These jobs aren't being lost to help the four people. They're being lost to directly benefit large corporations bottom lines. These cutbacks are a DIRECT result of Harper big business tax cuts.

I've already explained this to you, and this gentleman has as well. You're either mentally handicapped or deliberately astro turfing. Given the Harper Conservatives propensity for astro turfing I'm going to assume the latter.

Public sector jobs, as I have mentioned, directly cause wealth redistribution with a VERY long tail trickle down due to the generally high paying nature of these jobs. Any cuts in this sector cannot and will not be replaced, and neither will the trickle down losses.

Its an instant blow to the jobs market for which there is no "the free market will save us!" solution. People will lose their houses, an already soft housing market will crash altogether in some places. Construction companies start closing their doors because of it. Car sales go down, everything decreases. So-called tax "overhead" from the government actually turns into a very elaborate wealth redistribution system that partially drives the economy.

No, deficit spending is not good. Yes there is a happy medium. We've had that happy medium in Canada for years. Why would you try to fix something that isn't broken?

There is one simple answer: You wouldn't. Harper is doing this purely for his own and his rich friends benefit.

Large companies do not spend their tax savings. Its a proven fact. If you believe otherwise you are deluding yourself.

The reason for these cuts are the tax cuts that Harper IS CONTINUING to put into place that are costing the country over 4 billion year over year in revenue since the GST tax cut in 07, and an additional 6 billion per year in tax cuts since he got his majority government, and that figure is growing. The entire current deficit is due to Harpers tax cuts and guess what? The corporations aren't making new jobs. They're spending the money to off shore jobs. Why the hell do some Canadians continue to support this fraud of a government?

We are seeing the country sold down the river so fast that its actually alarming.

Good luck with keeping those rights. Harper is on a war path attempting to get rid of them. He's pushing shit through at such a rate that some of it isn't even making the news because some other issue that he's trying to ram through at the same time is eating all of the air time.

He's planning on reducing the ENTIRE FEDERAL EMPLOYEE BASE by 30%. Enough to cause a fucking recession on its own since the Feds are the largest single employer in the country.

Mod this up.

I tend to think for myself, which actually leads me to a slight democratic slant overall but in general if you took everything I say together I'm pissing off both sides.

As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and is likely to make a lot of people uncomfortable.

It depends which industry you are in. I tend to have seen the largest difference largely because I've worked mainly in retail and construction. When you have guys whose backs gave out years ago out-pacing the new generation, its fucking sad.

Also the guys in thier mid to late 20's were good. 10 years ago. Now you get decent work out of guys in their late 20s, and theres a steep steep drop off at 25 and below. The number keeps going up year after year. Its not at a 1:1 rate but its close to it.

If you're in a highly training intensive industry(and it sounds like you are), then the guys that you are working with have already "passed the bar" so to speak. You'll get more wheat and less chaff simply because they've gone through the work of getting there in the first place. You're getting a lot more of the guys right away that I find as a 1 in 100 to be a foreman or supervisor, or at least a guy I can count on to show up on time and actually WORK his whole shift.

Now, that said, there is also a trend in professions like accounting, IT, business management, engineering, practicing law and more to lose all work ethic for the last 5-10 years before they retire at 60. That is largely because these guys are financially secure at this point, probably have nice big golden parachutes against getting fired(Fire me? Big whoop. I have over 2 years worth of severance pay coming in a big cheque if you do. I'll just retire early.), and couldn't give a rats ass anymore. A total lack of motivation to work comes from... them really not having any motivation to keep working.

If they're close enough to retirement they even start trying to find ways to get fired without a cause that breaks their parachute agreement so that they can cash it out.

Um. Right.

Have you looked at a chart of JUST the bush tax cuts? And where the country would have been without them?

The national debt would have been reduced to a point where some additional temporary tightening of belts in some areas, starting of new interstate highway build & repair projects, plus the government buying the bad mortgages would have mostly halted the recession in its tracks and gotten a lot of people out of trouble.

Did you even realize that your third biggest budget item is the interest on your fucking debt?

We have a similar problem happening with Harper in Canada right now as you had with Bush. He's currently talking about cutting the largest single employer in the countries work force by 30% to fix it(Yes, the Federal Government). Which alone will cause another recession in large portions of Canada. In particular in the already devastated Ontario province which hasn't even begun to recover from the last swath of destruction cut through its large manufacturing centers by the collapse of the U.S. economy.

This is all to maintain tax cuts that are saving his big business buddies billions while saving the average Canadian less than $200 a year.

It may have been said, but its never been more true.

I'm a manager, and I'm having to hire fucking 50-60 year olds because they CAN WORK HARDER than the 15-20 year olds that apply for the same damn job.

