I'm Tired Of Student Hissy-Fits Over Tuition And The Greed Behind Them!

In the United States, the average cost of college tuition ranges from $20,000 to $50,000/yr. In Canada, where post-secondary education is significantly supported by provincial governments, tuition costs range from a high of $6,600/year in Ontario to a low of $2,500/yr in Quebec. Guess which province has students in the streets protesting a $325/year increase in tuition?

More than 600 students protested in Gatineau today and thousands have been protesting in Montreal and Quebec City. They are protesting the proposed increase of $325 / year to their tuition which is the lowest university tuition in North America.


Here's a couple of basic facts.

Post-secondary education in Canada is subsidized by taxpayers who pick up the tab for about 75% of the annual cost. Clearly this isn’t good enough for many students in Quebec who seem to feel that they have only a limited, if any, responsibility to pay for their education.

Annual tuition for a basic BA at McGill University in Montreal and one of the country's leading institutions cost Quebec students $2,100 / year. By contrast, an international student who must pay the full tuition cost rather than the one subsidized for Canadian students by taxpayers is charged $14,000 / year for the same degree. In Ontario, at Queen's University, another of Canada's leading educational institutions, the cost to Canadian students is more than $5,000 / year.

At Queen's the annual tuition for a medical degree is approximately $19,000 but at McGill, Quebec students are only charged $3,000 annually and they feel hard done by.

It is not a uniquely Canadian attitude.

This is a belief shared by their colleagues in the Occupy movement who have announced that post-secondary education is a right, not a privilege and definitely not a responsibility for students.

I'm not surprised. Self-reliability is a concept that is as alien to Occupy as common sense.

The argument put forward by students in Quebec, and groups like Occupy, is that getting a university education benefits the state, therefore the state should pay most, if not all, of the freight for its cost.

There is a counter argument that the education has far more benefit to the individual than the state which would suggest that the individual has a greater responsibility than the state; but let’s not quibble over logic. Let’s assume that most of the precious dears who think the state owes them a free ride are correct.

If the benefit accrues to the state and the state should therefore pay for the education, it also hold true then that the state should have a say in what individual students are going to study. There isn’t much demand for graduates of a program like “Social Practices in Art” or “The History of Philosophy.” (One can almost predict that if graduates from these programs don't find positions as academics, they will be living a good portion of their adult lives on social assistance where they will no doubt expect even more support from the taxpayer.)

Canada, for example, needs more doctors, engineers programmers, technicians and people who are trained in business-related disciplines. We also need more trades people like bricklayers, carpenters and electricians. We don't need more art critics and dillitants. We have more than enough of those employed at taxpayer expense at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The  Canada Council For The Arts.

If the state is to pay for the education because the state is to be the ultimate beneficiary of that education then the state should identify which programs each individual student should take.

This, of course, won’t be popular with students or Occupy and it has been tried before in places like the Soviet Union where it was equally unpopular. It was clear that depending on the state for everything as has been seen in North Korea, The Soviet Union and other countries that paid for everything doesn’t work out too well. One by one, those countries sank into poverty, oppression and ultimately, many simply fell apart.

What makes a country successful is the willingness of individuals to take responsibility for their own lives while making a contribution to their country. In other words, they don’t depend on the state to be successful; the state depends on them to function successfully as individuals and being fully responsible for their own lives.

It is an oxymoron to suggest that one can be independent and self-reliant while expecting others to pick up the tab.

In the end the argument that the state should pay because the state benefits is specious. The beneficiary of the education is the student. The state has no guarantee that the student will graduate, will be successful if they do graduate or even that the graduated student will remain in the country where they will put their education to good use for the benefit of a grateful nation.

Education is a privilege and a responsibility. Nobody owes anyone a free ride and the self-serving arguments by ‘kids’ who for the most part are barely out of the cocoon of having mommy and daddy pay for their lives up to this point is absurd.

The state is not an independent entity in and of itself. It is people and most of those people are taxpayers who don’t owe anyone a free or almost free education. We’ve already footed the bill for all of the education every student has received up to the end of secondary school. Now it’s their turn to contribute and merely showing up for class and graduating isn’t enough of a contribution!

Taxpayers have other things to pay for like social programs for the poor and disadvantaged, health care, highways and roads, environmental and consumer protection, justice and defense. Post-secondary education is primarily the responsibility of the student and no one else. It’s time for those who feel they have been oppressed by having to take responsibility for their own lives, to get over this self-absorbed, everything for free, Utopian self-centred fantasy and embrace the realities of the real world.

Demands that the state owe them a cheap or even free university education is just one more example of an unwarranted sense of entitlement in a world that already has too much of it! It's nothing less than a hissy-fit by spoled, self-centred and selfish children pretending to be grown up. They need to get over themselves!

And one more thing.

Instead of blaming the state for the high cost of education, protesters who think the cost of college is too high should take a look at those six-figure salaried professors who stand in solidarity with them. They, along with those who work in administration at universities and colleges, are the primary reason that tuition costs keep increasing.

If they want to protest something, protest the greed of academics and administrators and leave the taxpayer alone.

I’m tired of the posturing by people who think that they have a right to be fully independent while others pick up the tab for their independence. That isn’t independence, that’s nothing but pure and simple greed. It is no different than the greed they criticize on wall street and in corporations.

Don’t want to pay for your education? No problem. Get a job and forget university.

McDonalds is hiring.

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© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Can The Government Do More? Yes - But Pray It Doesn't!

