ouch.

Did your wages go up that much?

If you still have a job, acrider54.

My wages have been cut by at least 35%. Thankfully townhouses rates go up less than houses.

Guess its time to change city concill again. when will they learn.
Quesnel had a 0% increase this year.

Hopefully this post isn't too far off topic. I think this issue concerns a lot of Prince George City taxpayers in one way or another.

The following is from the web page of CBC radio's Cross Country Checkup talk show program:

"On Cross Country Checkup ...pension protection

Anyone who has ever dreamed of an old age secured by a comfortable pension, has to be worried nowadays. The recession has delivered a hit to many pension hopes. The question is ...should governments backup those pensions in trouble?

What do you think?

Do you depend on a company pension that might be in trouble? Have your RRSPS lost value? Do you have no pension? Are you a young working person who doesn't relish the thought of paying more for people who perhaps should have put more aside for their own future? Can the government afford to backup all pensions?

Join host Rex Murphy, Sunday on Cross Country Checkup"

This program runs on CBC Radio One from 1:05 - 3:00 PM Sunday April 26. It should be interesting to hear the views of Canadians on this topic.

http://www.cbc.ca/checkup/this-week.html

Charles, thats the second shoe to drop that I mentioned about 6-months ago.

No I don't think government should guarantee company funded pensions that were miss managed. No way the tax payer is obligated to guarantee the fudiciary duty of private contracts.

Spending our way out of recession is doubling down on a bad debt without solving the underlying problem. Free enterprise is the only solution to the current recession and no party will support that in practice, because they are all bought by special interest money with special agenda's. I'm not even going to vote this election, so as not to endorse any of the special interest ideologies.

Free enterprise IMO is the oil that makes an economy work by equalizing oportunity for the brightest and the best and the most efficient to create value that translates into profits and savings and investments. Taxes and debt and monopilistic capitalism are the enemies of a free enterprise economy... and stimulus spending by governments enable all three enemies of true free enterprise by devalueing existings capital in the creation of money that dilutes all savers (pensioners) in the economy... only to squander that new grafted capital on proping up the monoplistic banksters and their multinational corporations that will strangle true free enterprise, a free enterprise economy which plays by the rules and thus the monopolistic banksterism stimulous requires higher taxation to pay for its true government picking winners and losers inefficiencies to the economy as a whole. I'm starting to rant now....

So IMHO no to pension bailouts and corporate bailouts for an unethical and mismanaged economy of corruption. That is the cost for those that don't play fair and by the rules or that allowed those kinds of people to get into politics and business in the first place. Banks and corporations should be sorted out in bankruptcy court under bankruptcy rules... and that is the law that needs to be addressed if pensioners want to recover any of their value through the liquidation process or recovery of the business enterprise. I support creating the conditions for new economic activity based on fair play and not through taxation financing past injustices from previous generations.

As for city (home and business) taxes... IMO the municiple union runs the show and they have an open check book for waste. I support making all municiple employees non union. There is no way the tax payer should have hands tied by union contracts for things like municiple employees. The ones that perform pay them more, and the ones that don't send them home... if a contracter can provide better more efficient service then so be it... unions shouldn't be involved in that kind of decision making process... the most effective use of tax payer dollers should be the only concern. If anything the fast food restaurants should be the ones that are unionized not public employees.

Charles, and Eagleone, there is another vitally important point here which is overlooked.

The money that is paid into both public (CPP) and private pension plans by an employer represents a business "cost" that will be included in, and has to be recovered from, the "price" of that employer's products.

The diversion of this money into "investment" by the Pension Plan, by removing it from the flow of incomes heading towards "consumption" in the hands of those employee/consumers who've earned it, leaves an equivalent sum in already incurred business "costs" unliquidated.

And unliquidatable, unless that equivalent sum of money is re-created and LENT by the Banking system. Which, just as in the "investment" of the income removed by the Plan, in turn creates ANOTHER set of "costs", unliquidatable, too, unless this process continually repeats. It cannot, however, continually repeat.