I'm sorry, but in no place did I blame the kids. Every single thing I mentioned can in no reasonable way be misinterpreted as me claiming that it is the fault of the kids. I apologize if you have a reading comprehension failure, but everything in there is directly the fault of the parents. No, I'm not blaming the politicians at all, you would be right about that, but it is because the responsibility ultimately lies with the PARENTS for electing them and THEN putting up with bullshit.

I had more free time in school than kids these days would have, and I learned more than they seem to be learning these days. My parents had less free time than I had, but they learned more than I did. The problem is they've confused quality with quantity and are trying to force quantity to suffice for a continuing degradation of quality. My parents got quantity AND quality and were better off for it. I got a very slightly reduced quality with a moderate amount less quantity but students these days are getting quantity, quantity, quantity, and the quality has gone straight out the window.

A lot of our problem in my opinion is that our current notion of high school is fantastically out of check with the reality that it needs to serve. You learn more slowly as you get older, and yet we're waiting until these kids brains have matured to the point where absorbing new information is incredibly time consuming before we allow them to even start the beginnings of a career path. Most of our secondary education is pretty great, but its not getting to the kids at the proper age.

Also, I don't know where the hell you live, but where I am the kids growing up today are a mixed bag, as they have always been. What I do see that frightens me is a lot of young VERY intelligent minds going to absolute waste due to a failure of parents and the education system that is supposed to support them.

I don't put on any rose-tinted glasses, but more kids are becoming lazy, again, through no fault of their own. I know we had the same sort of slackers when I was going to school, but in my day it was 3-5 per class of 25-30. Now its 8-10 per class of 25-30, and sadly a good number of that 8-10 would likely have been at or near the top of their class 20 years ago.

If you don't believe me, go ask any teacher thats been teaching for more than 20 years. All these changes that are ruining generations started in the 80's and mostly came to full culmination and penetration in the late 90's/early 00's.

Parents DO need to have some of the answers, but not many people can either a) have all of the answers in memory or b) create an answer out of thin air that relays satisfactorily.

Unfortunately due to the way we reproduce and the relatively random expressions of certain genes you can frequently end up with a situation where the child is so much smarter than the adult that the adult simply cannot answer all of their questions. In this case the adults only option is to eventually fall back on the "mystical force" or "just because I said so dammit". Giving up and giving in to the child is the worst possible option, but one that happens unfortunately frequently. Some of this is also some of what used to be called "lip" and warranted corporal punishment in some homes. While I'm not a fan of large amounts of corporal punishment in raising a child, in some cases it is warranted, and given whats been happening generation over generation with work ethic in most western countries you can't say that it didn't have an extremely good effect on work ethic.

That said, I was in the same boat as you, and have an IQ north of 170, which is easily 40 points + higher than either of my parents. I could speak fluently in full sentences by the time I was two and remember most things from the time I could walk at 9 months old.

The majority of people couldn't and still can't answer my questions. This is just a fact of life that you're going to have to learn to live with. Not everyone either a) obsesses about having the answers or b) is intelligent enough to just have most of them for everyday things.

The trick here is trust. My parents were infuriating because they never gave me enough answers to ever make me trust them. They didn't even TRY to give me the answers in most cases, and it was blatantly obvious.

My grandfather on the other hand did. I still have no problems doing what he wants me to do, because if he can explain something at all, he will, and if he can't explain it, I can trust that it just needs to be done and that I'll either find out or figure out on my own the why of it later.

Your view is entirely naive as #1 it won't work on a lot of people because even after it is explained, a lot of folks with iq's south of 110-120 ish won't understand WHY it is in their self-interest. Not to mention the social ramifications of societies entirely focused on self-interest are being felt world-wide, most notably in the largest collapsing economy in history, the United States of America. Your approach, while I find is actually recommended in some childrens books etc, is extremely flawed, and entirely the wrong way to go about child-rearing as a blanket approach.

P.S. Yes, I know some of this is a generalization, and IQ is NOT a perfectly accurate measure of, well, anything, its just the only semi-accurate one I have to hand.

Actually I believe you're both wrong.

Also you're both mostly right.

A childs /NEEDS/ should be paramount. The problem is the bubble wrapping and the catering to the childs /WANTS/.

You know something I noticed not too long ago? A lot of children these days simply have no concept of "need". If they don't "want" to do something they won't, and see no reason they should. For instance if they don't "want" to do their school work, many of them won't. Its really quite simple, and while anecdotal to some extent, my experience with children recently has shown me that simply understanding that things that "need" to happen simply must, are the ones that are thought well of and have good work ethic.

For instance, the trash needs to be taken out. They want to have ice cream. Also a constant rewarding of needed doings with wanted items creates a similar problem.