I am always confused by those who demand the government provide more services. We hear it all the time. There is a demand for more health care, more environmental protection policies and demands that the government impose stricter regulations on the banks and big corporations.

I’m not suggesting that some of those things aren’t important or even necessary; some probably are but expecting government to take care of it is like expecting ….well…there isn’t anything quite as stupid as expecting government to take care of things in an effective and efficient manner.

Honestly! When was the last time government did much of anything that could be considered truly efficient? They can’t even collect taxes, let alone spend the money they collect efficiently.

I know it’s not a popular topic. I hate taxes too but we all need to throw some cash into the pot to take care of a few common essentials like roads and highways, national defense, justice and so on. So, taxes in some form or another are a necessary evil and we elected government to take care of that for us.

It’s a simple concept really. All government is required to do is collect a specific percentage of our incomes and then use that money to provide the services to which we’ve agreed. Government, however, lives in an alternate universe and they have turned that simple concept into a bizarre, overly complex and expensive process that is both inequitable and expensive.

In the United States, for example, government spends approximately $1.5 trillion…..let me repeat that for you in case you missed it the first time….$1.5 trillion collecting taxes. In Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency has almost as many employees as the Canadian armed forces. How is that possible?

It happens because bureaucracies are the same the world over. In Canada, a gun registry was budgeted to cost $200 million. It ended up costing $2 billion making it the most expensive data base ever created. In Germany, the bureaucracy and politicians invested billions in solar and wind power but are now dismantling the entire program and purchasing much of their power from the Czech Republic at a fraction of the cost already incurred.

Billions, even trillions, of dollars are spent on bureaucratic processes and systems that do nothing other than to slow down economies, overly complicate the function of government and drive sane people into therapy.

The procurement process is just one more example. Governments spend billions on everything from office furniture to military equipment each and every year. Do they do it well I’ll let you judge. Personally I don’t believe that paying more than $100 apiece for hammers that a Defense Department audit revealed a few years back would support any claim to either efficiency or even common sense. You and I can pick one up at Home Depot for less than twenty bucks. Maybe we should be doing procurement for the government,

Despite the incredible amount of bureaucratic process that goes into government procurement, somehow we still end up seeing an incredible amount of over-spending for things that most of us could pick up at a box store for a fraction of the price.

Government is very good at imposing restrictions on itself to protect our interests; they just aren’t very good at operating within those restrictions as is now being discovered in the ongoing GSA scandal in the United States.  Wouldn’t we all like a job where our employer picks up the tab for a vacation in Las Vegas complete with hot tubs and free meals? I think it would actually be better if the government cut most of these departments and let us keep more of our income so that we could pay for our own trips rather than applying for a government job just get away now and then.

It isn’t just the incredible wastage of real cash that is bothersome though, it’s the way government works that squanders billions in daily nickel and dime activities.

I was recently told about a very senior bureaucrat who was to present an award at a ceremony. It wasn’t a big ceremony and there were no media or politicians present, nor was the public involved. It was an employee awards presentation and this particular bureaucrat was asked to make a five minute presentation speech to present one of the awards.

He earns in excess of a quarter of a million a year but was incapable of winging that speech nor was he capable of jotting a few notes down on a piece of paper as he was being driven across town to make the presentation. Apparently his personal staff wasn’t capable either. Instead, they requested that a particular department write the speech for him. 

This speech took the better part of an afternoon to craft and involved a deputy-minister, assistant deputy minister, a director general and no less than two directors. The five minute, “Congratulations, here’s your award’ speech was emailed back and forth between these executives for approximately four to five hours as they painstakingly poured over every syllable. The cost? I’m glad you asked. The deputy minister makes close to $250,000/yr, the adm makes somewhere in the area of $180,000, the director general $150,000 and the two directors each earn approximately $110,000. 

In other words, government required the services of a team of people with annual salaries totaling $800,000+ / year just to craft a brief presentation speech that you and I could have ad-libbed.

That’s how government approaches everything. If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, government will never be able to successfully connect those two points. Instead they will form committees to discuss alternate routes between the two points, conduct feasibility studies to examine which of the alternate routes is the most environmentally friendly or has the least potential for political repercussions, call for tenders which they will subsequently ignore and then scrap the entire project because all of this took so long, the original requirement is now redundant.

Canadians are issued a social insurance number and a shiny plastic card with that number on it. My card eventually fell apart and I needed a new one. I thought it would be a simple matter of showing up at Service Canada (a somewhat outstanding oxymoron), producing some ID and then filling out a form. I was wrong.

I needed my birth certificate but I no longer had my birth certificate because it was printed on flimsy paper and had become so worn out, it simply decayed. Government, for reasons known only to itself won’t permit you to plasticize your paper birth certificate. So, I dutifully drove to Toronto, prepared to produce all kinds of ID to get a new birth certificate. I didn’t need ID, I merely had to fill out the form, pay a fee and we were done. Three days later, my birth certificate arrived by mail.

Now understand what happened here. I was originally applying for a new SIN card, arguably the most important document a Canadian has. The federal government would not accept any government issued photo ID to verify who I was. I was required to produce my birth certificate (remember, I was already in their data base). I didn’t need photo ID to replace my birth certificate which means that the federal government relied on a document any idiot can obtain without any verification of who they are.

Only a bureaucracy could be that abjectly stupid.

There are many good and professional people who work for governments. They do the very best they can but they are constrained by a system and process so antiquated and byzantine that I’m surprised more of them haven’t attempted suicide out of frustration.

