"Eating the Future" in Action
Alex Usher,
HESA,
Nov 13, 2024
Sometimes the economist comes out in Alex Usher and it's not pretty to see. I have spent my entire adult life advocating for increated funding for education, but one thing I have never done is to advocate paying for it by cutting old age security (OAS). Now Usher tries to justify the move by saying benefits for the elderly are a type of "consumption" in contrast to spendings on education, which are "real investments that pay dividends down the line." He doesn't include the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) because it is "paid out of contributions rather than government funding." Well. I don't collect OAS because I don't need it (yet) but I will point out that I started paying into 'government funding' at the age of 14, which is (calculates...) 51 years ago. Fifty years of taxes, and Usher suggests that we didn't contribute? Ugly. Just ugly. Fund education, yes. Let's start with the billions in useless subsidies to oil and gas. Let's consider the corporate tax rate, which is half what it was when I started paying tax. Let's address the suppression of wages, which directly lowers tax income. Let's tax capital gains at the same rate as income tax. There are many ways to fund education that do not involve lowering payments to elderly people so poor they qualify for OAS.
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