Since what is issued as "costs" in credit as bank loans has to be completely recovered as loan repayments through "price" on sale of product into final consumption. Or business loans cannot be fully amortized.

When overall "incomes" fall in respect of the overall "costs of production" continually coming forward into "prices" at the point of retail sale, Sales cannot fully liquidate the costs incurred.

And the rate of overall business profit, from which Bank loans will be repaid, declines. When Banks aren't being fully repaid for the money they've lent, they tighten up on future lending. Which has been what's happening now.

In spite of the current dry-up of credit, this set-up ensures that bank debt, a normal, vitally necessary part of the the entire 'free-enterprise' system, will grow exponentially. And never be totally repayable.

And "financial" credit will become increasingly out of sync with "real" credit (the actual potential of the economy to produce and deliver 'real' goods and services), until the system suffers a collapse.

What the government is trying to do by its "stimulus" packages, is to convert the unrepayable floating bank debt of the private sector, into unrepayable fixed debt of the public sector. On which we, through taxation, (and the robbery of the purchasing power of our savings through 'inflation'), will pay tribute to the Banks in interest charges and increased borrowings for ever and ever.

A much more effective soluition, for all of us, would be for the proper use of DEBT-FREE (not "costed into any production) new credit created by the Bank of Canada and paid directly to each citizen of Canada in the way of a National dividend and retail price rebate.

This new credit would cancel currently unrepayable past "costs", and "stimulate" the economy properly, without further unrepayable debt, via the proper origin of ALL economic activity ~ increased CONSUMER demand.

Socred what you are talking about is what Tiawan did, some would say with success. They recently last month gave every man woman and child a $1400 credit they could pick up at the local post office. Credit that was created by government to induce local consumption and debt pay down and liquidated by industry back to government using public credit in a way as a stimulus shared equally by everyone.

I think your thinking is on the right track, but I have to disagree with the notion that free enterprise requires debt financing. Debt financing is what perverts free enterprise especially when it picks winners and losers based on funny leverage formulas that are not consistent for all participants.

IMO bankruptcy courts should be used to clean up and rebalance any enterprise that is no longer profitable because of debt and in no way should these enterprises be subsidized by taxpayers. They failed and no business should be to big to fail... if operations are profitable they should continue as a going concern under new ownership as per the bankruptcy proceedings.

If anything hopefully we see some attention paid to the bankruptcy laws that are entirely inadequate and are heavily in favor of the bankster predatory practices that are responsible in most cases for companies ending up in bankruptcy through drive by bond offerings the banksters underwrite allowing for excessive leveraging and then walking in as the secured and claiming the assets for pennies on the dollar... bankruptcy law need to rebalance the interests of pensioners, bond holders, and yes even shareholders and other third party interests. We won't see it though because the economy isn't about fairness and the bankers would never stand for that.

Time Will Tell

Yes, I've heard that Taiwan has adopted this policy, Eagle. Though I'm not aware of whether they're using their central bank to create and distribute new credit "debt-free", (in the manner of a what might be viewed as a macro-economic accounting adjustment to the "books" of "Taiwan, Inc."), or whether the credit they're distrbuting to Taiwanese consumers is just added onto their country's existing National Debt.

If it's the former, then they are indeed on the right track, and the effects of recession on their economy and citizens will be greatly mitigated. Now, and into the future.

Even the latter course would be superior to what our governments are contemplating doing here in the way of "stimulus" ~ which will just take us from a 'deflation' back into another round of 'inflation', and dissipate the hardship amongst us all, while ensuring it's longevity is greatly extended.

"Debt" is not something "of the Devil", Eagle. It's simply another financial device. Part of any creditary money system, which all money systems ultimately are, (even those using gold and silver "commodity money" ~ if there are any left ~ they're all still fundamentally "creditary".)

This is something the "Socialists", from old Karl Marx on, have never understood. Ergo their occasional confused call for the "nationalisation of banking", rather than the "socialisation of credit".

