taxation is not to raise money, but make the rich poor, so

Working Families Party 🐺 on Twitter - "There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. That amount of capital is only possible through exploitation: of the people, of the system, and of the environment. Tax them out of existence."

Meme - Reddit Lies @reddit_lies: "That's several hundred dollars of weed bruh"
r/depressionmeals u/pepeslosthamster: "have 0.87 till next paycheck my moms in the hospital and almost cried at work be a little girl said I was ugly
Turkey on stale(ish) tortillas with a can of chips I found at the food bank(atleast I got weed tho)"

K ☭ on Twitter - "The ruling class has to push the myth of “personal responsibility” so you don’t realize that most of your perceived failures are actually systemic."
Left wing ideology in a nutshell

Meme - "The "I can't afford to pay for my kids' school lunch, we can barely make ends meet" starter pack."
*Miller Lite, Marlboro, lottery scratch cards*
Jessica Alvarez: "Honestly I am so tired of people shitting on lower class for enjoying things in life. Yes you should provide for your kids first but nobody bats an eye at somebody on a yatch enjoying a glass of wine and a cigar so why is it when lower class citizens do stuff that yes may be bad for them but allows them to enjoy what little quality of life they have we crap on them? We should have free school lunches anyways but why hate on parents that are probably just stressed and making ends meet affording themselves something to make them happy. Do you guys hate on people buying artwork and coffees too? This is super and disgusting judgement honestly"
Apparently people on yachts complain that they can't afford to pay for their kids' school lunches and can barely make ends meet

Meme - "This user was later discovered to have a $600/mo car payment, a very nice apartment crammed to the gills with high end vintage gaming consoles which he claims "is just a hobby that gives me life", and a partner that hasn't worked at all since 2020. Yes, you're really suffering, USA such shit hole poor baby"
"u/jru92
$35/hour and still broke
31 years of age now.. been working full time since I was 16 years old. Never had the privilege to "formally" educate myself.. I would go homeless otherwise. Rent is about $25k/year for my 800sqft apartment. There is no end to the abuse, I spent my whole boot strapping and having faith in a system that only takes and does not give. I've never left my state once since I cannot afford a vacation, never been on vacation and have always chose to work since I would drown otherwise. I want my life "back" I don't even know what that means cause I've been sold a lie and I'm having trouble returning this propaganda. I'm afraid I'm going to snap any day now and just quit.. probably end up on the streets. It's obviously what I was destined to become. I hate it here, USA is a shit hole country."
Meme - "u/jru92: I guess you could say I'm in pretty deep, although not the most deep from what I've seen
Arcade Rhythm Game"
A lot of poor people just have poor spending habits

Meme - sage (seraphim) @urdreamghoul: "ask ur non-binary roommate to pay rent on time and then suddenly there's a gofundme for them to get out of their toxic living situation"

Trudeau is right: 40% of Canadians don’t pay income taxes, which means someone else is picking up the bill - "On average, two of every five Canadian households do not pay anything towards federally and provincially funded expenses such as health care, education, community and social services, national defence, public safety and even the good old Canada Revenue Agency. One household of every five pays much more than 70 per cent of all of those costs... The Fraser Institute’s Canadian Tax Simulator 2017 looked at Canadian households with income ranging from zero to $80,843, representing the bottom 40 per cent of households by income, and found they paid 4.6 per cent of all the personal tax paid. That seems like a low number, but it still isn’t zero.  How does 4.6 per cent become zero? It happens when the tax that is paid is then given back (and more) by the federal and provincial governments.  As it turns out, quite a few benefits are paid out to Canadians with household income in the lower 40 per cent — particularly those with children... The top 20 per cent is likely paying 70 per cent or more of all income taxes. Is this tax fairness? It is certainly fair to some.  In the United States, taxation has been moving in a completely different direction. But when we hear about the “evil” one per cent in the U.S., we must recognize that the Canadian one per cent is paying a huge amount of our tax bill."

