Canadian Basic Income

[Windsong]

Stephen Harper wanted a pipe line that would of poisoned my towns water supply regardless of what the scientists said so... I don't know but might not be good.

Sounds like an average day for America politicians..

 

[Touch of Insanity]

It's very difficult to abuse Welfare and disability but like you said it can be done. Welfare it's actually allot of money to be honest, my parents are on it and they have to ask me and my brother for rent so we could put food on the table :/

It is said to be hard to abuse the system, yet there are so many people who do it. Or as my basis goes, the people I know abuse it, and the people who are honest about what is going on, generally don't get the help they need. I've heard this story over and over again. I know people who are on Welfare their whole lives and it's the people who only need help for a few months to get back on their feet that end up getting screwed. People on welfare do generally get a bit of money. From what I know, they can get more then a mini-wage job.

However, this is all from things I've experienced, seen, or heard. I haven't done any hard research, but if someone can prove me otherwise with proof that my views are wrong, they are very welcomed.

 

[Space Cowboy]

FUCK YOU, CANADA!!

/me prepares immigration papers

 

[Dervish]

Also, what did Harper do that was so bad? And not just 'hurr he wuz Hitler-lite'. Really, what was so bad that he left on, from what I can read just by googling his name, relatively pleasant terms?

Barebacking the country through two separate recessions was probably not a good thing for his case, but I'm going to preface this by saying I voted for Harper twice, and this last election was the only time I was legitimately terrified of any politician in my country getting reelected.

Harper and his Conservatives ended up starting down a road that looked a lot like an oligarchy where the government was becoming less and less accountable and transparent, pushed hard for a lot of fear mongering rhetoric while signing off Charter of Rights and Freedoms violating anti-terror legislation with Bill C-51, signing off on the largest military arms deal with Saudi Arabia at $14.8 billion while we're supposed to have laws in place to not sell to countries that are known human rights violators, the Conservatives removed Federal oversight and protection from over 2 million protected lakes and rivers, and a list longer than my arm of other shit that basically made the Conservatives come across as civil rights dismantling, environment destroying, and otherwise morally bankrupt government that was embattled with Senator scandals that Harper had appointed (Duffy and Brazeau, in particular) in their later years.

Given their crushing defeat in the last federal election, it's pretty clear that the majority of Canadians felt that Harper didn't embody the values of our country anymore, and considering the primary reason the Conservatives were holding power for so long was because they are seen as the most economically responsible party tells you a lot of how sorry of a state our economy is in now, including the previously mentioned two recessions that happened under Harper's government. Now, I'm not going to hold the government entirely responsible for what happens in a global economy, but it does look pretty bad when your strongest selling point is suddenly having to explain why Alberta, formerly the economic "have" province that was driving the Canadian economy for years is suddenly bombing hard and unemployment is embarrassingly high.

So, with any luck, the Conservative party will reinvent itself and become a party that isn't afraid to put itself out there with a clear message of what it stands for that resonates with Canadians instead of the shadow dwelling gremlins they had turned into the past 4 years. Maybe not making shit up like claiming marijuana is "infinitely worse than tobacco" is a good place to start.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

I don't know. As much as this would be a wonderful thing. I can see it being easily abused, just like the welfare system already is. I could also see people trying to raise prices for housing, seeing as people have 'more money to afford it'. Maybe I've just had too many run in with people who abuse the system of getting help from the government, and watching people like my grandmother barely make ends meat (my mother ends up helping her out a lot).

A legitimate concern.

Though this is something where I feel other laws would need to go into place in regards to land pricing.

 

[Brovo]

I don't know. As much as this would be a wonderful thing. I can see it being easily abused, just like the welfare system already is. I could also see people trying to raise prices for housing, seeing as people have 'more money to afford it'. Maybe I've just had too many run in with people who abuse the system of getting help from the government, and watching people like my grandmother barely make ends meat (my mother ends up helping her out a lot).

Part of me would like to imagine that the people who control housing prices would...
A. Realize that skullfucking the entire market into the ground via raising housing prices would screw them in the long run too.
B. Actually compete with each other to try and offer housing as cheaply as possible.

But, well, probably not. These are private businesses we're talking about here: Most of them don't care about the plebs one bit. So, yeah, there should probably be some regulations in place to stop that, but, it probably won't be done. So. Who knows.

As a Canadian I wish I got paid to go to school. No. It's only the registered native students get paid as a bribe to get more of them to come to school.. When all they do is spend it on more weed and Alcohol....

Yeah... I'm not particularly a fan of this either.

I really, really, REALLY miss Stephen Harper.

I miss him like I miss poverty. And the suppression of scientists. And multiple broken promises about budgets. And...

Maybe all that shit is different in Canadia, but down here in the states.. Money for free is money for free. It doesn't matter how much, people will find a way to abuse it.

Welfare is supposed to be a bandage, a crutch, until you support yourself. Nah.

All I've found is a single study saying there was a mixed reaction to testing the idea of pay everyone for nothing.

Also, get 2-3 people on basic income and your quip is kinda useless. Get a family or group together and that house can have as much money as a working family easily.

