A prescription to reverse the trend of a divided society: Focus on living wages and full employment
Nipawin - Monday - December 16, 2002 - by: Mario deSantis
neoclassical	In a world where the privileged make money with money it is obvious that these same privileged people would support the neoclassical 'accurate measurement' of economic performance: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
conjuring	So we have governments, bankers, think tanks and priestly academicians all conjuring among themselves about the recurring prediction of the size the GDP would take this next month. They use the law of the average to hide their greed, and they use the supposed scientific law of statistics to back up their predictions and the related supporting governmental economic policies.
decline in standard of living	I remember when Canadian bankers, the federal government along with the Business Council on National Issues were all busy laying out a promotional economic agenda to improve average productivity and therefore overcome the progressive decline in Canada's standard of living relative to the United States.
low wages higher unemployment	What a non sense! You have all these rich guys wrapping themselves in the Canadian flag and vowing to work hard to overcome the United States' standard of living by supporting higher average productivity and the byproduct of low wages and higher unemployment. Then we have these same rich people telling us that the health care system needs both more federal money and privatization.
evolving for the worse	I am going to explain my truth in what is wrong with our social and economic system. We must all know that in a supposed democratic society social and economic changes don't occur overnight, rather they evolve and they evolve either for the better or for the worse for people at large. In the last twenty years our social and economic systems evolved for the worse as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
concentration of wealth	We have already written about the disparity of wealth in the United States as the financial wealth of the top one percent of households now exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent. And we have the development of a similar trend in Canada where the poorest ten percent of family units have negative average wealth or more debts than assets. On the other hand, the richest 20 percent of family units own 72 percent of the $420 billion in registered savings plans, 94 percent of the $92 billion in stocks outside the registered savings plans, and 81 percent of the $80 billion in mutual and investment funds outside the registered savings plans.
full employment	We must reverse this trend where the rich get richer, and we must stop the deceptive talks of our rich bankers, politicians and gurus who continue to preach the ever continuing growth of both the GDP and average productivity. Why not talking about living wages and full employment instead?
	Mario deSantis
References:
	Ownership Statistics: Why a Shared Capitalism is Needed Shared Capitalism Institute http://www.sharedcapitalism.org/scfacts.html
	Kerstetter,Steve, Wealth Inequality in Canada, , December 2002, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, http://www.policyalternatives.ca
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