Number of seniors living in poverty soars nearly 25%, By Joe Friesen, November 24, 2010, Globe and Mail: “The number of seniors living in poverty spiked at the beginning of the financial meltdown, reversing a decades-long trend and threatening one of Canada’s most important social policy successes. The number of seniors living below the low-income cutoff, Statistics Canada’s basic measure of poverty, jumped nearly 25 per cent between 2007 and 2008, to 250,000 from 204,000, according to figures released on Wednesday by Campaign 2000. It’s the largest increase among any group, and as the first cohort of baby boomers turns 65 next year, could place increased pressure on families supporting elderly parents. Economists say women make up as much as 80 per cent of the increase in seniors poverty…”
Day: December 3, 2010
Poverty and Guaranteed Income – Canada
To end poverty, guarantee everyone in Canada $20,000 a year. But are you willing to trust the poor?, By Erin Anderssen, November 19, 2010, Globe and Mail: “Nicole Gray, a 24-year-old single mother living in Victoria, feels like a ‘beggar’ every time she has to go into a government office and ask for help to pay her bills. She has finished her diploma to be an office medical assistant despite having gotten pregnant as a teenager. But job losses and the difficulty of raising her son, now 7, on her own have made her income unpredictable. Meanwhile, she says, the system is suspicious of every request and doubts every word. There are hundreds of rules. She has been sent away because she was missing one document. She has had to justify a no-contact order against her son’s father and had a caseworker scrutinize every detail of her bank account. Every interrogation ‘makes you feel very low to the ground,’ she says. And the worst, she says, is that you learn quickly ‘that you can’t count on anything.’ But what if we gave Ms. Gray and other poor Canadians something to count on: cash directly in their pockets, with no conditions, trusting people to do what’s right for them? It’s a bold idea, and it runs counter to the paternal approach to poverty that polices what is done with ‘our’ money and tries to strong-arm the poor into better lives…”
Recession and the Newly Poor – Ireland
Irish cutbacks pile it on for ‘new poor’, By Guy Chazan, November 27, 2010, Wall Street Journal: “A church-run soup kitchen here symbolizes the human cost of Ireland’s crisis: Middle-class homeowners, squeezed by rising debt and falling incomes, line up for food parcels alongside foreign asylum-seekers and the long-term unemployed. These are Ireland’s ‘new poor’-ordinary people with houses and jobs laid low by years of austerity, and now facing even tougher times as the government slashes public-sector jobs, raises taxes and cuts social welfare. Theresa Dolan runs the Capuchin Day Center near Dublin’s law courts that caters to the swelling ranks of the city’s poor. Before 2008, around 250 people came each day for a hot dinner, she says. Now there are 520. And the visitors’ profile is changing…”