I’ve brought this up because so many continue to pressure, petition and lobby the government for more services. Why? Were they not here for the last billion dollar boondoggle? Are they masochists who enjoy seeing things done in the most ineffective manner possible or are they so naïve that they cling to faint hope like a fat kid clings to a chocolate bar. Government doesn’t make our lives easier or better. It interferes and undermines what otherwise would be a pretty good lifestyle. 

Do we never learn? Just how many $100 hammers can we afford?

Personally, I think the time has come to reduce government to as small a size as possible. They clearly have too much time on their hands and the world is full of real problems looking for real and expeditious solutions. We don’t have the time or the money anymore to wait for politicians and bureaucrats to figure out the worst way of accomplishing something,

We’re better off muddling along on our own for most things. For those who think government should handle everything remember this simple truism.  

The less government touches, the less they can screw up!

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© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

You're Awesome!

I’ve been told that I’m awesome more often since joining Twitter six months ago than throughout out all of prior life and almost exclusively by people who have never met me, don’t know me and who seem to think that because I can click the follow button I’m - well - simply amazing!

I don’t let it go to my head because I've also been called a 'capitalist lickspittle', a 'right-wing neo-fascist' and a 'left-wing socialist jerk-off'. I also have lots of people in my real life who know me quite well and who regularly assure me that I am merely just ok.

Then too, there is something about trusting the sincerity of an automated direct message telling you that you're awesome that tends to get in the way of believing it.

I’ve often commented on the extreme rhetoric used in social media and usually my comments focus on the accusatory and over-the-top attacks on someone else’s point of view or opinion. But not all of the extreme language in places like Twitter is reserved for attacking others. Sometimes it’s just so downright obsequious it’s embarrassing. 

The fact that someone chooses to follow someone on Twitter doesn’t make them awesome. It doesn’t even make them special. It might mean they’re curious, interested in the other person’s tweets or just simply hoping that the person they’re following will follow them back but it doesn’t raise them up to a level of awesome achievement.

In the real world, we tend to reserve that for people who discover cures for diseases like polio or who invent new technologies nobody ever thought of before. Steven Hawking is awesome, the last person who chose to follow you on Twitter isn’t.

I follow lots of people. Sometimes I follow them because they were recommended by Twitter, sometimes because they followed me and after checking their profile and reading some of their previous tweets, I thought they might be interesting enough to follow. Sometimes, I unfollow them later because it turns out we have nothing in common. Occasionally, Twitter randomly unfollows a few on its own.

And that, of course, is the other side of being awesome.

People are not merely offended that you unfollowed them; they are downright insulted and even hurt. They send messages demanding to know why you are no longer following them or tweet that you have unfollowed them to the Twitterverse as if anyone else actually cares. It’s as if you have committed a grave injustice to them and they feel the need to tell the world what a mean, selfish and uncaring person you are.

It makes me wonder what this whole follow thing really is about.

Clearly for many, it isn’t about connecting with people and exploring ideas or just chatting. It seems to be like acquiring points and the more you have, the more value you have as a person. Some seem to think that the number of followers they have is a measure of their popularity but that seems pretty shallow to me.

I follow a guy who has less than 50 followers and communicate regularly with him. Our connection started when he severely criticized one of my blog posts which prompted a back and forth argument for about a week. I learned some things in that debate that I didn’t know before and started following him on Twitter and he started following me. We communicate reasonably regularly now and have established a solid mutual respect for each other.

I contrast that with some who have a few thousand followers, who never interact with anyone or who waste my timeline with meaningless quotes by famous dead people. I haven’t got much time for that so I tend to unfollow those people (the tweep, not the famous dead person) after awhile. Likewise, I’m not overly interested in following those constantly trying to flog their latest book or sell iPhones so I tend to unfollow them as well. It’s not personal nor do I think those people are bad people; it’s just not where my interest lays.

But a lot of folks online take it very personally. 

They protect their follower’s list like a lioness protects her cubs and they can switch from thinking you’re awesome to telling the world you aren’t in a heartbeat. One Twit, (or is it Tweep?) that I followed based on Twittter's recommendation, tweeted me that he didn't permit fascists to follow him and immediately blocked me. It was if people he permitted to follow him should feel honoured. It really doesn't get much more adolescent than that.

But here’s the thing. I thought it was my follow list. I thought it was up to me to decide who I wanted to follow and when I make a decision to follow someone, it isn’t like I’m bestowing some great honour on anyone. Likewise, when I decide to stop following someone, I'm not intending it as a personal slight,

I’ve had a number of people actually tweet me to tell me they’re honoured that I am following them. Why? I’m just reading their tweets; I’m not leading them to the Promised Land.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed in all of this is that those who were most honoured that I followed them and who took the time to thank me and tell me that I’m awesome, almost never contact me again unless I unfollow them. Many of them were so honoured they used a bot to send me a direct message to tell me so. But they have no connection to me, make no attempt to get to know me and forget I even exist until another app they use tells them I am not following them anymore.

It’s like accumulating a lot of stuff over a period of time, never using most of it but becoming upset because you suddenly become aware of the fact that something you never used and forgot you had has gone missing. It’s a shock and your life is somehow diminished.

I have a message for people like that. Get a life!

It’s Twitter, not a new universe. People will follow you and unfollow you randomly and for countless reasons. It means nothing. It is not an honour to have someone follow you, it is merely an opportunity to potentially get to know someone online. It is not an insult when you are unfollowed, it simply means that the person with whom you had no contact has moved on. 

