I’ve worked hard my whole life and I can’t afford food
macleans.ca
macleans.ca
This is $4,632 a month. Something needs to change if that’s not enough to buy food. Perhaps spending less on candles.
Edit: Apparently the numbers are doubled up so we’re at 2,932
Still, she has a really low rent by Toronto standards of $1,100, leaving $1,800 for all other expenses, which given her medical conditions and the fact that provincial governments are cutting, I can see a lot of that getting eaten up pretty quick.
My wife and I do shopping for a full week at Farm Boy (not the cheapest) and this runs to about $300 for a week of food. Does not include other things such as detergent, toilet paper, etc..
$1800 for everything shouldn't be starving
Building insurance is many magnitudes worse. I personally know small biz owners that are teetering on shuttering after the legislatures latest insurance fixes.
But it's much harder to compare all the other expenses involved with month-to-month living (utilities, car insurance, car maintenance, etc).
Less $1100 of current rent, that’s $1832 per month to cover all other costs for two people. Few would elect to be traveling 6 days a week obtaining food assistance if there were easy expenditures to cut.
I was working in a well paid IT job almost living from pay check to pay check. Now I work remote for a lower pay and most of it just goes in my retirement savings.
Not sure what my point is but there are alternatives...
Today it's common to compete with dozens->hundreds of applicants for a rental. We just did a similar move to that $4k of yesteryear (same region, modest house, local move) and it was about $16k.
We are following the same path as the UK now in that the conservative parties are moving rightward and gaining ground on populist notions of “this isn’t the Canada we grew up with” (because of immigration) which plays to certain folks who are upset that their quality of life has eroded due to the increase in housing costs. Now these groups have been whipped into such a fury they’ll vote against their own interests like electing politicians who commit to privatizing healthcare, one of the cornerstones of our identity.
Wild times.
I'd probably buy rice, beans, and frozen veg rather than salad, but if the majority of her expenditure is medical then I'm not sure it matters.
aslo I personally wouldn't describe old age security and Canadian pension as "assistance" as I imagine its more of an entitlement rather than an something needs based which I would consider more of assistance.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/publicpensions/cp...
After three decades of working closely with folks of every possible income bracket, I found maybe 1 in 15 had income so high that they could afford to save for retirement.
How can this be the case? What decisions are being made that 14 / 15 people across tax brackets can’t save?
Antidotally - just look around, people wearing $300 foam shower sandals, new trucks towing dirt bikes/jet skis, dinking $6 coffees, and the talking on their iPhones etc. these are not people worried about saving
That's a picture which doesn't well represent the folks I've known, associated with and worked with.
Out in the public tho, I can see where spendy folks would be the ones that register in our awareness.
But in the US we are indoctrinated to believe that conspicuous consumption is the best thing we can do for our country. Saving hurts our economy and spending drives it forward. Every mainstream economist talks about savings rates like they are a bad thing.
The system has been engineered to simultaneously require people to save a majority of each paycheck in order to live well after they are no longer useful as laborers, but also we are constantly told to spend spend spend.
I say this just because I don't think that it is productive to place the blame on individuals within the system instead of the system itself. I think your analysis is correct though.
I have a $150 phone and it's constantly slowing me down and wasting my time. When I switch apps 4GB RAM + 3GB swap is not enough to keep the other apps open, so I lose what I was writing on Reddit if I quickly respond to a text message
It doesn't have a lot of extra features like a good touchscreen (have to frequently select the correct candidate word), good GPS, NFC, OLED screen (actually I don't miss this as much as I thought)
I will buy a more expensive phone next time, maybe a discounted previous flagship
As for usability, iPhones are too limited for my use. I use apps that need root and others are sideloaded. I typically load alternate firmware (Not the current one tho. That was a mistake, I think). Many $200 android device are fast and capable but zero iPhones are.
Do iPhones come with preloaded carrier crapware like Androids do? I hope not and for that I'd give iPhones a plug.
Jobs with degrees pay just a bit more than a family's responsible spending on expenses. We had news stories for ages about people in degree-req positions on food stamps/SNAP. The state resolved that by opting out of food assistance programs.
This isn't the correct grouping. It was that 1 in 15 were in one of the tax brackets, where savings was possible with disciplined spending.
Hell, even if someone doesn't spend their whole life working we should still afford them that comfort. But to spend your whole life working and consuming and helping push forward the engine of the economy to only be left out in the cold is a real gut punch.
For housing in a city, it makes sense to me to always increase supply such that every place in the USA costs the same. This allows people to move freely, it allows people to congregate with other smart people and have "intellectual density", it allows wealthy investors to live next to struggling bohemian artists, and allows the average Joe to experience all of this just by virtue of existing in that place. I understand there are constraints on land but it's bizarre to me that people have accepted the idea that these places are just naturally "HCOL" locations and not that they have been homogenized and sanitized into this type of place.
> They chose to live in a high cost of living area.
Millions of people are born in HCOL areas and make their lives there. We shouldn't ask them to leave.
> Millions of people are born in HCOL areas and make their lives there. We shouldn't ask them to leave.
then they should make more money
> then they should make more money
Like this, this is such an incredibly simplistic response that it feels more naive even than a statement like "everyone should be able to live in a big city". If everyone simultaneously makes more money it just changes who is priced out. The current game is zero-sum, I am saying it should not be.
I hope that I have enough to get my kids through school and provide a comfortable retirement for my wife and me.
> Making minimum wage at 55
30+ years seems like enough time to pick up some skills to earn above minimum wage
> Not saving anything your entire life
This one is debatable, but at some point you have to learn enough life lessons to understand that retirement is going to _suck_ if you don't save anything. Most people manage to learn this before ~40 y.o
> I’m only 69, mobile and otherwise healthy. But what will happen as I get older and need care?