That's the thing though. With this form of welfare, you're cutting on the need for other forms of it. At the very least, even if you don't see the point of having welfare, I'm sure you could at least appreciate the idea of taking several different departments and payout schemes which each target one minority or another minority, and just taking all of that, and putting it into one, more efficient funding scheme.

Getting 2-3 people on basic income in the same household would be dumb. Part of your tax return involves telling the government where you live, so they can know your property value and charge you property taxes accordingly. It's not hard, at all, for them to put limitations on how much you get per additional person in a household. Is the system perfect? No, but no system is. There will always be a loophole. At least with this one, you'd have one primary system of payouts that does not discriminate against you based on your gender or race, be you white or black, native or immigrant, man or woman. It's also more efficient.

So, getting that at least, is useful. Then if you need to tweak or alter welfare, it's "hit this particular program here" instead of "oh christ which one of these twenty fucking programs do we even try to tamper with now?"

It's very difficult to abuse Welfare and disability but like you said it can be done. Welfare it's actually allot of money to be honest, my parents are on it and they have to ask me and my brother for rent so we could put food on the table :/

At least here in Canada it is. In the US it admittedly depends. Food stamps are not all that hard to get. Then again, the welfare situation in the US is a complete clusterfucked nightmare of federal and state red tapes that are so loaded with caveats that it may as well be like navigating the tax code.

tbh a literal dog with a toupee would be a better choice than Stephen Harper

It would also be more adorable and more loyal to the country via not selling our oil assets to China.

Here people 'sell' their kids during tax times because you can only claim on I think 2 or 4, one of those. They let others sign them off as their own so they get an extra 3-5k then split it with the actual parent.

That's pretty fucked up, but then, I understand having a conservative mindset with the American government. It's such a bloated mess that any attempt to actually coral it into something manageable is impossible at its current, grotesque size.

Also, what did Harper do that was so bad? And not just 'hurr he wuz Hitler-lite'. Really, what was so bad that he left on, from what I can read just by googling his name, relatively pleasant terms?

My father is a conservative, so, I'll counterbalance it for you with some of the points he liked about Harper.

Good

• He lowered the GST. This is especially important for expensive purchases (ex: computers, televisions, cell phones, et cetera. Anything that chunks your wallet.)
• He introduced tax incentives for taking public transit.
• He agreed to actually overall Canada's military and update its military hardware to try and meet NATO treaty standards. (It's why we started buying planes from the US. Because ours were literally falling out of the fucking sky during training drills in Alberta.)
• He introduced small business tax breaks that, for the most part, did actually help small businesses. My father operates as a contractor with his own small business for this very reason.

Bad

• He muffled climate scientists, outright. As in, censored their research, and tried to shut down any lab that refused to capitulate on climate change points.
• He hurt Canadian civil rights, though more specifically rights to privacy. He also wanted to create a caveat to citizenship: That if you committed an indictable crime (major offense), that you could have your citizenship revoked, if you possessed citizenship with another country. To put this into perspective: This also included crimes for which no public jury is available (military tribunal), and even included people who had never visited or lived in the country in question (ex: child of immigrants). This even includes me, by technicality: My mother has an American citizenship, so I could be legally deported to America, even though I don't possess an American citizenship, because it's possible for me to acquire one anyway.
• He repeatedly broke promises about the federal budget, and ran repeated deficit years. He ran the country into not one, but two economic meltdowns. Something which the Liberals used as a major beating stick over his head. (Though the 2009 collapse was entirely unavoidable, and thus blaming Harper for it is really fucking stupid.)
• Where he could have created local Canadian jobs building military hardware, he constantly outsourced and purchased hardware from other countries. Up to and including the purchase of two Diesel submarines from the UK, which were originally made during the cold war. The cost to repair them to standards that would make them actually effective against other submarines would cost more than just building our own nuclear submarines.
• He broke the Kyoto Accord. Even if you're not a fan of it, casually breaking international treaties is not something you're supposed to fucking do.
• He was in favour of getting into TTIP, against the general will of the Canadian people, without having it reviewed by any judicial authority. Stipulations in the deal included allowing Canadian citizens to be sued and tried for things like copyright infringement by the standards of countries which said Canadians are not legally bound to in any way, shape, or form.
• He repeatedly ignored requests for help from the aboriginal community about the disappearances of dozens of men and women in BC, on a road now known as the Highway of Tears. It's a severe enough issue that it's an international civil rights issue outright. He's also ignored other aboriginal people's calls for help too, even at one point going to visit pandas from China over talking to the aboriginal people. Doesn't matter how you feel about the aboriginals: Nobody should be ignored like that by their government.

That's not to say that Justin Trudaeu is fantastically better. He's already broken promises about the federal budget in pretty major ways, and has come up with some of the most bafflingly stupid justifications I've ever heard for governmental change. "It's the current year people." Holy shit, really? Are you that stupid? "It's the current year" can be a justification for anything.

Still, we definitely needed to get rid of Harper. He was starting to let all that power go a little too far into his head. He even allowed his party to almost bring up gay marriage's legality again, and his entire party was slammed for it.