If a person’s life is so bereft of meaning that they measure it by who followed or unfollowed them on Twitter, I suggest they need to spend less time online and more time out in the real world building a real life. 

A person’s value as a person is not measured by how many people do or don’t follow them. It’s measured by things like character, talent, ability, intelligence and compassion for others. We are what we think and do in life. We are not defined by how many follow or stop following us online. A followers list is merely what its name implies, a list of people who are following their tweets. It is not a measure of a person's worth.

It’s nothing more and nothing less than that and treating it like it is somehow the measure of a life is like trying to evaluate a life based on how many ‘things’ you’ve acquired. At the end of the day, that’s how most people treat their followers. They’re just things that make the list bigger.

There is no humanity in that, just an insecure need to appear to be popular. It's an illusion of popularity brought about by the delusion that the number of followers one has is a reflection of how popular they must be. People offer to sell followers and others set up "follow back teams" in an attempt to gain more followers.

That isn't popularity. It's just one more illusion in the great cloud, a universe where virtual reality for too many has become more important than the reality we live out here in the big world.


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© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Noise!

There are days that I wish I had been born in a different era. Any era will do on those days because all I’m looking for is an escape from the noise. I get tired of the yelling and screaming online and in the media. I get tired of bureaucrats speaking in a language none of us understands and who work overtime trying to socially engineer our societies with politically correct doublespeak and regulation upon regulation for even the most mundane things.

I get tired of politicians pretending to believe in something just so we will elect them and even more tired of the sanctimonious and divisive rhetoric that spins out of that from their supporters. Much of that noise comes from folks who have bought into the fantasies spun by them and that’s all it is much of it is now…..noise.

 We have successfully turned our freedom of expression into a form of ideological slavery.

Oh, I know. We’ve had some form of government since the dawn of time and I’m sure the folks living in caves divided up into left and right political ideologies. “Kill the T-Rex  - “No. It’s an endangered species and we need to protect it.” And I’m equally certain they had some kind of primitive bureaucracy to support the tribal council, some faceless group to ensure that all spears and clubs were properly registered and that the tribal elders got their share of every root foraged or mystery beast killed for dinner.

What they didn’t have was the constant yelling and screaming that passes for informed discussion and debate these days. My God but it gets tiresome after awhile. The entire free world is capable of taking one fact, it doesn’t matter what it is, and exploding it into days and weeks of arguing, accusations, conspiracy theories and, of course, countless accusations about the perfidity of the opposition.

And here’s the really stupid thing. Most of the time, whatever that issue was gets forgotten almost as quickly as it emerged once a new one shows up. Remember NDAAP or SOPA or RoboCall?

Often the accusations have virtually nothing to do with the original issue and you’d have to invest a considerable amount of time and energy trying to find some facts to debate. Instead it’s all personal attacks. There is no sense of proportion anymore and everything is a threat to someone.

Here is something I have learned that may help you wade through some of the overwhelming noise. The more personal the attack, the more threatened the attacker feels because they really don’t have much upon which to base their opinion. 

I’ve reached a point where I have simply accepted that there is no point in discussing anything with people like this. They don’t listen to anyone but themselves or those who agree with them and there is nothing to be learned from them. 

Debate is an excellent way to learn. It offers the opportunity to challenge your own opinions by looking at, and discussing, facts from a different perspective. You can’t have that debate with people who start from a position that has no factual basis or who think that debate means clobbering their opponent over the head with ill-informed opinion and personal attacks.

To me, it is no different than racism and religious intolerance. It is opinion and belief based on emotions rather than factual information. Like being anti-gay, it’s just another form of intolerant prejudice.

Often, with these people, the language is so over the top, it becomes impossible to consider it let alone take it seriously. Too often they use an issue as an opportunity to open up a debate on something else and pick over old scars.

Some state governments have recently passed or are attempting pass legislation to change abortion laws. That is an issue worth debating. There are real consequences to those decisions and we should be discussing them. Instead of debating the issues and the wisdom behind those decisions, the left has characterized it as a ‘War On Women’ and the language quickly moves from discussing a serious issue in a serious way to yelling and screaming that the Republicans hate women.

How absurd is that?

Within days, Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist, utters a poorly phrased but otherwise harmless comment about Mitt Romney’s wife never having worked a day in her life and the right fires up its troops and declares that it is the left that is actually at war with women. The rhetoric escalates and the stupidity is that both sides have successful and intelligent women. Getting around that to prove one side or the other hates women requires a certain amount of verbal tap dancing. Day after day, pundits, politicians, bloggers, mainstream media scavengers fuel the war until the rhetoric is so loud, you can’t hear yourself think and certainly not about the original issue.

Remember that issue? It was abortion but nobody is talking about abortion are they? Instead, they are yelling, screaming, sneering, accusing and labeling the other side and the original issue, which should always be treated with consideration by both sides, is long forgotten.

And we wonder why we never seem to move forward.

The simple fact is that issues like abortion are contentious and difficult for both sides of the debate and both sides of the debate have valid concerns. The only way these issues can be resolved is by consensus and there can be no consensus when people are using words like weapons designed to hurt and intimidate each other.

I watch this constant flow of anger and derision and often find myself wondering if most of the people involved ever stop to think that it is their fellow citizens and not some foreign enemy they are attacking.

