recceguy said:
I'm going to take a guess and say if it weren't for the old cohort, the young cohort would have to start working. Indulge my tin foil and common sense, while I try explain my personal feelings on the subject. It was the older cohort that paid for and supported, with their taxes, those programs and social engineering experiments and government initiatives. It is our money in OAS and CPP. It's our money that Wynne and Trudeau are pissing away. Who is paying for everything right now? Us old cohort are still paying our way, in increase taxes to give away our money to those that won't work. If future generations are going to be paying for our electricity and needs today, that is the governments fault not ours. I've never voted socialist in my life, but young people will, because the government promises to give them our money. Current examples of Wynne and Horvath promises to spend billions and none to the people paying for it. Who the hell is going to pay for that?
Maybe the young cohort wouldn't be so large today if our governments hadn't made us old cohort pay for all these youngsters that won't work and think we owe them something.
The fact that people get old and need taking care of seems to slip the minds of those that the old cohort has supported their whole lives. And I'll be paying for them until I die.
Simple tit for tat. You can't blame the old cohort. It's not, just, the increasing numbers of old people retiring that causing the strain. It's the increasing amount of young people, immigrants legal and illegal, 3rd generation welfare and the tax and give socialist programs that are at fault so far as I'm concerned.
Old people, mostly, have the experience and forethought not to spend more than we earn and I'll be making more in retirement than when I worked. I just need a better way to keep it out of the hands of the communists.
Now, I'm not saying it's all one way or another, but the idea that old people would be a burden, because the young will have to foot our bills is nonsense. It will be burdensome on the young though, because they've already spent the money we gave them to put aside for us.
Hope that makes some sort of sense to some.
Actually, in terms of debt and the older generation, the baby-boomer generation was where the welfare state was created. Programs from 1940 on, including the creation of unemployment insurance (1940), Old Age Security (52), Canada Pension Plan (65), and equalization. The prevailing fiscal reasoning was that the high economic growth of the post-war era would continue indefinately, funding the massive increase in spending. As stated in the linked Frasier institute paper, " The role of the state as the provider of core public goods within a liberal market economy had shifted to one of government as a source of redistribution and social investment" (Frasier, 47).
In terms of pure debt burden, in 1945 Canada had a deficit of $2.123 billion CAD but the end of the war saw expenditures go down, with sales and revenue going up due to the inability of European nations to produce due to war damage and the advantage of foreign debt payments from the war (same as in the US). This led to 6 consecutive surpluses from 1946 to 1951. In spite of this, between 1945 and 1973 Canada's net debt rose from $11.3 to $22.6 billion due to increased social spending. Moreover, in 1955 38.24% of spending was on defence, not including 5.18% of spending being on veterans (!). By 1967 defence accounted for 15.63% and veterans benefits to 3.16%, while health rose from 1.66% to 4.88%, old age security from 7.6% to 12.33%, welfare from .62% to 2.22%, education assistance from .21% to 1.01%, and other welfare and social assistance from 1.81% to 2.98%. Spending was so out of hand that in spite of an economy that grew roughly ~8%/year the government was still generally running deficits to pay for social programs for that generation (baby boomers). This problem was then pushed to the next generations as economic development slowed from 1973-1996. This era saw the massive deficits that have become more commonplace begin to support those social programs listed above and resulted in a $2.2 billion deficit in 1973 to a high of a $39 billion in 1992 (PC). By 1990, Canadian spending was at a level where welfare accounted for 13.6%, old age security 11.02%, health 5.25%, family allowances 5.2, and public debt charges to 26.03% of the total budget. This meant that social spending accounted for 37% of total spending, with social spending and debt accounting for 63.03% of Canada's budget, in a year where millenials would have been anywhere from 5 years of age to not yet born.
So, it is clear that the baby boomer era did in fact create the debt problem that exists today and in large part has been handed to the new generations to deal with. With the expected massive spending requirements to get the baby boomers through their golden years this present will become more exacerbated as the reality that OAS, which was designed for when people died younger is increasingly stretched due to longer life expediencies. So, your generation did not support the social spending through your taxes, but rather through increased debt which has ballooned the level of debt repayment. The baby boomer generation created a series of social spending programs which were based on unrealistic GDP models and were unwilling to cut them when the model changed in 1973. If the old cohort wants to blame someone for the current debt issue they should look in a mirror. So, in sum, yes, the younger generation CAN blame the older cohort. There was no money "put aside" for them- only massive debt.
While Trudeau (and Wynne provincially) certainly wont improve this, neither did Harper when he racked up massive deficits.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/federal-fiscal-history-canada-1867-2017.pdf
