Why Am I Not Surprised

It appears that NAFTA may have impacted our National Savings Rate (NSR), as well as the Households Savings Rate (HSR). From 1994 to 2004 (the most recent year with data available), Canada’s NSR increased 6.6%, to 23.1%. However, with the exceptions of 2000 and 2001, the percentage of income Canadian households have devoted to savings has shrunk or stayed the same every year since NAFTA’s implementation. In 2005, Statistics Canada and the OECD reported that Canadians savings were –0.4%! So says Centrerion

NAFTA, the FTA, WTO, APEC, CARICOM, CAFTA, etc. etc. ad nauesum are all global agreements between govenrment and business. They are macroeconomics. However the neo-con's have always claimed that their supply side economics were trickle down, which this shows is a bunch of bunkum.

Canada last year enjoyed a greater than expected record $30.2 billion surplus in its trade and investment dealings with the rest of the world. But Canadian employees worked for less money in December, according to another set of Statistics Canada data released yesterday.Current account surplus passes $30 billion

As does a comparison between average wages in the same period and corporate profitablity including the stock market. Wages have remained stagnant in the Canadian economy. True unemployment has decreased, but wages have not increased significantly.

Globalisation, Technology and Wage Inequality, 1870-1970

Canada Wages, salaries and supplementary labour income 1926 to 1975

The economic boom that began in the late 1990s has likewise drawn attention away from this convergence of minimum wages and poverty, Goldberg says, persuading most Canadians that they are better off now, even as the largest portion of the boom’s benefits has gone to the richest 10 percent of Canadian families.Working for a living

Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750

- between 1750 and 2003, prices rose by around 140 times;

- most of the increase in prices has occurred since the Second World War: between 1750 and 1938, a period spanning nearly two centuries, prices rose by a little over three times; since then they have increased more than forty-fold.

Put another way, the index shows that one decimal penny in 1750 would have had greater purchasing power than one pound in 2003.

Consumer price index

1995 to present. Includes core inflation, CPI-XFET, CPIW, and the effect of changes in indirect taxes

Retail increases have been to blame for inflation,Retail Sales Lend To Loonie Strength because the regular judas goat of wage increases was not available for blame.

Higher wages could drive Canada inflation-analysts

Bank of Canada's press meet big draw for C$, bonds

Again despite the increasing ease and reduction in production costs, including a steady increase in productivity, the share earned by average workers remains static. And its impact is felt the most on female workers.

Women still losing wage wars

Pink ghetto lives on in workplace

Why single moms have a double load to carry

New research from Statistics Canada concludes the number of Canadian children in single parent families rose 50 per cent in 20 years. It also concludes single mothers are five times as likely as those with partners to end up with a low income. The study, published this week, found the proportion of children under age 18 in a single mother family rose to 21 per cent from 14 per cent in the two decades between 1981 and 2001.

What makes our economy attractive is the social wage, the taxes we pay for social services that supplement capitalist investment strategies. The taxes paid by the average Canadian worker are now 60% of the Federal and Provincial direct funding, while corporate taxes have decreased.

GST and PST consumer taxes and user fees, another form of taxation, are also aimed at the working class taxpayer along with the stupid tax; VLT's, lottery's, and gambling.

The tax breaks that business has instituted for itself with its neo-con agenda for government in North America has not trickled down to the working classes. Rather we have had to make up for those breaks from our own pockets. Either in tax increases, service reductions, loss of hours of work, minimal wage increases, increase costs in our benefit plans.


What Wages Tell You -- and What They Don't

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of September 2005, health insurance represented the largest single component of compensation costs for workers in private industry. In Canadian cities, for example, the BizCosts study estimates that benefits add only 20% of agents' annual wages to agents' annual compensation because Canadian residents are entitled to government-sponsored health care.

In a wealthy country that offers, for instance, government-sponsored health care and top-notch public education, you may pay more up front in hourly wages. Yet as a percentage of these wages, you might pay less for some types of benefits, like health care, if they're already available to residents of that country. According to the World Health Organization, as of 2002, private health care expenditures accounted for about 30% of all health care spending in Canada; the government took care of the rest. That same year, spending on health care in the U.S. was nearly evenly divided between public and private entities, with private expenditures representing 55%, or a slim majority, of health care spending.