I'm still not entirely certain I like Justin Trudaeu, but Harper had to go. Censorship of science is something that should belong in the 1400's, not today. Not in a modern first world nation.

Perhaps I'm not the best to be speaking on a subject like this. After all, stateside I've been (slowly) missing Bush.

He was an idiot who started two wars that cost your country countless billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. The end result of which arguably created one of the most terrifying extremist forces the world has ever seen.

If I were you, I'd miss Reagan. Not Bush. Reagen was a great Conservative. Bush was a daddy's boy who had shoes thrown at his head.

Stephen Harper wanted a pipe line that would of poisoned my towns water supply regardless of what the scientists said so... I don't know but might not be good.

Who needs trees when you can poison the entire planet for green?

However, this is all from things I've experienced, seen, or heard. I haven't done any hard research, but if someone can prove me otherwise with proof that my views are wrong, they are very welcomed.

Macleans talks about it in detail. Then, there's The Toronto Star who did a piece on it back in 2009. 28 Million out of 2 billion. Or, a rate of about 0.014%. And that's assuming that all overpayment is due to people rigging the system, and not a simple government fuckup due to the 800+ rules that agents have to follow in distributing welfare. Rules which could be cut down if we reduced the prerequisite for receiving welfare to "you have a pulse and a citizenship."

FUCK YOU, CANADA!!

/me prepares immigration papers

HELP BUILD OUR WALL TO STOP TRUMP FROM COMING UP HERE AND YOU'RE WELCOME. ALSO BRING SOME GLITTER. WE CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH FOR GAY PRIDE PARADES!

A legitimate concern.

Though this is something where I feel other laws would need to go into place in regards to land pricing.

tl;dr: Don't let the free market decide the price of things which people cannot say no to, and suddenly, life might be a lot easier as a result. Free Market can do wonderful things, but only if people have the option to choose not to choose anything at all. Otherwise you're just practicing out a privatized tax, that goes to the people at the top, rather than a government who can redistribute that wealth back into the economy.

 

[Legens Legentis]

He was an idiot who started two wars that cost your country countless billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. The end result of which arguably created one of the most terrifying extremist forces the world has ever seen.
If I were you, I'd miss Reagan. Not Bush. Reagen was a great Conservative. Bush was a daddy's boy who had shoes thrown at his head.

Reagan was certainly a great president, no doubt. But there are some things I'm willing to defend Bush on, namely the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kicking the Taliban out of power was something that stands as a humane course of action. In Iraq, we had Saddam Hussein, a murderous dictator that, contrary to what many believed at the time, did possess WMD's. I can easily blame Obama for withdrawing out of the Middle East carelessly, when taking into account the rise of ISIS, as well as the complete cesspit that Libya has been reduced to nowadays.

 

[Brovo]

Fair enough mate, but probably better to start another thread with this in mind.

 

[Archwar]

Which is why I'm taking programming so when the time does come I'll be rolling in green.

 

[SacredWarrior]

Now I wish I lived in Canada :(

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Now I wish I lived in Canada :(

If it's consolation, as a Canadian I've been wishing I lived in Europe for the longest time now.

But if Trudeau keeps up his current record I might be changing my position on that.

 

[SacredWarrior]

If it's consolation, as a Canadian I've been wishing I lived in Europe for the longest time now.

But if Trudeau keeps up his current record I might be changing my position on that.

Poor baby :(

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Poor baby :(

To be fair, Canada isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination.

It's just that I've always found Europe generally had it together better.
Especially in regards to Education.

Hell, Education is actually the main reason for it. Whenever I get kids I want them to have the best opportunities possible.

But... Getting off topic. XD

The 900$ I wouldn't lie would be used on stuff like computer upgrades and accessories for the first while.
But that's still going back into the economy and getting it moving, so I guess that's still mission accomplished?

 

[SacredWarrior]

To be fair, Canada isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination.

It's just that I've always found Europe generally had it together better.
Especially in regards to Education.

Hell, Education is actually the main reason for it. Whenever I get kids I want them to have the best opportunities possible.

But... Getting off topic. XD

The 900$ I wouldn't lie would be used on stuff like computer upgrades and accessories for the first while.
But that's still going back into the economy and getting it moving, so I guess that's still mission accomplished?

Hell I don't know what I would do with that money XD

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Hell I don't know what I would do with that money XD

You don't got any hobbies to spend it on?

 

[SacredWarrior]

You don't got any hobbies to spend it on?

Gaming but that's it XD And I already have most of what I want in that area D:

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Gaming but that's it XD And I already have most of what I want in that area D:

You could always upgrade, get a better set-up.

Or just look into a new hobby.
Or save it, and the blow it on a huge vacation. :P

 

[SacredWarrior]

You could always upgrade, get a better set-up.

Or just look into a new hobby.
Or save it, and the blow it on a huge vacation. :P

I did upgrade and get a better set-up you dolt! DUH!

No new hobbies! NUUUUUUUUUU!
That requires traveling and I ain't doing that shit!

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

I'm moving this to another thread.