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The Middle Class In Canada Is Now Doing Better Than The Middle Class In America
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
For most of Canada's existence, it has been regarded as the weak neighbor to the north by most Americans. Well, that has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. Back in the year 2000, middle class Canadians were earning much less than middle class Americans, but since then there has been a dramatic shift. At this point, middle class Canadians are actually earning more than middle class Americans are. The Canadian economy has been booming thanks to a rapidly growing oil industry, and meanwhile the U.S. middle class has been steadily shrinking. If current trends continue, a whole bunch of other countries are going to start passing us too. The era of the "great U.S. middle class" is rapidly coming to a bitter end.
In recent years, I have been up to Canada frequently, and I am always amazed at how much nicer things are up there. The stores and streets are cleaner, the people are more polite and it seems like almost everyone that wants to work has a job.
But despite knowing all this, I was still surprised when the New York Times reported this week that middle class incomes in Canada have now surpassed middle class incomes in the United States...
After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.
And things are particularly dire for those in the U.S. on the low end of the scale...
The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.
Even while our politicians and the media continue to proclaim that everything is "just fine", the U.S. middle class continues to slide toward oblivion.
The biggest reason for this is the lack of middle class jobs. Millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, and millions of other good jobs have been replaced by technology.
The value of our labor is declining with each passing day, and this has forced millions upon millions of very qualified Americans to take whatever they can get. As NBC News recently noted, this is a big reason why the temp industry has been booming...
For Americans who can't find jobs, the booming demand for temp workers has been a path out of unemployment, but now many fear it's a dead-end route.
With full-time work hard to find, these workers have built temping into a de facto career, minus vacation, sick days or insurance. The assignments might be temporary — a few months here, a year there — but labor economists warn that companies' growing hunger for a workforce they can switch on and off could do permanent damage to these workers' career trajectories and retirement plans.
"It seems to be the new norm in the working world," said Kelly Sibla, 54. The computer systems engineer has been looking for a full-time job for four years now, but the Amherst, Ohio, resident said she has to take whatever she can find.
It has been estimated that one out of every ten jobs is now filled by a temp agency. I have worked for temp agencies myself in the past. Big companies like the idea of having "disposable workers", and this is a trend that is likely to only grow in the years ahead.
But temp jobs and part-time jobs don't pay as well as normal jobs. And those kinds of jobs generally cannot support middle class families.
At this point, nine out of the top ten occupations in the United States pay an average wage of less than $35,000 a year.
That is absolutely stunning.
These days most families are barely scraping by, and they don't have much extra money to go shopping with.
This is a big reason for the "retail apocalypse" that we are now witnessing. This week we learned that retail stores in the United States are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But you won't hear much about that on the mainstream news.
You can find lots of "space available" signs and empty buildings in formerly middle class neighborhoods all over the country. For example, one of my readers recently shot the following YouTube video in Scottsdale, Arizona. As you can see, empty commercial buildings are all over the place...
As the middle class shrinks, more families are being forced to take in family members that can't find decent work. I have written previously about the huge rise in the number of young adults that are moving back in with their parents. But this is not just happening to young people. As the Los Angeles Times recently detailed, the number of Americans 50 and older that are moving in with their parents has absolutely soared in recent years...
For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.
The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.
"The numbers are pretty amazing," Wallace said. "It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents' homes."
The U.S. economy is slowly but steadily falling apart, and more people fall out of the middle class every single day.
A recent Gallup survey found that 14 percent of all Americans would experience "significant financial hardship" within one week of a job loss.
An additional 29 percent of all Americans would experience "significant financial hardship" within one month of a job loss.
That means that 43 percent of the entire country is living right on the edge.
It is no wonder why only about 30 percent of all Americans believe that we are moving in the right direction as a nation.
Most people know deep down that something is seriously wrong. But most people can't explain exactly what that is or how to fix it.
Meanwhile, the politicians and the media keep telling us that if we just keep doing the same old things that everything will work out okay somehow. The blind are leading the blind, and we are rapidly marching toward disaster.
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Buddy, try getting a coffee at Tim Horton's- if not for your foreign worker.
Only thing bad I can say about Canada is that we try to live like Americans and it's impossible. Canada sucks. It was much better in the 60s.
I guess I could always move to Frostbite Falls, Mn.
Much of Canada's middle class prosperity has been FIRE/government-employment related. And that segment of the economy appears to be turning down with the housing market.
The earlier post with the 165% debt to income ratio is quite accurate.
I can add a little bit here. We have more bots than any other country. I just saw an infographic today that shows more than half of the world's bad bots come from guess where, the good old USA.
So enough about the bad bots, let's just talk bots. Anymore on my website the tracking bots come in like armies. I talked to a guy the other day and he confimed it too as he does data mining as part of his job and he said same thing, unbelievable. Used to be a tracking bot would come in do it's indexing and leave, not any more an army shows up and indexes each page at least 5-10 times with multiple pings and then it returns later and does it again, same page. What I'm leading up to here is that bots aka Algorithms are taking over. A bot is worth $100 and a human is free or zero. When you look at how they come up with the value of some of social networks, it's not our value as we're the serfs that have to fill in where bots can't do things:) Dr. Sean Gourley, a physicist does a good job explaining this and says "who's bots are they and will I benefit". He says 61% of the web traffic now is bots.