They are people just like you and I. They have families, jobs, believe in democracy and many, bless their hearts, have even been known to laugh out loud now and then. How does having an opinion that doesn’t agree with our own suddenly make them, not only the enemy, but less than human? Have we really lost that much of a sense of civilized behaviour and respect for the opinions of others?

I think we have and I think it is born in fear and insecurity which we hide behind intolerant and accusatory rhetoric.

We’re like frightened animals trapped in a corner that lash out and snap at anyone who gets close when they feel threatened. In this case, it is our opinions that are threatened and we are afraid because too many of us lack the confidence in those opinions to debate them without anger. We all have opinions and in North America we are free to voiced them but instead of voicing our opinion with confidence, we attack and denigrate the opinions of others. It shows not only a lack of the same respect for others that we expect and demand for ourselves but a lack of confidence in the opinions we’ve formed.

I think we need to reacquaint ourselves with some of the fundamentals of democracy and one of them is that just as we expect our opinions to be respected even when others disagree with us, so too should we be respecting those with whom we disagree. When the time comes, we vote and the majority decision dictates the decision. Yelling and screaming doesn't change that and accomplishes nothing except more anger, yelling and division.

I grant you some opinions are so stupid they aren’t worth much consideration but that doesn’t mean we have to go out of our way to treat the people who hold those opinions as an enemy of the state.  We don’t gain anything by that other than to create a climate of hostility and intolerance where people talk at others rather than to others. It breeds mistrust, anger and polarization….

….and that, my friends, has been the undoing of more than one civilization in the past.

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© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Up To Our Necks In Dinosaur Poop!

"Doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different result each time is the surest way to guarantee that sooner or later a dinosaur is going to bite your ass."  

- Gorak Einstein, one of Albert's ancient ancestors

One of the few things I like about having a problem is that it does provide an opportunity to rise to the challenge. At first, that may sound a little perverse to some but it really isn’t. How many of us don’t feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment for having met and overcome a challenge that was otherwise a problem we first thought insurmountable?

Sometimes we don’t succeed and I personally am less fond of those problems.

Nonetheless, problems exist and we have only three real options for dealing with them: do nothing, meet them head on or……………pretend to meet them head on by fixing something related that isn’t actually part of the problem.

We see a lot of that third option these days.

Some problems are like T-Rex, big and scary

Back in the days when the problem might have been that a Tyrannosaurus Rex had moved into the cave’s neighbourhood and was eating the livestock along with a few of your neighbours, you really only had a couple of options.

You could move the tribe to another area and hope the big guy didn’t follow you or you could gird up your loins, get the lads together and go out and kill Big Rex. Killing a couple of smaller dinosaurs or imposing new rules on the other folks in the cave really wouldn’t do much to keep the T-Rex from treating your clan like an all you could eat buffet.

Unfortunately, that fuzzy thinking is too often the thinking that goes into problem resolution these days.

You see it all the time and it doesn’t matter how often those quasi-solutions fail, people are right back in there pitching them again even though they accomplished nothing the first, second or third time around.

Examples? Oh great. Now you want examples but fortunately I anticipated that and I happen to have a couple handy.

Former Canadian  Prime Minister
Paul Martin

In Canada, our government is in the process of dismantling the Longun Registry which was a database of every legally owned rifle and shotgun in the country. It was established under the Paul Martin Liberal government a few years back in response to a shooting. Many think it was the response to a terrible shooting rampage at a college in Montreal but it wasn’t.

That tragic moment came and went with no government action. It was actually in response to the shooting of a young woman in Toronto who got caught in the crossfire between rival street gangs, none of whom were using either a rifle or a shotgun.

While progressives, who like to believe that serious crime is decreasing, are very upset with the current government for its omnibus crime bill which cracks down hard on convicted criminals, it was many of those same progressives who demanded action against firearms because they believed crime was on the increase.

Don’t try to figure that out, just pretend the logic makes sense to you and let’s move on.

The simple truth is that while they correctly identified that gun crime was on the increase, they incorrectly determined it was legal firearms and not illegal weapons that were at the heart of the problem. They demanded and got, not a crackdown on illegal gun crime but rather another layer of bureaucracy against legally owned and used hunting rifles and shotguns. 

Criminals were trembling more from laughter than anything else. 

The registry was supposed to cost $200 million, it ended up costing more than $2 billion and did not actually address the real problem. What was the real problem you ask? Too many illegal weapons were being smuggled into the country across a significant number of Canadian border crossings that were unstaffed between midnight and 6:00 am. 

Instead of spending a few million to close those holes in the country’s border security, the solution to the problem was to spend a couple of billion to clamp down on legal firearms.

Those who supported the gun  registry believe that it controlled the acquisition of firearms and thereby reduced gun crime. They are wrong. The registry was a database, not a licensing mechanism. There already existed an acquisition process before the gun registry was enacted and some firearms like automatic weapons and handguns were already restricted.

Believing that the gun registry prevented gun crime is like believing that registering and plating your car or truck reduces  accidents.

I am not a proponent of having lots of guns around and in fact think there are too many but if you're going to fix that problem, having bureaucrats maintain a database isn't much of a solution nor is it gun control. It's the illusion of fixing a real and serious problem masquerading as problem resolution and we have too many illusions in our lives these days .

It is the same fuzzy thinking behind the tax the rich crowd. The problem is pretty clear. The tax system is unfair and places a higher and disproportionate burden on the  middle class and lower income wage earners than on the affluent and the stupidly rich.

I agree. I am about as middle class as you can get and would love to see a more equitable distribution of the tax burden.

