Why is it hard for low income families?

[Catz]

MBH...good post.

If I had extra money...
-offer to help pay for brown bag lunches for the schools that kids have no lunch? Or school fees for that matter.
-go and buy extra snow suites, mitts, socks for kids or homeless, again, maybe through the school system to find out who.
-call up a vet office and see who is making monthly payements on a pet, as maybe some really bad happend and they were cut short with the holidays?
-go to local WMCA and see if I could offer my services.

Not sure if those were the kinds or answers you were looking for.

I know I need to make changes to make things work, and am more than agreeable to do so.
I hope to plant a bigger garden next year to take care of some veggies.
I also want to get my kids to get a part time job and start helping out...one is old enough.

I will keep thinking.

[Catz]

Oh...e few years ago there was a big appartment fire...where as I had nothing new to buy them, I did go through and give dishes, sheets, towels, etc.
Maybe you can see if anyone needs help like that...people who have lost everything.

[grammafreddy]

My problem also, is finding people who need small things. I am stuck. I dont know where to start.

Bless yer little pea-pickin' heart. The world could use more people like you.

I suggest to start on your own street ... is there a senior who needs help with yard work or who needs a ride to do their banking, grocery shopping, get a haircut or just an outing once in a while? Do they need help paying for a medical service they need but can't afford? Perhaps somebody to come to trim their toenails for them - that is a big issue for some older folks.

You could also ask at the various seniors' centres if there is someone with a need you can help with financially or materially. Perhaps they need something fixed in their house - a broken drawer, a furnace made more efficient, a bill paid once in a while to give them a bit of a cushion with other things.

Or just a bunch of flowers once in a blue moon for no good reason at all ... an immense lift to their spirits!

Adopt a senior one day or afternoon a week ... it feels so good to help them and they are very appreciative of any small bit they receive.

[Catz]

GF...life circles...kinda had to giggle...all my suggestions are kids and your's the seniors...Not hard to tell the age difference...LOL.
All good ideas.
There are a lot of them who have not enough money for basics.

[JLives]

I think one of the biggest helpers is teaching skills to help themselves. I grew up on boxed food and didn't know how to do anything myself when I went out on my own. Learning how to be self sufficient has taken a lot of effort and research and I'm still nowhere near where I'd like to be. Teach people how to sew, how to do basic mechanics, how to do home repairs, how to grow food, how to cook etc. Wherever you have the opportunity to pass on your skills, use it.

[kgcayenne]

Call up a daycare and ask if there is an outstanding balance owing by a family that is trying exceptionally hard and offer to cover some of that expense. Ask the daycare if there are any kids in their charge that outgrew a coat that the family can not afford to replace.

When I was a single mom, things were incredibly difficult for a while. Sometimes, all I needed was a listening ear over a cup of coffee to get some self-oppressive thoughts off my chest, or to brainstorm ‘where do I go from here’ strategies. Without opportunities like that, perhaps the strength to forge on may have been lost.

Jenny is right. Even though some people simply won’t be told what changes they need to make, some people will accept an eye-opener, and the latter are the ones to seek out. Making more money may not be possible, but finding the money already present just might be through learning self-sufficiency, albeit humbling. You have to go slow though; when they’re in the forest, they can’t see more than a couple trees at a time.

[MCB]

The problem that is killing the valley is the unrealistic wages vs the unrealistic land values for housing and living costs. I know that those that own rental property need to make ends meet to maintain the investment, but the costs locally are unrealistic when it comes to making an honest living when you factor in the local wages. In the long term, it only hurts the economy, but those that have investments here cannot take the loss and I have no problem with that, however I do thing that the land value locally is out to lunch. Supply and demand I guess.

Locally, we're moving into an upstairs of a house for 1200/month that is a 3 bedroom. When I was working up in PG, I was paying 670 INCLUDING power for a two bedroom basement suite.

[The Green Barbarian]

Locally, we're moving into an upstairs of a house for 1200/month that is a 3 bedroom. When I was working up in PG, I was paying 670 INCLUDING power for a two bedroom basement suite.

It's called supply and demand.

[steven lloyd]

Locally, we're moving into an upstairs of a house for 1200/month that is a 3 bedroom. When I was working up in PG, I was paying 670 INCLUDING power for a two bedroom basement suite.

You were getting ripped off in PG

[Woodenhead]

Locally, we're moving into an upstairs of a house for 1200/month that is a 3 bedroom. When I was working up in PG, I was paying 670 INCLUDING power for a two bedroom basement suite.

It's called supply and demand.

Which is a flawed system. It will eventually become antiquated; just not in our time.

[grammafreddy]

Locally, we're moving into an upstairs of a house for 1200/month that is a 3 bedroom. When I was working up in PG, I was paying 670 INCLUDING power for a two bedroom basement suite.

It's called supply and demand.

Which is a flawed system. It will eventually become antiquated; just not in our time.

The flaw in the system is government intervention - capping or regulating.

Prices will self-regulate as markets and demand fluctuates. If people stopped buying overpriced Kelowna homes, the price would come down. Rents are high because "flippers" bought in at the top of the market and they need to cover their mortgage payments. Because they rent for high prices, anyone with an older rental unit will go with what the market is asking for and what people are paying.