Meme Soyjaks: "haha take that billionaires"
"I <3 Hollywood T-shirt
Amazon packages
Netflix
Blackrock
Coexist
iPhone
Apple
amazon
prime video
Pornhub
*Grogu/Baby Yoda*
Mickey Mouse Cap"

Don't Extend the CDC's Unconstitutional 'Eviction Moratorium' - "the so-called moratorium was always a constitutionally suspect power-grab. Just think about this: The director of the CDC, an unelected bureaucrat, cited one vague law to unilaterally issue a mandate essentially seizing millions of landlords’ properties and subjecting those properties to unpaid occupation.   It’s as if the CDC ruled that anyone could go to a grocery store, fill up their cart, and walk out without paying. It effectively canceled peoples’ contracts and seized their property. It did so without providing them the “just compensation” required by the Takings Clause of the Constitution.
From 2021

AOC and Ayanna Pressley Predicted Massive ‘Tsunami’ of Evictions After Supreme Court Ended CDC Moratorium. It Hasn’t Happened - "Some of the rhetoric from progressive politicians was downright hysterical.  Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who protested on the Capitol steps, warned there would be an “eviction tsunami” and a “national tent city.” Meanwhile, Senator Ed Markey said that we were going to see a “historic and devastating wave of evictions in every corner of our country.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, said that the moratorium was necessary to stop a “secondary pandemic” of evictions, and claimed that as of August, up to “one in every six renters in the United States [was] facing eviction.” Yet, thankfully, these disastrous outcomes haven’t come to pass. In fact, the rate of evictions has hardly changed at all, new reporting reveals...   The eviction moratorium was always a heavy-handed solution in search of a problem. There are more open jobs than unemployed Americans, and those who struggled during the pandemic were able to receive enormous welfare payouts. Most people were able to pay their rents, and in non-paying situations, landlords are often flexible. But the CDC’s moratorium commandeered the market, bankrupted working-class landlords, and overruled Americans’ most basic property rights.    It was leading many landlords to leave their properties sitting empty rather than take on the risk of accepting tenants who couldn’t be forced to pay. (They still run up utility costs!) Many other landlords were selling off their properties entirely.    As Reuters reported, “About 23% of small landlords, owning between one and three single-family homes, planned to sell at least one property due to difficulties caused by the eviction ban.”   The enormous constraint the moratorium placed on rental supply housing undoubtedly contributed to rising rent prices. According to Zillow’s 2021 Housing Trends Report, about 46% of renters saw a rent increase last year, with the typical increase amounting to about $150."
Liberals will claim that if you can't afford the risk, you shouldn't be a landlord. Great way to support corporate ownership of housing, since corporations are more able to absorb the risk

An Eviction Crisis Is Coming — We Need to Treat Housing as a Right | Teen Vogue - "We should cancel rent outright as this pandemic rages. And we should work toward a world where landlords no longer hold this sort of power over people’s lives.  We need a housing movement based on a rejection of the construct that any one person should own this earth’s land."
Teen Vogue pushing Marxism as usual. Clearly declaring something a right means you get an unlimited amount of it

Fact check: False claim that checkout charities offset corporate taxes - "Anyone who’s ever been to a grocery store has probably been asked whether they want to donate a few dollars to charity at checkout.  Some social media users are spreading misinformation about what happens to that spare change after customers leave the store.  “When you donate at the register, that company is using YOUR donation to fund THEIR tax deduction,” claims a meme shared to Facebook on May 4.  But experts say this is false... TPC said misinformation around checkout charities could be financially detrimental for the charities involved. In the last three decades, checkout campaigns have raised more than $5.3 billion for charities.  “Misinforming a younger, more impressionable audience is bad for charitable giving and for their understanding of tax policy,” TPC wrote."
This doesn't stop all the ignorant liberals bashing companies for saving on taxes using customer donations. But they don't know how taxes work anyway, so (related: how they keep demanding churches pay taxes, not realising that that will apply to charities too)

Meme - The Meme Policeman: "This is just nonsense, the latest Job Openings and Turnover Summary (JOLTS) reported 10.9M openings in July, the highest level since the series began in December 2000. That was +749K from June, which also set a record. The reality is there are job openings everywhere. Ironically, retail trade (which would include Target and Forever 21) was one of the few sectors where job openings and hiring declined. Meanwhile, openings are booming in areas like professional/business services, education/health services, information, financial activities & government.
The Other 98%:
Gucci & Gumdrops
Y'all will say "get a job, don't be picky, poverty is a choice", but then the only jobs that are hiring are Target and Forever 21, then when people say they can't pay their bills y'all start telling them to "get better jobs". Y'all do CARTWHEELS to justify poverty."