The solution for many, however, is simply to tax the rich and life will be better for all of us. Terrorists will no longer hate the west, Anonymous will use its technological skills to fix all of our computers for free and integrity will magically appear in politics. Most significantly, our budget deficits will disappear and there will be free tuition and coffee for all.

The issue is that the tax system in most democracies is the real problem and dumping a surtax on the rich doesn’t even come close to fixing that. It just makes us feel better because we have someone to blame and take it out on. But here’s the thing, the rich are merely paying what the tax act tells them they must. Even President Obama, that great progressive and visionary, ended up paying a lower tax rate than his secretary who makes significantly less income. 

Then too, there are some among us who are not rich but who do OK and pay no tax at all. They would be groups like unions  whose income is tax exempt and who are leading the charge to tax the rich at a higher rate.

How about this instead? How about everyone pays the same tax rate with no deductions and the poor pay no tax at all? Wouldn’t that be more equitable, more efficient and less divisive? It certainly would provide government with more money, not that this would be a particularly good thing considering what they did with the last stack of cash we gave them. But still, it seems to me that the solution to a complex, unfair tax system does not lie in picking one group and trying to treat them differently but rather lies in simplifying the system and taxing everyone exactly the same percentage and closing all of those ridiculous, impossible to figure out loopholes.

Everyone, including corporations, unions, NGOs and non-profit organizations pays 10-12%, no exemptions, no deductions, no monkey business and with absolutely no exceptions, no loopholes and no deductions for special groups or organnizations.

Progressives don’t like that idea, of course, because it doesn’t fit the narrative that all of the world’s problems can be traced back to the rich who they consider to be capitalist parasites. Conservatives don’t like that solution because it doesn’t fit their narrative that all of the world’s problems can be traced back to progressives who they consider to be socialist parasites.

It's the same kind of thinking that leads some to promote safe-injection sites in a city's downtown core. The thinking is that by providing a safe place for addicts to use illegal drugs, diseases like HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis will be contained. They are wrong, In cities that have safe-injection sites, the incidents of these diseases has increased along with violent crime and addiction. Successful harm reduction won't be found in enabling bad or dangerous behaviour nor will it result from keeping addicts addicted.

It isn’t all the fault of liberal thinking, the right is in there working overtime to try and ensure that no problem ever gets a real solution either. There is a looming foreclosure crisis coming again in the United States and some pretty serious credit card debt issues in Canada. You don't hear the current conservative government offering up solutions to address that and you never hear any of the GOP candidates offering any concrete solutions to prevent people from being thrown out of their homes. On issues like these, the right is like a deer caught standing in the middle of the highway, mesmorized by  the headlights of an oncoming eighteen wheeler.

 Instead of working to find a real solution, they will do what they always do; blame the people who are in trouble or about to lose their homes.

But why not put together a program that allows banks to protect their mortgage loan by applying the arrears to the mortgage and then negotiate a rental agreement with the current owner. That agreement would allow the bank to protect its investment while allowing the home-owner to continue to live in the home rather than being evicted. It could even include a mechanism for the current owner to reclaim ownership of the home by repaying the mortgage arrears within a certain specified time frame.

Ah, but that’s too simple and we are a society that prefers our solutions to be even more complex and draconian than the original problem. We don’t kill our dinosaurs, we pretend that by renaming them to something more politically correct and less offensive they will go away. We delude ourselves into thinking that  by demonizing some within the village, the dinosaurs will only eat those we demonize and the rest of the clan will be safe.

Sadly, that doesn’t work and we’ve had ample examples of  that for a very long time.

We can continue to play the game of almost solutions that we have played for so long or we can stop letting special interest groups on the left, the right and in government offer up card tricks and slight of hand illusions to the very real problems we face in our societies instead of real solutions these issues actually demand.

President Barack Obama

Even as he took full advantage of paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, the President was calling on a surtax on the rich and if that isn’t one of the best bits of sleight of hand I’ve seen in a long time, I don’t know what is.

Politicians love pretend solutions. It gives them the appearance of doing something without actually having to do much that's effective at all, particularly if they get to blame someone else (in this case the wealthy) for the original problem rather than their own failed policies.

The simple fact is that we are facing real and serious challenges in our societies these days. Some of them are like huge dinosaurs with big gnarly teeth and a taste for their favourite prey....people. As a result, we are up to our necks in dinosaur poop.

If we don’t soon start doing something about them we’re going to get eaten alive - either by those dinosaurs or by those among us who keep coming up with the illusion of solutions to very real problems. 

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Those Who Don't Learn From History Are Doomed To |Repeat It

http://bearsrant.blogspot.ca/2012/02/those-who-dont-learn-from-history.html

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Taxed

Throughout recorded history, there have been taxes. Every empire, every nation has imposed taxation on its citizens and it is recognized that the operation of government requires taxation to provide the funds necessary to ensure that operation is as inefficient as possible.

Even Christ recognized the need for taxes and said, “Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s”.

Of course, he was much more forgiving than most of us. Today, what Caesar took in the way of taxes to fund his wars and the expansion of the Roman Empire looks pretty good compared to what most of us get taxed.

It has gone beyond any rational understanding of the citizens of a nation contributing a portion of their income to maintain common services and infrastructure. It has become an unbelievable and out of control orgy of spending by governments and politicians who have forgotten that it is our money.

Everything is taxed now.

