Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?
Forget even the finances, the allocation of labor is a problem. Imagine 1 billion young people and they're all farmers, the next generation is 100 million young people, but they still have to feed 1.1 billion. No amount of financial shenanigans will avoid facing this basic fact.
I'm skeptical that the super-rich are only generating 5% on their money. My anecdotal experience is that it's usually north of 15%. They have access to investments that main-street does not.
If we plug in 15% instead of 5% in PG's reasoning, the effective income tax increase is quite a bit lower.
Smugness usually turns people off. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. No one likes people who act superior to them. Hilary lost over her “deplorables” comment. It makes me sad that the left is not taking the right lesson from this election.
I hear you, I think it's a balance of people trying to not be so smug (aka not attacking other people's intelligence) and people trying to not see other people as smug (aka not thinking the other person is attacking their intelligence).
I've struggled with the former a lot in my life. I was really good at school and feel very confident in my intelligence. So when I feel attacked, I often punch back at someone's intelligence without even realizing it.
Sometimes me feeling attacked is just confusion or sadness or disappointment that someone doesn't know something and I feel lonely that I'm the only one who does, and often angry when their decisions impact my life. Takes a lot to remind myself they know other things a lot better than me.
How do the critics divine the intention here? At a certain point, we're going to get to anything short of a riot being labelled virtue signaling. I'd like to avoid riots altogether.
RIP. As a Canadian I've always liked that we technically had the Queen as our head of state. I wonder how attitudes will change now that her 70 year reign.
I have an idea that's only half insane. Bear with me. Let's assume we want to get rid of the monarch as Canada's head-of-state. Canada will not be able to feasibly do so because it opens up too many difficult questions about re-structuring our government. Ergo, we will probably just coast on the status-quo. But we could use the desire for everything to stay the same to our advantage by declaring the Queen Elizabeth II the Eternal Monarch even in death.
The Monarch of Canada is a ceremonial position. The Monarch's representative (the Governor General) is appointed by the Prime Minister and has no real power (see: the King-Bing Affair for legal precedent), and therefore could technically be done by anyone from anywhere (even beyond the grave). Politically speaking, absolutely nothing would have to change. The Monarch's effective power in our political system would go from basically zero to literally zero, thus eliminating an avenue for potential abuse of power that we risk by keeping a living Monarch as head-of-state. We could achieve this without having to re-open difficult constitutional questions. Traditionalist Canadian institutions with "Royal" in their names (Mounted Police, Army, Airforce, etc) would not have to change their names or branding. Heck, we wouldn't even have to change the designs on our money. Literally nothing would change except closing a loop-hole (albeit a very low-risk one) for potential power abuse in our political system.
The only down side is that smug know-it-alls can say "actually Canada is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Necrocracy"
The Governor General does, and must, have real power. The King-Bing affair was controversial, but the Governor General's action was arguably justified, and negative opinions of it do not set a precedent that the Governor General can never do anything. The Governor general arguably should have taken a more active role in some recent times - when Paul Martin and Stephen Harper were trying to dodge (successfully, it turned out) votes of non-confidence, which have to be allowed in a democracy. Certainly, if the Prime Minister blatantly violates constitutional convention, such as by refusing to resign after losing the confidence of the House, it is necessary for the Governor General to dismiss them.
Since the Governor General must have real power, it follows that the Monarch must have real power regarding the appointment of the Governor General - rejecting the Prime Minister's request to dismiss or appoint a Governor General when this is clearly an attempt to fill the position with someone who will allow the Prime Minister to act non-democratically.
A dead person will not be able to fulfill this role.
> Since the Governor General must have real power, it follows that the Monarch must have real power regarding the appointment of the Governor General - rejecting the Prime Minister's request to dismiss or appoint a Governor General when this is clearly an attempt to fill the position with someone who will allow the Prime Minister to act non-democratically.
Counter-hypothetical: what if the Monarch decided to act against the Prime Minister and appoint a Governor General to act against their mandate? Both your hypothetical and mine are incidents of "bad-behaviour" going against norms to push agendas. We would prefer were that neither were possible. However in your hypothetical at least the person exhibiting "bad-behaviour" (the Prime Minister) has some mandate given that they were democratically elected. Whereas in my hypothetical the person exhibiting "bad-behaviour" is an inherited position held by someone in lives in a far-away place and may have only set foot in the nation they are meddling in a handful of times.
In either situation we're accepting the risk of bad-faith actors manipulating the structures of power, but if we ditch the Monarch, at least the person doing so is in someway accountable to the people. Harper was successfully able to dodge a confidence vote, but in the end he was ousted from power in a democratic process. I'd argue that's the better scenario.