Meme - "Handcuffed and jailed at 93 years old, in Florida, for not paying the rent at her independent living facility and refusing to leave once evicted"
"How do you have the heart to evict a 93 year old woman out of her house and arrest her for not paying rent when she's too disabled to even work and can't make any money?? Y'all really some fucking heartless animals"
93-Year Old Woman Arrested For Not Paying Rent - "A 93-year-old woman was arrested after she reportedly refused to pay rent for three months to the independent living facility she was in. Police arrested Juanita Fitzgerald for trespassing, took her to Lake County Jail, handcuffed her at the facility and put her in an orange jumpsuit... Karen Twinem who is with the church service said Fitzgerald told the staff she was holding back rent because she was going to die soon and that there was mold in her apartment.  The facility tested the apartment and no mold was found.  Twinemen said she tried contacting Fitzgerald's family to try to get her help and reached out to several agencies but Fitzgerald refused them all."
Leftist mentality: old people should not pay rent even if they can afford to. But then again, they think no one should pay rent

Meme - "OWNING PROPERTY AND RENTING IT ISN'T A REAL JOB. HOW ABOUT YOU GET A REAL JOB
WHAT YOU MEAN? NO, SEX WORK IS DEFINITELY REAL WORK. SHOWING MY ASSHOLE TO STRANGERS IS A REAL JOB."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Jamie Oliver Guest Edits Today - "'‘Does this make sense? Is it just more cost on the taxpayer? What's the value for the taxpayer in this going forward?’
‘I can't imagine anybody would disagree with feeding children. It is not their fault where they've been born. That's not their fault, that whole kind of postcode lottery. So I can't imagine anybody having a problem with feeding children’...
‘Of course you want to give people meals but there are plenty of kids in perfectly prosperous areas. Maybe that's money you should spend on books instead or playgrounds and so on so. There are choices that people are making’"
So much for mocking conservatives for going "what about the children?"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Inequality: Is the gap between rich and poor in the UK fair? - "‘There are many different dimensions of inequality. People differ in their beauty and their intelligence and their health and their likely longevity, where they live in the country. All kinds of different factors. And I would say that to over focus on merely your income or your wealth is to get the wrong kind of angle on things to begin with.’...
‘The way we treat people and the way people exist in our society, all of that must reflect to some extent, our sort of equal moral worth.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And and why can't we try and reflect that economically?’
‘Well, we could, it's, there's nothing that prevents us from doing that. To me, I don't think that's a morally a particularly good idea. Because for much of the same reason that I would say, I wouldn't go and find somebody who had, who was beautiful, and make them less beautiful, simply in order to make beauty more equal, or find somebody who was intelligent and deny them education, so that that so that they became less sophisticated.’"

Meme - "Owen Jones makes an unplanned donation to the proletariat.
Owen Jones @OwenJones84: "just had my phone snatched off me by a guy on a bike, how's your evening going
This is the third time it's happened, always in Islington"