Those bots are doing a lot more than what referenced as an example above as far as a tracking bot, they are capturing data for sale for one to be sold and we can't do that as humans and thus our value is zero. In short this is what's happening here as Wall Street and the Silicon Valley values bots and data.
Now if you watched the news, Nike wearables is cutting back and laying off people. Well a wearable needs a host, a human and people don't work the way we are marketed to think that we work. Google is doing a study right now to find out how humans work. Well after hiring 1000s of them, they don't know? Well that tells you where their focus is and how they have taken virtual values and racked it into money, and I mean beyond just simple ad money. The video does a much better job explaining this than I can with words here.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.de/2014/03/algorithms-that-exploit-sean-gourl...
Part two, the "over scoring of the American citizens"...this means something and all the world is looking at the US as no other country scores and creates analytics like we do and nobody questions the proprietary code that does it. Why is this a danger? If you are a one you get access to something and if you are a two, you get denied. This is a very simple explanation but it goes on. The World Privacy Forum put together a a report all about this and the data is flawed on top of nobody asking about the formula. It's a fair report and goes back to how credit ratings finally had to be made available to us. Today that's only a very small part of the "scoring" that goes on.
Heck HR departments now run ads for jobs they never intend to fill and collect resumes and information and turn around and sell it. They may also have you take some kind of a test too and they sell your results there too and make money so it goes into a bot repository to be sold. See what I mean with the bot world. The World Privacy Forum nicely attacked the FICO medication adherence scoring to. They say all they need is a name and address for you and they can mine and get all the information they need to score you from 0 to 500 on whether or not you will take your prescriptive medicine. You may bunk at this point and I agree with that but heck they have scored about 3 million people and sold the results. Can you and I see or get that score, no. Can some who models have the ability to replicate that model and check for accuracy, no, it's propriety, their secret sauce.
So insurance companies and pharma buy this crap and use it to do what ever they want, sick a wellness coach on you, give you cheaper meds as another one. This is what I mean by the "scoring" as it happens beyond just routine credit scores. Look at the Lending club, 90% are turned down and it's like a mini CDO when an investor decides to watch and fund your loan if you are one of the 10% who get a loan at a fairly high interest rate too. That investor watches everything you do with your loan too. They cruise through and pick which ones they want. The other 90% who don't get approved, well gee we have all this really detailed data, you guessed it, let's sell it. Lending club has its proprietary formulas and algorithms they use as well.
So those are just a couple examples but "the scoring of America" is getting tough out there and denies people access everywhere, money, jobs, you name it and then there's the "dark HR" folks operating as I mentioned too. The data gets flawed and they don't care. I checked a couple of my own, loaded with mistakes. Last year my car insurance company asked me why I had not included the other two people at my address as secondary drivers. Well I sold the house and didn't live there anymore and 9 months later the bots on the machine added them as they were programmed to think I was not giving them all the information. Well I had to call up and get that fixed as it was a bad data mining match and the average clerk looks and thinks everything on the screen is accurate..wrong.
Here's the World Forum report, and again the rest of the world is looking at all of this insanity in the US as there is normal scoring but it's the black underworld of scoring and bots that is a big reason why the middle class keeps shrinking, it's all modeled on servers with bots and algos.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-22pC35LPWPcGt3TURRenctbDQ/edit?pli=1
Thanks by the way for the Gold video post here as I added to the video collection over the Killer Algorithm page too. I keep collecting various videos like that one done by folks smarter than me so they are in one place to find and are at layman level too.
Attack of the Killer Algorithms – “Algo Duping 101?
So as long as this proprietary scoring keeps going on and telling use we can't have this and can't have access to that with junk science and nobody questions or let's us see the formulas, the madness continues.
Heck HR departments now run ads for jobs they never intend to fill and collect resumes and information and turn around and sell it.
Good point and so true.
Then toss in the fact that on a good day over 50% of the participants in these forums are BOT's that are just clever programming algo's, and 30+ years ago they could fool a majority, today its closer to 90%.
The 'machine', or 'her', are all telling trends that soon humans will prefer to talk with bot's, and why not, the bot knows more about YOU, than you know about yourself, the ultimate circle-jerk.
Unicorn heaven if you will.
But yes collection of data resell and aggregation ( social media ), is the last business model.
What I'm getting too, is when will most of us simply disconnect, and go out and just talk with humans face to face, given the fact that an artificial conversation IMHO would eventually make a SANE man INSANE.
All the middle class jobs ae leaving North America. We have more middle class jobs because of the trees, rocks and water but I our manufacturing has been obliterated. Our tech jobs are seeing some growth but it may be because of the tech bubble. There are lots of civil servant jobs too.