Same thing that happens to all of us. We get sicker and more frail and eventually die. Billions will die in less privileged conditions than receiving $2900/month and living in a country that has free healthcare.
I don't say this lightly, but my dad worked just as hard, probably several times harder and his living conditions aren't anywhere as good as these. It's just that the country he retired in is much more poor. But luckily I can help him, because I have no plans to make minimum wage at 55.
Where's his article?
I think the author should have tried to improve their situation a bit more given that they lived in a prosperous time and place. But regardless they worked every single day and contributed to society. Is that not enough to at least be ensured a comfortable death?
Therefore, realistically, everyone is entitled to a piece of wealth, whether you like this truth or not, given a significantly more intelligent way of seeing things, this would be the only conclusion that can be made.
But we've drawn borders and set up law enforcement to protect the ridiculous wealth inequality that seems like it will never end.
You can learn all of that and spend decades struggling to afford food. All it takes is not being lucky enough to avoid extremely common catastrophes.
This is the fallacy of assuming the person can predict the future. Do you know what happened to typesetters when desktop publishing came along? They were decimated. Some did as much as they could to adapt their skills to the new environment - e.g. learning to use computerized typesetting systems as far back as the 70s, teaching others how to make documents that didn't look like shit instead of typesetting those documents themselves - and still got hammered. The kicker is that those who had invested the most in learning this fairly technical skill were the most vulnerable. Throw in some other kind of savings-liquidating reversal, such as natural disaster or unreimbursed medical expenses (possibly caused by the chemicals used in the related printing industry) and it's easy for someone who tried really hard to make all the right decisions to end up poor (or dependent on their children) in their old age anyway.
We're seeing the pattern repeat with LLMs. A lot of people right here and now have been talking about how "AI" is going to make many jobs obsolete, throwing their practitioners' life plans into disarray. They're probably right, though I'm still skeptical that programming is one of those jobs. The point is that it's unreasonable and monumentally callous to say all of those people screwed up and should accept the consequences. A society where a decent late-life outcome is possible only if you make all the right decisions even in the face of uncertainty is still not as just as one where even mere humans who make a few mere-human mistakes can still expect something better than complete abandonment. I suggest you try reading John Rawls for a fuller exposition.
> I have no plans to make minimum wage at 55
Neither did the vast majority of people who actually end up doing so. You might or might not be smarter - or more "meritorious" in any other way - than most of them, but I guarantee you're less so than some. It could happen to you. It could even happen to me, though it's probably less likely since I'm already retired and comfortably so. Everyone thinks they're going to be the lucky ones (see also: neo-feudalists of both authoritarian and libertarian flavors thinking they'll be among those who thrive by creating a less equitable society) but that's just another delusion.
Thanks to decades of the boomer generation's "build nothing" housing policies, millions of young people can't afford to live near where they work. Yet that same generation feels entitled to take up space in one of the most in-demand cities on the planet for their retirement life of socialising and volunteering. They'll complain about being "forced" to move out of a home they've lived in for 10 or 20 years (and paid below-market rent the whole time!) when the rest of us are lucky to be able to hold onto a place for half of that. And their response to their unaffordable lifestyle catching up to them is to ask for more and bigger handouts, funded by those same working people who they're keeping out of the city.
I have a lot of sympathy for those priced out of the cities - that's exactly why I think there should be more homebuilding and better prioritisation of the limited supply, rather than those who were fortunate enough to be born earlier getting to hold onto subsidised housing units forever at everyone else's expense.
I bet there's a long line of people who'd love to live where they do, even paying more for it - and if those people would enjoy living there more, that's all the more reason they should have priority over these people.
> Canada is suffering from decades of housing policy failure.
Yep. And who voted for it?
Hard disagree on this part, it's a short-sighted take. Do you want to live in a city which might effectively kick you out when you're 70, cost of living has gone up and your income has gone down? What's the collateral damage done by this sort of policy? Loneliness in old age is already epidemic in advanced countries - I can't imagine a more effective way to make it worse than asking someone to uproot at that point.
We can disagree on the manner and degree of support or reform, the implementation etc. but my point is a city which doesn't try to address this is actually a pretty shitty city for everyone. It's a shitty place to put down roots. The fact that a small number of cities have so much economic gravity in the modern era is bad economic policy. It's antidemocratic and highly correlated with wealth inequality. These cities suck in thousands of people from other cities because they've got all the jobs, and then tell those people they can't live there anymore when their career is over. This is inhumane, it's a problem which will affect all of us as we age and it should be addressed.
What's the collateral damage done by not having it? When we rent-control that money is coming from somewhere.
> It's antidemocratic and highly correlated with wealth inequality.
It's particularly antidemocratic because so many of the people working there can't afford to live there.
Plenty of people already can't afford to live in Toronto, wouldn't be able to afford to eat if they moved there. But somehow those people don't get to make it someone else's problem.
Long term I think the solution is to figure out how to structure the national economy so it isn't dominated by just a few cities. This was not always the case and doesn't have to be a given. If the economy itself is less centralized and monopolized the cities will evolve as well.
Exactly. At the risk of being accelerationist, rent control is an anti-solution - it prevents the generation with the most political power from feeling the pain, and also removes some of the profit motive to actually fix the problem.
> Long term I think the solution is to figure out how to structure the national economy so it isn't dominated by just a few cities. This was not always the case and doesn't have to be a given. If the economy itself is less centralized and monopolized the cities will evolve as well.
The main way to avoid it being dominated by a few cities is to give them some competition, by allowing other cities to grow to compete. But unfortunately that hits the same problem of it being functionally illegal to build anything anywhere people want to live.