Shop at the Gap
I was out all evening at a meeting and just got home. Rather than let the day go by without a word or a thought, let me point you to a report released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, entitled, "The Rich and the Rest of Us". It basically looks at the growing wage gap in Canada and illustrates how we are making less money now than we did 30 years ago, yet the rich keep getting richer.
Average income is always a useless statistic that the government uses to convince us the economy is getting stronger all the time. We should really be measuring median income. There's close to a 30% difference between the two. Median Canadian income hovers somewhere around $20k/year. It's hard to believe that if you're standing on a street somewhere, odds are that either the person on your immediate left or the person to your right will be living off less than that.
Labels: demographics, economic collapse
2 Comments
The trend is very similar here in the US. Although making more money, the cost of necessities has gone up so astronomically that the average income does not cover the basics entirely, and most families have at least two jobs supporting them. So much for the Chlorox ads where Mom stays home with the kids.
11:49 PM
I sure saw a big difference just in the time I was away, from 2000-2004. A lot of things had the same ticket price, but they were swarming with service charges.
Most places seem to have wage freezes too, so with power rates going up every year, property assessments going up, rent going up... the hole keeps getting deeper and deeper.
11:19 PM
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