[homeles_ot-l] Fwd: [c2000-l] URGENT! ltrs to ed needed

[Terrie]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ROTHMAN, Laurel <LaurelRo at familyservicetoronto.org>
Date: 2009/11/26
Subject: [c2000-l] URGENT! ltrs to ed needed
To: c2000-l at list.web.ca






Please read this editorial and respond.  We will be asking for an Op Ed;
don’t know if we will be successful.  - Laurel



http://www.nationalpost.com/contact/letters.html?name=Letters&subject=Letter+to+the+editor

*Thursday, November 26, 2009*
*Money can't end poverty*

To really help the poor, abolish excessive taxes and regulations

*National Post  *

Twenty years ago, Canada's Parliamentarians passed an ambitious (and naive)
resolution calling for an end to child poverty by 2000, as if there were
some magic lantern that could be rubbed to make the problem disappear. Now
on the 20th anniversary of that resolution, the anti-child-poverty lobby
Campaign 2000 is complaining that very little has changed.

But what is most unchanged are the claims and remedies pushed by groups such
as Campaign 2000. They likely could have purchased a software program to
spit out their latest predictable, formulaic report card without having had
to go to the trouble of regurgitating the key findings themselves.

Let's see: Too little money is being spent. The minimum wage is too low. The
gap between rich and poor is too great. Canada lacks a national daycare
program, a national income support program for low-income families, and so
on. The stubbornness of child poverty is blamed, as always, on a lack of
political will and tax-dollar funding.

Convince politicians to tax away more of working Canadians' earnings and
give it to the poor and -- poof -- poverty would disappear.

Would it that it were that easy.

Child poverty, like all other forms of poverty, is not merely or even mostly
the result of a lack of money. It is just as often a result of single
parenthood, unemployment and addictions. So demands by anti-poverty
crusaders for ever more expensive social programs amount to barking up the
wrong tree.

Campaign 2000 complains, for instance, that poverty is still a blight,
particularly among aboriginals, immigrants and single mothers. But in the
past 20 years, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on income
support, skills training, education and special health care for identifiable
groups.

Take immigrant children, for instance. According to Campaign 2000,
"beginning in the 1990s, recent immigrants in contrast to earlier
immigrants" have faced "higher unemployment rates, lower earnings and more
challenges in securing employment." Such inadequacies do not normally stem
from insufficient government funding, though.

Prior to the late 1980s, most immigrants to Canada were economic immigrants.
They came here with employable skills, facility in one or both of our
official languages and some basic cultural preparation for life in an
industrialized democracy. Since the late 1980s, though, most of our
immigrants have been in the family reunification class. They may have no job
skills and speak neither French nor English. Where it once took new
Canadians about a decade to become contributing members of society,
increasingly it is taking newcomers two or three decades or more.

Is it any mystery, then, why more children of immigrants live in poverty?

Similarly with aboriginal Canadians. No group has received more government
funding per capita in the past 20 years. At present, Ottawa and the
provinces spend about $17,000 per aboriginal man, woman and child each year.
Yet aboriginals continue to have one of the highest poverty rates in the
country.

Surely their experience should teach us that throwing money at the problem
is never going to be the solution.

National daycare, a minimum wage of $11 an hour, more taxes on the alleged
"rich" and a national affordable housing strategy -- all demands made by
Campaign 2000 and the assortment of unions and left-wing lobby groups that
support it -- will do nothing to make a dent in child poverty.

In the past 20 years, the child-poverty rate has gone from 11.9% to 9.5%.
While Campaign 2000 scoffs at this improvement as trivial, it is actually
tremendous progress. So long as there is family breakup, unemployment,
school dropout and addictions, there is going to be poverty. In the face of
this, then, lowering the national child-poverty rate by a full two
percentage points is a fantastic achievement.

What's more, most of that improvement has been the result of expansion of
the private-sector economy. If Campaign 2000 really wanted to get at the
tragedy of children living poor, it would push for the abolition of those
taxes and regulations that stand in the way of private-sector economic
expansion.

People on the right who don't want to spend money on welfare are often
branded as stingy or uncaring or punitive, when in fact they merely
understand that sadly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, money can't combat
poverty. Failing to recognize this and to keep making the same demands for
more taxpayer dollars is uncaring and selfish in itself.








-- 
Terrie ( mocharebyl at gmail.com )
“If you see an injustice being committed, you aren't an observer, you are a
participant.” June Callwood
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and
renders the present inaccessible.  Maya Angelou
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