There are taxes on personal and corporate income, investments and other capital gains. There are sales taxes, consumption taxes, value added taxes and gasoline taxes. There are taxes to dispose of old tires, old computers and other electronics. We pay school taxes and property taxes. There are taxes disguised as user-fees for certain roads, bridges and the use of the sports and other facilities our other taxes paid to build and operate.  

The government requires the filling out of various forms for things like passports, birth and death certificates and then charges a fee for those same forms which is just another form of taxation. 

In Canada, there are additional surtaxes on everything from Health to Unemployment insurance and income over a certain level. The list is endless and the prevailing political and bureaucratic wisdom seems to be that if exists, tax the crap out of it.

There are even death taxes which I personally consider to be not only rude but just plain embarrassing. How little dignity does a government have to have that it scrambles to tax the pennies on your eyes?

I’ve been thinking about this because it is that time of year again, that time that we all dutifully sit down or have someone else we’ve hired sit down, and try to figure out how to screw the government out of taxes.

Personally, I don’t mind paying taxes. I believe that there are certain things that we need government to manage on our behalf like education, our military, health care,  communications and transportation infrastructure and a host of other services that are necessary for a modern, civilized society. 

But it has gone far beyond that now and I do resent that.

It has become so bad that instead of blaming politicians for this tax mess, we blame each other. “Tax the rich and all of our problems will be solved.” What a crock that is but it plays nicely into the hands of politicians who have no excuse for the staggering debt and oppressive taxes their outright mismanagement has created. As long as we are blaming each other, we aren't blaming them and that suits politicians just fine.

The rich aren’t responsible for the national debt nor are they responsible for the lack of money available from taxes to properly fund necessary services or attack things like poverty. Politicians are responsible!

And here’s another thing that just annoys the you know what out of me. Most of the organizations leading the charge on getting the rich to pay more in tax are themselves – tax exempt. In Canada, for example, Unions pay no tax on the money they receive in union dues nor do they pay any taxes on the money they make on the income they earn when they invest those dues. “Excuse me? You pay no taxes but are demanding others pay more?”

Non-profit charities are tax exempt and before you start ragging on me about picking on charities, let me remind you that the donations they receive are also tax exempt which means the tax payer gets to make that donation on behalf of whoever wrote the original cheque.

All kinds of groups from environmental foundations to academic institutions benefit from tax breaks the average tax payer could only dream of and when people talk about taxes, who ends up paying, Well…if you guessed it was the average tax payer, give yourself a gold star. We pay while they bellyache about how much more everyone else should pay.

It’s always somebody else (usually us) that should pay, never their cause or organization

Well, that’s just a field full of cow manure waiting to dry out in the summer sun. The simple fact is that we should all pay our fair share but the operative word there is ‘fair’.

The way taxes are assessed, collected and managed in most democracies is the antithesis of fairness. It is a system that is irrational, overly complex and oppressive on too many. In Canada, less than 60% of Canadians are paying 100% of the income taxes.

It’s unnecessarily complicated and that only adds to the inequity.

People have talked about a flat tax for years but it always gets diseased as too simplistic. Bollocks! (Good expression that, thanks to one of my British followers for sending it along,) 

Whatever the issues around the implementation of a flat tax it is infinitely preferable to the 'fat tax' system we currently have in our democracies. I believe that politicians oppose it because it puts a cap on what they can spend while the accounting industry is opposed because it will pretty much make them irrelevant at tax time.

If every working person, profitable corporation, NGO, charity, activist group and anyone or anything else that has income was taxed at the same basic percentage with no, and I mean no, deductions – government would have more money than even politicians would know what to do with and we would all pay less of our income in taxes. We wouldn't need all those other taxes and fees to pay for this mismanagement of government,

Here’s a simple reality that politicians and those who scream tax the rich have never quite grasped. Wal-Mart didn’t get to be what it is by charging excessive prices for what it sells, it makes huge profits by trying to charge as little as possible but get as many as possible to purchase from them.

Apply that thinking to taxation. If we lowered taxes but made everyone pay the same percentage, there would be more willing compliance, less opportunity to lower the assessed tax rate to the absurd levels some billionaires now pay and the national debt of most countries could be retired in less than twenty years.

Even better, the government would have a specific amount of tax income that couldn't be adjusted, increased or amended. They get x per cent of our total income and that folks is it! Of course, it would require political leaders with some integrity and we may be a while waiting for that to happen.  But if they ever did show up, one of the first things required would be to rewrite the law banning all taxes except income tax. It's just too easy for government now. When they screw up, the simply raise taxes or create new ones. Some governments aren't even aware of how much their citizens are taxed. It is a blind, mindless addiction by self-serving special interest both within government and those who feed at the table.

I know, I know….you're still hung up on the idea that you can’t tax charities because they need that tax deduction to raise funds. Why?

Why is it the taxpayer’s responsibility to help charities raise money by kicking in a percentage of the donation in the form of a tax deduction to someone else? Why should tax payers be hoofing the bill for those expensive fund raising dinners so many attend and then write off the cost as a donation on their taxes. If a charity can’t raise money because people want to voluntarily donate, that shouldn’t suddenly make taxpayers responsible. It’s that kind of fuzzy thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

Taxpayers are not a money tree nor are we the geese that have golden eggs popping out of our asses every April for the enjoyment of government and all of those other special folks who currently live off our largesse. We are people who work hard to earn a living to provide for our families and to build successful lives.

Political parties benefit even more with higher tax deductions for donations than even charities receive. Why? If the only way you can raise enough money for television commercials to lie to the electorate is by getting the taxpayer to fund the donations of others, we have more than just a problem here.

