Given how many politicians have advanced law or business degrees, it's not crazy that they could earn more by turning to private industry.
Hell, one of the fastest ways to qualify for a six-figure job is to run for political office, fail, and use that experience to get a job with a lobbying or PR firm.
Exactly, articles like this are just confusing the meaning of class.
What makes you a member of "the working class" is that you are forced to sell your labour to survive. Fullstop. A tradesperson, and a lawyer, and a burgerflipper are all in the same class from that point of view.
As soon as your accumulated capital becomes large enough that you earn your income only as a result of your capital, then you are no longer working class, and that's when your interests diverge from the average worker and average homebuyer or renter.
A landlord with no other job, the major shareholders of a profitable business, a wealthy heir, those people make their money by siphoning value off of other people's work without actually needing to spend their time on work.
Long story short: I have no problem with a 50 year old plumber with a large family who legitimately uses that 4500 sqft house.
My issue is with Karen who used dad's money to buy 8 properties to airBnB them and insists she get special treatment because her business risks didn't pan out.
This is just the neoliberal way, we're decades deep into the idea that all solutions to any problem must involve directing public funds into private hands, usually those of the wealthy.
At this point, the concept of allowing public-sector employees to use publicly-owned equipment to take publicly-owned materials and provide necessary services for the public who vote for and fund the government is tantamount to heresy. In their minds, money should only go one way, from the government, to a select few private hands. We have at least three generations of bureaucrats and politicians whose minds are so warped by this practice that they cannot conceive of any way to help people or really implement any policy without giving some private business a chance to run a profit off of it.
Think about it, try to come up with anything government has directly built since 1990. Not talking about subcontracted, or with "funding provided as a private/public partnership", that the government has directly built and run. Used to be that the government would actually employ people to do things like GO Transit, or Ontario Place, or the LCBO, but that era is long, long passed.
Now do the reverse, think about all the things that used to be publicly owned but have now been given away to some billionaire. Air Canada, Petro Canada, Potash Corp, Highway 407, Telus, Hydro One. The list is huge, and a lot of these are very profitable. Imagine if we still owned them? Imagine what we could do re: climate change if we still owned Petro Canada and Hydro One? Or what our internet services might look like if we owned Telus? We gave away billions of dollars of value and significant strategic assets, mortgaging our future.
In addition to the direct costs of all the money that could have been put back into the budget (or the cost savings provided to the average taxpayer by not requiring that these companies take massive profit margins), we are also losing government capabilities: think about all the people, all the equipment, all the buildings and services that used to be directly delivered but now are parasitized by rent-seeking private companies looking to extract as much value as they can from us before we die. Think about old-age homes, hospital services, corporate landlords that hold the lease on former government buildings, contractors paid instead of municipal works departments.
The government won't act because it would mean admitting that the neoliberal ideology that's made a small number of people very rich was wrong.
This video covers the UK, but it's all similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk
Actually, because the highly paid people tend to be REALLY highly paid, a LOT more than 50% of people earn less.
Absolutely ridiculous. Why are we punishing people who are trying hard to conserve their resources and use less energy? The carbon tax is revenue neutral, if you burn less than the average person you are BETTER OFF with a higher tax. This is a GOOD tax for the poor, and the cons are using this wedge to hurt them
Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.
Ehh. This is an issue of a whitelist vs blacklist approach, it's not that nuts that the government would want to allow newer tech to be used by work devices as a default.
The military is very different and much more strict about this, the average civil servant is less sensitive.
No, you don't understand, that profit is for shareholders and executives. They were the ones that bravely cut lunch breaks and asked the staff to work harder, and they deserve the fruits of the staff's labour.
All the employees did was produce 100% of the value, but that's just their job. Can't go setting any precedents by rewarding them.
Exactly. It's not "Leftist", it's just NOT fully of Nazis, and that's how far our standards have slipped.
We definitely should change emissions, yes, but I think a good "foot in the door" tactic would be to lobby your local city to make street parking require a permit that is priced based on the length of your car. It makes ZERO sense that minis and F350s pay the same for parking.
And/or make car registration costs scale reflect the true damage of additional vehicle weight.
The guys from I Did a Thing has a second channel that covers politics and they did a GREAT video on this wackjob, and the whole industry of these rich vampires paying the young homeless people in the USA to literally drain them of their blood: The Dark World of Young Blood Transfusions
My dude, everything is politics. Especially things like "I want a free internet" or "I don't want to be drowning in ads" which is a huge part of the appeal of Lemmy are both DEEPLY political stances.