I am so surprised that Canada did not go into a recession following the 2008 problems in the States. I think that is the first time ever that we have not been lockstep with the states.
I am not terribly worried about a Canadian housing crash. Vancouver Calgary and Toronto might go down but such is the nature of those markets (always have had wild swings). The rest of Canada should be fine. I have been on a forum (google redflagdeals real estate crash) that has been debating a crash for 4 years now. People have given up debating it because all the doomsdayers have made their predictions and the years have passed and nothing has happened. It may happen but it will take a big event and then we will have something bigger to worry about.
As a Canadian who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, this article is bullshit. Provincial and Federal Governments are running out of money and need a reason.................any reason to increase taxes. What better way than to release a fluff piece about how prosperous everyone is in order to justify increasing income taxes.
Easter long weekend, I took Thursday off and drove across the border into Lewiston NY to shop at the Lewiston Outlet Mall. I picked up a dozen golf shirts and t-shirts and a pair of New Balance sneakers for $350 US. I comparison shopped in Toronto prior to my crossing over and calculated that to purchase the same items I purchased in NY State would have costed me $1000 CAD in Toronto.
If I'm so prosperous, tell me........................why am I doing my clothing shopping in the USA??????
Oh, and it was worth it, even after reporting it to Canada Customs. I produced the bills and they charged me $20 CAD tax on my purchases. Needless to say, I will continue doing my shopping south of the border.
To the American's who like our clean streets, it don't come cheap. I'm in the 35% income tax bracket upon which I still pay another 13% in HST whenever I buy something.
When I purchased all that clothing in NY, I noticed the tax rate was something like 2.5%!!!! We're getting fucked here in Ontario that's for sure.
My local newspaper has a six page classified ad section.
Four and a half pages are help wanted.
In fly over land.
Cities suck.
Stack On
Canada has the third largest oil reserves for a population of 34 millions, the average Canadian is way richer than the average American.
As a Canadian i have to say, the author must work for harper's " Denial policy " lol Fiirst off, the only thing driving the Canadian economey is the over-inflated housing market that ie being driven by 1 thing and 1 thing only Immigration. Canada has one of the highest rates of immigration in the world. When you look at each province seperatly, well, you have Ontario that has more Debit then the state of California with less people. And we all know that Alberta Oil pays for Queerbec WELFARE.
Cananadians are property rich and cash poor. When it crashes, its going to be extrmely bad. But you know, lets keep selling natural resources like a 3rd world country becuase that is all we have left.
As far as wages go, ya our minumum wage is and always has been higher, but when you factor in teh extremly HIGH COST OF LIVING and extmrely HIGH TAXES, how much better off are we really.
Iam a proud Canadian, but frankly i have more respect for all of my American friends.
Remove Ontario,the welfare state of Canada (federal public servants + subsidized industries) and this country rocks.
Don't forget Quebec. But they don't count because they want to leave anyway. Apparently the English in the rest of Canada are holding them back by throwing money at them year after year, decade after decade.
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Are you people aware that Vancouver and Toronto are not the only cities in Canada? Here are Edmonton and Calgary, containing the majority of Alberta's citizens, with vacancy rates under 2%:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Calgary+Edmonton+have+lowest+renta...
Regina is under 2% vacancy:
http://regina.ctvnews.ca/regina-on-track-for-three-per-cent-vacancy-rate...
Winnipeg still around 2% vacancy
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/vacancy-rate-for-apartments-in...
To put that into perspective, the vacancy rate in Phoenix, Arizona ranges somewhere between 10% and 30%, depending on how the counting is done (whether or not foreclosed homes count as vacant). Las Vegas is around 10% as well.
You guys said Australia's housing is in trouble too. Sydney, Australia's vacancy rate as of January 2014 was under 2%
http://spionline.com.au/home/12533-sydney-vacancy-rates-climb
If Canada was really a country, we would of bombed, invaded, overthrown, sanctioned, embargoed, foreign aided, NGO'd, "saved" it by now. I would of read of the Canadian People's Liberation Front. Hollywood and The New York Times would of made stories about indigenous Canadians being killed by Blackwater.
I don't know what Canada is.
yeah if you want to live in a freezer 2/3rds of the year
what do they have 2 weeks of summer.... eh
and the french part aint doin so well ....
I saw that show Property Brothers and I thought it was interesting, but I didn't know the name. I typed "gay realtor show" in google. There are THOUSANDS of gay realtors doing home showings. That search didn't bring me anywhere near that TV show. Just tons of gay realtors. Sorry, no cock pics were on their business cards.
This country used to take immense pride in its strong middle class, but it hasn’t promoted its growth for the past thirty years. On the other hand, eliminating student loan debt and helping people lower their home mortgages are investments that revitalize the middle class. Financial help is available to middle-class families from the government and private assistance organizations. Apply for Canadian payday loans and you can usually receive counseling for debt, help with payment plans, federal tax credits and low-interest loansto pay for college.