It was only three hundred years ago that a couple of kings got a little carried away with taxation. In France, the king lost his head over it….literally….once the taxpayers had decided they had pretty much had enough. While the British monarch lost a nation. It’s time politicians, and the rest who benefit from what they have convinced government to take from us, got this simple message.

Christian or not, we’re willing to take Christ’s suggestion and pay our fair share but we are neither as forgiving nor as patient as he was. We aren’t so civilized and meek these days that we can’t start throwing tea into the Boston Harbour again and I’m pretty sure someone can dig out how those old plans on how to build a guillotine.

History has taught us that when taxes become unfair and spiral out of control, something is going to get cut and quite honestly, wouldn't it be easier, not to mention safer, to clean up the current tax system than to lose your head over the status quo? Just ask Louis XVII. I'm sure he'll give you his best 20/20 hindsight advice on the issue.

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We Are Canadian, eh? - We are coming. Expect Us!

Empires rise and fall, colonies break away to form independent nations and new empires and superpowers are born. Britain, Russia, Austria, Rome and many others including our friends to the south in the United States have had their turn as the world’s leading empire or superpower. Now, it is Canada’s turn.

We have been the world’s nice guys for too long and have stood by quietly while others hogged the spotlight. We have remained silent as other countries stole our most talented and left us with Don Cherry and Ben Mulroney. We watched as our natural resources were plundered by everyone except President Obama who was polite enough not to commit to taking our oil from the oil sands so that we could sell it to China.

Canadian Rapid Transit

We have listened to countless  tiresome jokes about living in igloos (ok, some of us do), being a nation of lumberjacks (ok, we have bunch) and have only two seasons, winter and July (how silly - in some parts of the country we have spring and September too.)

We remained stoic while others mistook us for Americans or Brits or illiterate French who couldn't speak either of our official languages properly. They're our languages, we'll speak 'em the way we want to eh!.

We were  brave in the face of the humiliation of having to accept that our football was like our dollar, not quite on par. It has only three downs instead of four like the NFL

We suffered through watching our currency never quite achieve parity with the U.S. dollar until recently, as if it wasn’t good enough for the rest of the world no matter how colourful and attractive we made it.

And we are tired of the Americans blaming every Arctic cold front on us as if we did it on purpose. Get over it. We come to Florida every winter and spend a lot of money at Target to help keep your economy going.

We're fed up with people from other countries asking us if we know some friend of theirs on the other side of the country. Canada is big, I mean really really big. You could put all of Great Britain in Lake Superior. So no, we don't know everyone living here and definitely not your pal.

We're definitely tired of being treated like we're the world's worst polluter. Eight of the top ten cities in the world with the cleanest air are Canadian, except for the smell of poutine, of course.

We're annoyed that the U.S., Denmark and Russia now think they have a claim to the Arctic because they want our oil but don't want to pay for it. It's ours as any Atlas will show you. Even schoolchildren know that if it's pink on a map of North America - it's Canadian!

Our American friends should remember that the last time we went to war with each other was in 1812. We won and we still have the muskets and other equipment from that war should we need to defend our Arctic sovereignty.

We're tired of being ignored and treated like we don't know how to be cool. The rest of the world needs to get it through their heads once and for all. Canadians are cool.....not just cold!

Yes, we are Canadians and we know the meaning of having suffered but we won't be bullied or taken for granted any more. We have been the world's whipping boy (and/or girl) for too long. Enough we say!. We are Canadians and we are the next superpower. CNN has decreed it!

The nutritional BeaverTail

Within a decade, the better part of the world will be eating BeaverTails, poutine and wearing toques. Countries that try to resist us will be forced to watch endless reruns of  Hinterland Who's Who and the CBC’s The Nature of Things while we watch American Idol and Dancing With The Stars.

Because we’re Canadian, we will not expand by military force which is a good thing. The second-hand submarines we bought from Britain won’t be fully functional for another year or two and there is some debate now as to whether or not we will proceed to purchase those new fighter jets. Besides, we're only violent when our hockey team loses in the playoffs and then we tend to only burn our own cities.

Now this is Canadian hockey....
or should be

Instead we will expand country by country lulling each into a false sense of security by encouraging them to adopt our colourful money as their official currency. We will teach them how to play hockey the real way….the Canadian way and then beat them into submission on the ice.

Nobody plays hockey like we do and especially not the Toronto Maple Leafs!

We will continue planting infiltrators like Justin Beiber, William Shatner, and Jim Carey who will slowly undermine the entertainment industries of our targets giving us control, as well as, the opportunity to attend the Academy and Grammy Awards where we'll get to meet and get autographs from a lot of really great stars like Madonna and Lady Gaga.

We will pretend to be polite because we know no one is suspicious of the motives of those who are courteous. But make no mistake. We are Canadian and we are coming. Being polite is more than just our nature, it is our strategy for world domination.

There is never a danger of a

personality cult in Canada.

Our Prime Minister doesn't have

a personality

We are the only country in the world being led by an accountant who has the sense of humour of a tax auditor and the ethics of a used car salesman. It gives us an advantage over those nations led by leaders with a personality.

We are Canadian. We are the metric equivalent of Legion. We're tired of forgiving. We try not to forget. Expect us, eh!

Canada's time is now!. We are determined and we are ready. We can be provocative....well, almost but we will conquer nonetheless and we will rule…..if that’s ok with everyone else.

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© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others