I live in Lethbridge with my spouse and 5 of our 6 children. I’m a writer, focusing on social issues and the occasional poem. My politics are radically left. I recently finished writing a book debunking several capitalism myths. My newest book writing project is on the labour history of Lethbridge.
I’m also dichotomally Mormon. And I’m a functional vegetarian: I have a blog post about that somewhere around here. My pronouns are he/him.
When conservatives implement austerity budgets, music, art, and drama programmes are among the first casualties. When cities build an art gallery, or a theatre, or an art centre, conservatives think it’s a waste of money. When cities commission an artist to create a public art piece, conservatives complain. When arts organizations are subsidized by government funding, conservatives call it excessive.
Yet despite their hatred for the arts, they consume it every day.
A couple of years ago, the local paper ran a story with the following headline: “Low-income families not using program meant to help save for kids’ education”.
This is the thing that Conservatives and Liberals can’t seem to get through their heads. Poor people can’t afford to save. They can’t afford to spend in order to later receive a tax break. Tax breaks, top ups, matching funds—none of them help poor people because they all require poor people first spending money they don’t have: if you don’t have the money to spend, you can’t benefit from these programmes.
I decided to try a new feature here on my blog a few months ago: my most popular social media posts. Well, here’s the fifth installment:
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Billionaires steal money from workers by not paying them what they’re worth, then they hoard the money, tying it up in stocks, real estate, and other investments, which keeps that money from circulating in the economy.
You’ve probably heard people extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency, how if we work hard and pull ourselves up from the bootstraps, we can care for ourselves and mitigate the risk of unforeseen circumstances.
Here’s the problem with focusing on balanced budgets.
Balanced budgets rarely come with increased revenue, which means they must be accomplished with decreased expenses. And decreased expenses always means job losses. Because, as I’ve discussed before, everything the government spends money on creates jobs.
A couple of years ago, the City of Lethbridge was experiencing some issues with the municipal water supply and were asking residents to voluntarily conserve water.
One day, they posted an info graphic with several conservation ideas. One of them was putting off doing laundry for a day.
On 2 December 2019, Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf spoke to the Alberta legislature, saying the seemingly random rant seen below:
I decided to try a new feature here on my blog a couple of months ago: my most popular social media posts. Well, here’s the fourth installment:
To generate profit, a company must make more than it spends. It must pay their workers less money to produce a product than it charges customers who purchase that product. It must pay less for the raw materials to produce a product than it charges customers who purchase that product.