They'd make the banking system's 'Monopoly of Credit' that presently exists absolute, by bringing it entirely into "government".

Instead of making the corrections necessary to "de-centralize" it, into the hands of Consumers (all of us ~ because we're all 'consumers', even if fewer and fewer of us, thanks to technology, are still needed as 'producers'.)

ALL 'money' is "credit" in the hands of one party to a transaction, and "debt" owed by another party to it. Think of it as a highly portable "accounting system" using tokens, or "tickets", of some kind instead of figures in a ledger, or data in a computer. Because, in reality that's all any money system is.

"Credit" is, or should be, issued (as "debt") to initiate PRODUCTION, and is, or should be, retrieved and cancelled with final CONSUMPTION.

It simply facilitates the production, distribution and consumption of all the various goods and services we need and desire.

The problem is NOT with "debt" per se, (nor, as many monetary reformers believe, the "interest" payable on it), rather it is with the fact that under the current circumstances "debt", in its totality, is incapable of ever being fully amortized.

Primarily because of a very easily corrected "flaw" in the way National cost-accountancy presently works (or, perhaps I should say, increasingly doesn't work!)

If our governments were smart enough to recognize and move to correct this, then that which is "physically possible, socially desirable and morally correct" would ALWAYS be capable of being made "financially" possible. Finance would do as it properly should always do ~ simply "reflect" actual reality. Not, as at present, determine it.

Abberations to the present financial system created by "banksters" would not be tolerated as they have been, and will continue to be, in spite of all the talk of new "regulations".

They will continue to be tolerated, no doubt in different forms than sub-prime mortgages and derivatives, because the current underlying need to find new ways to constantly issue more new credit as "debt" to enable previously issed "debt" to be fully repaid still is necessary under the present system so long as the "flaw" I mentioned remains uncorrected.

"Free-enterprise" DOES indeed always need "debt-financing", Eagle. Under the rules of double-entry cost accountancy, as they apply in the whole economy, "cash disbursements" (spending from Bank loans made to the Firms' sector of the economy) preceeds "cash receipts" from Sales whenever any economy is expanding.

Firms, in general, are continually "deficit financing" so far as their "cash flow" is concerned, yet are also generally, in a period of expansion, "booking" a profit.

This is possible because the rules of accounting delay the "expensing" of today's "investment" (money received, and spent, from Bank loans) against future Sales receipts. Which are prospectively greater as a result of that investment. This is why it is said that modern economies are virtually entirely "creditary" in nature.

Socred I'm not saying you can't have free enterprise without debt. Debt is a part of the business cycle... its the abuse of finance though access to debt that perverts real free enterprise. When a bank consolidates and monopolizes an industry based on purely financial speculation that picks winners through favorable access to finance with fake capital derived from bogus investment vehicles, or partisan access to capital, then debt becomes the true enemy of a free enterprise economy.

As for your comments on socialism and bankers I find it odd that even the USSR didn't have public owned banks and were financed by private bankers. I think the monopoly capitalists we are dealing with today are the same people that ran the monopoly communist societies they told us were our enemies... they are the same ends to a u-shaped rope that they use for total control and strangulation of the free enterprise economy. IMO private ‘central banks’ (not your local banks) are the enemy of our traditional free enterprise economy and that includes the bank of Canada. Debt creation and money supply are issues of national sovereignty as great as any foreign invasion would be, and so should be conducted for the rule of law that respects free enterprise fairness in the conduct of the economy and not be for the perverted metrics of GDP and monopoly capitalism. Credit should be for public good IMO.

As for Taiwan they went with a system that was non interest or borrowed debt. They created coupons with a value distributed to all citizens that could be spent at local stores, who in turn could pay their suppliers with these coupons, and in turn the suppliers could be reimbursed by government for the value of the coupons they received. Not sure exactly how it works, just read about it briefly, but it involved no new external debt and no interest obligations. I agree they are one step ahead of the world in this regard for stimulating the economy to its full capacity.