[Thinktank]

bump.

[NAB]

"The problem isn’t giving people money when they don’t work … it’s taking it away when they do"
Andrew Coyne | Nov 16, 2012 8:10 PM ET

""Andy Clark/REUTERSWe should focus less on reducing the number of rich people, Andrew Coyne says, and focus more on reducing the number of poor people..

For much of the past two years, much of the media has been obsessed with a tiny number of very rich people — “the 1%.” Rather less coverage has been devoted to the far greater numbers of the very poor: the bottom 10%. This suggests a certain loss of perspective. Surely if there is a problem that merits our concern, it is not that we have too many rich people, but too many poor.

On the other hand, everything’s relative. Maybe there is less talk about poverty nowadays because, in Canada at least, there is less of it about. And indeed that’s true: though it has gone all but unreported, the proportion of the population on low income has fallen sharply over the last decade. By the most common measure, Statistics Canada’s Low-Income Cutoff, it has fallen from 15.2% in 1996 to 9.0% in 2010 — the lowest level in nearly four decades.


Related
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.
Using a more recent yardstick, the “market basket” measure — roughly $30,000, depending on the city, for a family of four — it has fallen from 12% to 10%. (The same progress has not been observed relative to yet a third benchmark, one-half of the median income — not surprisingly, perhaps, as median incomes rose steadily over much of that period.) Had the trend been in the other direction, you may be sure we would have been talking about nothing but.

Still, it ought to trouble us that so many remain so poor, in a country as rich as ours — not least because we devote so large a share of our resources to income security: more than $160-billion annually, combining the various federal and provincial programs. Emphasis on the “various.” Indeed, there are libraries full of research to show that the sheer multiplicity of these programs — overlapping, confusing, and riddled with perverse incentives — is a big part of the problem. The safety net is for too many people a spider’s web, in which they can remain trapped for years.

Every so often this enduring problem produces a spasm of reform efforts, usually inconclusive. With federal and provincial finances in their current disarray, and given the premium, as the ranks of the retired swell, on freeing every available person-hour for work, perhaps it is time to try again. Some impetus was provided by the recent report of the Commission for the Review of Social Assistance in Ontario, the first the province has undertaken in more than 20 years. More radically, there is renewed interest in that hardy perennial, the guaranteed annual income, as championed by the indefatigable Senator Hugh Segal.

The basic idea behind the GAI is sound: to consolidate a number of federal and provincial programs, some in cash and some in kind, into a single, universal, unconditional cash benefit, delivered through the tax system. The base amount would be modest: perhaps $10,000-$12,000 per person. Critically, it would be taxed back only gradually, say at 25 cents on the dollar, as earned income rises. Compare that to current practice, where benefits are often withdrawn dollar-for-dollar, or in the case of benefits in kind like free dental care or prescription drugs, are denied altogether to those who leave social assistance: an effective marginal tax rate of 100% or more.

You can see why the people who design and administer these systems do this. They’re trying to save money; they want to target assistance only to those who “need” it; they worry what people would do if given the cash to buy what they want, rather than the services government thinks they should have. But the result of all this careful selection and monitoring is not just condescending and intrusive: it effectively punishes people for taking a job, or working longer hours. This is the key insight of the GAI: dependence is created not so much by giving people money when they don’t work — certainly not at $10,000 a year — as by taking it away from them when they do.

So if all of this makes sense, why hasn’t it been done? One barrier is cost. The more gradually you reduce the transfer as income rises, the more paltry the base amount must be to stay within a given limit; conversely, set a more generous minimum, and you have to impose a steeper clawback. Of course, the arithmetic becomes less stark if you include the revenues saved from the programs the GAI would replace. But here you run into other obstacles.

Most of these programs are provincial, and the provinces are notoriously unwilling to give up turf. Moreover, it’s not clear just how many you’d even want to scrap. Some GAI models envisage replacing not only welfare, but employment insurance, daycare and pensions. But these are very different programs, designed for different purposes: EI, for instance, is properly about income replacement, not income support. It’s probable some current social assistance programs are ineffective and unnecessary; it’s not obvious all of them are.

So any reform will probably be incremental and piecemeal, rather than the kind of revolution some proponents have in mind. The good news is: we’re already part way there. The Guaranteed Income Supplement for the elderly, the National Child Benefit for parents with children, and the Working Income Tax Benefit for the working poor are all very GAI-like, as is the GST credit available to those on low income generally. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of building on those foundations.""

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... n-they-do/

[The Rooster]

4.4. Million people in bc and over 12 million care cards issued . A Premier that spent a half million dollars in expenses , that alone is the whole budget for some small towns in BC .$10billion for a new Port Mann bridge in Vancouver that will be a charge bridge , while the old decrepit Patela bridge , that has been condemned since the 70's is not touched .

Force an HST on the province that will saves all and after it is rejected they tell us that it will cost $billions to get over it , so obviously it was just another way of stealing more oney from us , and they lied about it savingus money .