The left refights the financial crisis - "So, capitalism, what do you have to say for yourself? Basically that's the message from left-wing critics who see the terrible economic and human carnage of the past three months as confirmation that they were right all along about the inadequacy of business and markets. They said that "capitalism kills" before the pandemic, and now they're saying it's killing ever harder. Socialist magazine Jacobin warns that "capitalism will be responsible for many" of the fatalities in one of "worst mass deaths in human history."... What really seems to bug some on the left, maybe even more than the job losses, are the government bailouts... maybe try this alternative storyline: The economy has suddenly stopped because it is under a quarantine — partially from consumer fear, partially from government edict. And Corporate America needs a government cash and credit lifeline because companies didn't do what no one ever recommended they do: Stockpile an Olympus Mons of cash just in case there was a global pandemic whose economic impact was exacerbated by bad government. Remember, all those buyback haters wanted companies to spend more money — on both workers and machines — not sock billions away in some ginormous rainy-day fund... One would hope the left would be learning lessons in humility about what government is capable of. Instead, they dream of giving it more power and responsibility. "Nationalize everything," tweeted (and since deleted) Marissa Barrera, a health policy adviser to Bernie Sanders. "I don't even care what it is … y'all lost your capitalist privileges." But government already took away those "privileges" with a mandated economic shutdown. And it's nearly time to give them back."
From April 2020

HC S: [Confidence in Her Majesty's Government] | Margaret Thatcher Foundation - Mr. Hughes: "There is no doubt that the Prime Minister, in many ways, has achieved substantial success. There is one statistic, however, that I understand is not challenged, and that is that, during her 11 years as Prime Minister, the gap between the richest 10 per cent. and the poorest 10 per cent. in this country has widened substantially. At the end of her chapter of British politics, how can she say that she can justify the fact that many people in a constituency such as mine are relatively much poorer, much less well housed and much less well provided for than they were in 1979? Surely she accepts that that is not a record that she or any Prime Minister can be proud of."
The Prime Minister: "People on all levels of income are better off than they were in 1979. The hon. Gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That way one will never create the wealth for better social services, as we have. What a policy. Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That is the Liberal policy... I think that the hon. Gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of east Europe, who have experienced them, have for theirs. I think that I must have hit the right nail on the head when I pointed out that the logic of those policies is that they would rather the poor were poorer... So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. One does not create wealth and opportunity that way. One does not create a property-owning democracy that way."

Meme - richie owens: "I can't wait to hand out these babies now that the weather is nice
You Are Part of the Problem. How your Lemonade Stand Perpetuates A Toxic and Cancerous Capitalist System
"We should divorce Ourselves from the idea that we need to Monetize our hobbies." ~ Richie Owens"

You’re Not Poor. You’re Financially Illiterate, And That’s Your Fault - "A viral tweet posted Wednesday showed precisely why so many city-dwelling Americans aren’t actually poor, they’re just extremely financially illiterate.  The tweet featured side-by-side screenshots of two posts from Colombia professor and author Molly McGhee. The first of McGhee’s tweets read, “God I am starting to think that being poor is something that happens to you at birth and you can never escape it. I teach at an Ivy, I’m a New York Times Bestselling editor, I have a novel coming out, and I am still so fucking poor it’s embarrassing.”  Okay so firstly, being poor isn’t embarrassing. Secondly, you ain’t poor, Molly! If you have all of the income and reputation your profile claims to have, you just have the worst financial literacy. The reason McGhee’s tweet went viral is because it was juxtaposed next to another where she posted a photograph of her extremely over-the-top personal library at home. After going viral, McGhee attempted to argue that she managed to decorate her library with thrift shop finds, but there is a massive hole in her argument … because thrift shops ain’t that cheap either. To decorate even one room from a thrift store in the way that she claims she has, you’re talking costs well into the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Trust me. I am an expert in thrifting. McGhee is far from the first person I’ve met who has cried poverty when really they just haven’t bothered to live within their means. Did McGhee need this library? No, but she bought its contents anyway."
I used to know someone who worked in an investment bank who complained about being poor

Eli 🐝🐝 on Twitter - "God I can't stand when wealthy people do this. You aren't poor. You just need to learn some money management skills and maybe cut down on luxuries. Saying you are poor when you aren't is stolen valor."

Meme - "Are you going hunting with me?"
"Not today-I am going to think instead"
7 hours later..
"Did you reach any conclusions?"
"In order to survive, we must hunt and pick berries"
"So?"
"We are being oppressed by nature!"