The difference between a bad-actor Prime Minister and a bad-actor Monarch is precisely that the latter, in today's world, clearly has no legitimacy outside of enforcing well-established norms. So a Monarch appointing their unelected friend as Governor General, contrary to the Prime Minister's wishes, would simply result in an extra-legal declaration that the country is now a republic, or possibly that the Monarch is now the next person in line of succession (ie, forced abdication, again, extra-legal). In contrast, a Prime Minister who tells the Monarch to dismiss the Governor General and appoint their friend as Governor General instead, after loosing a confidence vote and refusing to resign, will presumably have the backing of some segment of the population (unless they're just insane), and hence will be much more dangerous, if the Monarch declines to exercise their power to refuse this request.
I do not think it is a good idea to assume that a Monarch will always be viewed as having no legitimacy outside of enforcing established norms. While that is certainly the case now, I would not want to rely on that being true forever. After which we would have to rely on benevolence (or perhaps indifference) of undemocratic executive power.
Could we not solve the problem of the PM appointing a lackey as Governor General with other form of check-and-balance that requires zero input from individuals with no connections to a democratic process? Perhaps a similar way that Supreme Court Justices are appointed (candidates recommended by the Prime Minister and approved by the federal cabinet). While not immune to abuses of power, I would like this better than a Monarch being that check-and-balance.
In the unlikely event that the UK were to abolish or deprecate its monarchy, Canada would still prefer not to re-open the Constitution. This might indeed lead to Canada worshipping "The Crown" without anybody to wear said ceremonial headgear.
In other words, the logical contortions of a democracy naming one family as being more important than anyone else, and it being a family without power anyway, are less painfully absurd in Canadian politics than discussing the Constitution. ^_^
Because they have no power and we get to hold the actual elected leaders in contempt, as is right and just. The alternative is electing one, and that kind of worship messes with people's heads. Look how bonkers some Americans get about their blessed president.
I don't agree with the argument that having a Monarch somehow shields Canada from worship of it's leaders, or enables us to hold our leaders in contempt. Absolutely no one in country thinks of the Monarch as our head of state except in a technical sense. The Prime Minister is for all practical purposes. Having a monarch in no-way shields Canadian leaders from hero-worship. Nor does it make Canada uniquely able to hold politicians accountable. It's our Westminster-style parliamentary system that (somewhat) achieves that by concentrating less power in the hands of an individual, which could exist independent of the Monarch. It already essentially does since the King-Bing Affair in the 1920s cemented the Monarch's influence as purely ceremonial.
The status quo has a lot of momentum and you need some sort of catalyst to make the change. Liz managed to avoid much controversy so that catalyst never appeared - perhaps her death will trigger the will to change it
I buy the first, not the second. Retailers often charge consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) for preferential placement in aisle and carry no risk on inventory. The bigger the retailer (eg. bestbuy, walmart), the more likely they can assume no risk on inventory with a full return policy to the CPG. Best Buy just rents out space on their store floor to individual brands.
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I don't know. I would say I'm d) believe that the West cannot and should not enforce a lockdown the same way authoritarian China or Singapore can, and therefore it is doomed to fail.
So:
* lockdowns are guaranteed not going to eradicate the virus the way it has in China.
* lockdowns are guaranteed to crush small businesses and restaurants, creating an L-shaped economic recovery and putting the West at a disadvantage in future geopolitical conflicts.
* the vaccine works but will take a year to rollout to everyone and it is unimaginable that the public will tolerate a lockdown for more than a month
* herd immunity might work
I truly welcome any debate on this as I'd love to be wrong about my critique of my country's (Canada) approach to all this. We seem to be not having our cake and not eating it too.
Waterloo Region here. Up until the end of August, I was pretty happy with the response where I am, at all three levels of government— it seemed like the policies were basically working and the spread was contained, with new flare-ups presumably being seeded from elsewhere (Toronto, the US probably) and quickly dying out.
And then cases started spiking in September, I suppose due to some combination of back-to-school, lockdown fatigue, increased indoor gatherings, etc. At that point I became extremely unhappy as it became apparent how little the Provincial gov't in particular had taken advantage of the long summer of low cases to build up test and hospital bed capacity, and to make plans for vaccine distribution. The second wave hit and it felt like basically just rewinding to March. This was apparent to everyone and I think it probably became a positive feedback loop as more and more people gave up and had in-person Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.
They can if they stop enrolling and paying tuition. There are plenty of options online for college-style certifications that most employers in my industry (software engineering) would accept.
I get that other professional training with certifications would be harder to do online, but those tend to be done in community colleges anyway. The most "abusive" shops are universities offering BS degrees to students swimming in debt.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?