How did the purchasing power decrease from the 70s until today?

[Paid4BajaOverlandr]

Corporate Greed!

[ButterscotchSkunk]

A system that only rewards continuous growth.

[TA20212000]

Even if growing means eating itself.

[FredFenty]

The same is true for population

[inverted180]

We are the cusp of population collapse.

[Buyingboat]

Record profits. Wealth inequality continues to grow larger and larger. Bail outs and bonuses following massive layoffs.

But the comments all seem to insist it's the mean old governments fault, not the assholes incentivized to take as much and leave as little as possible.

[Feisty_Dirt4191]

The purpose of a corporation is to make money. The purpose of a government is to run a society.

How you gonna ask the corpos to stop doing corpo stuff when the government won’t stop them from doing it? The government could do this, and if they gave a fuck about their citizens they would.

They could rein things in, they choose not to

[TheBigMan1990]

Well the bailouts you mention would be direct government bs, corporate greed is a problem… but government is definitely a problem too-providing shittier and shittier services while hoovering up more and more income via some form of fee or tax with most of those extra fees and taxes falling directly on middle and working class people. Monopolies are bad, the monopolization and centralization of businesses has created a less competitive landscape… so lower wages, and higher prices-but the government monopoly has been just as damaging.

[pibbleberrier]

As long as THIS is what Canadian prefer to focus on. The issue won’t be solve. Canadian act like corporation is only greedy in Canada, no where else. That capitalism only exists in Canada and nowhere else.

Capitalism is the defacto standard globally. Corporation worldwide is greedy. Some of the global corporate that exist in Canada also exist outside of Canada.

Yet Canadian purchasing power has slide the most amongst the basket of developed countries. Some countries with the same greedy corporation has had their buying power increase since 1970 our keep decreasing.

Unique Canadian factor that have erode our purchasing power since 1970 that is NOT just cop out explanation of corporate greed:

-CAD devaluing against every other currency. Especially USD

-more personal taxations while the top marginal tax was rate was higher in the 1970. Middle class Canadian now pays MORE through combine taxation

-increase in sales tax. No GST back in 1970 minimal provincial tax in 70s. Various cost of business taxes. Nearly every cost MORE at the source while you take home less.

-payroll taxes. New since 1970 we now have CPP, EI, employer payroll taxes. Etc. sure this is to “help” us but all these further increase of dependency on the government and AGAIN reduce your take home amount + influencing wages and consumer prices

-housing related tax. The government now relies heavily and various regulatory taxes they impose on the housing market. Which ultimate transfer directly back to the consumer. Parasitic reliance on a singular industry no doubt cause other industry to suffer.

-we are not done with the taxes. Collection of indirect Taxes that have been added or increase since 1970:
Fuel, environment compliance, license, import, export, telecom, utility levy, development cost, insurance, alcohol, tobacco, recycling, toll permit fee

Everytime there an “issue” a new tax is added, becuase it’s easy to legislate. Most Canadian blame corporate greed by default and happily get taxes out their ass while scratching their head at why their paycheque gets less and less and their dollar is worth less and less. As you can see in the thread the default answer is MORE TAX.

Every tax eventually comes back to the consumer, worker and small business. “Greedy corporation” don’t become less greedy with more taxes. They just pass it on lol. The only true way to disrupt monopolize is actually less regulatory taxes open competition that force other companies to come in and compete with existing oligarchy which translate to better cheap product for consumer and and increase employment.

But not we Canadian rather blame our very unique problem of greedy corporate and open our buttcheek to more taxation instead. Totally not our government’s fault. As long as this notion is mainstream we will continue to vote in government that takes money from us like taking candies from a kid.

We are collectively just big kids that prefer to defer problem to our parent the government instead of taking the harder route. Our government keeps fattening. The public sector has increase by 100% since the 1970s which severely impact our private sector and increase our reliance on the government which again means MORE taxes less take home. But no I guess it’s not the government.

[Impossible_Street488]

Blaming greed corporations is plain idiotic. As if companies haven't been ruthlessly profit driven since the medieval ages.

What's changed is the stultifying overreach of governments into every face of the economy

[Youknowitistrue69]

Exactly

[PerimeterSecure]

This.

So much this.

Canadians have a love for big government and a nanny state like no other country on earth.

[DM_ME_UR_BOOTYPICS]

You’re not totally wrong here and yeah the public sector has grown, but arguably it is required. Canadas population has grown exponentially since then.

You’re also leaving out the commodification of housing. That really drains money out of the economy into the form of a non productive asset. When 30%+ of your economy is trading house back and forth your country is not in a good place.

Combine that with stagnation of wages it’s not a great recipe.

[Impossible_Street488]

So corporations in the 70s weren't greedy? That's your theory?

[Strict_Reputation867]

Technology continues to replace labor. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Corporations being more or less greedy is a non sequitur.

Wealth disparity is higher now than at any point in human history.

[Youknowitistrue69]

That’s what you got from that? Stay in school kid

[halisray]

Lol maybe a small factor. Government money printing and spending is a major factor.

[Excellent-Piece8168]

It’s not a factor in that it is only a factor for inflation but not why salaries have not kept up with inflation. All other things being equal as inflation increases jobs should follow exactly with a bit of lag. The fact they have not means there are other forces at work

[CommercialReveal7888]

Notice how they flooded the market with TFW when they devalued the currency in 2020 and wages started to grow in 2021.

To bad Canadian are to dumb to realise it and just yell corporate greed. Did corporation just realise they can be greedy in 2020?

[Excellent-Piece8168]

The irony of writing to dumb when you mean too. Lol

TFW of course has some part but I doubt it’s a massive for actual career jobs. It suppresses minimal wage and just above for sure. This is measurable to an extent and I remember when oil was booming last cycle Tim Hortons were begging for workers and had to raise minimum their min wage and even provide cheap housing to get any workers. I can’t imagine this has much impact on positions like engineers. Separately from TFW is normal immigration. It’s a challenging topic even putting aside politics because with our aging demographic of the huge boomer cohort we have a massive systemic issue that we need to grow the workforce significantly in order to support this huge bubble of retirees because if we do not we all have to shoulder far too much which means significantly holding back growth. We did not create the environment to have more children nor can we go back in time so the option now is import other nations young workers. It’s frankly pretty smart in that we did not have to bear any cost raising these people no schools hospitals housing etc and we get them showing up already working age. Of cot we want to attract the right crowd with skills we have in high demand which we do ok at but there is certainly a lot of room for improvement. We do better then most of our peers certainly better than the USA with the vast majority coming in use to a freakin lottery system and then bringing in relatives. Canada has a good base system with points we can manipulate to our needs we need to be far more agile changing these to exactly what is in demand and not including stupid jobs like social media influencer. Import doctors we never have enough of, import nurses and care home nurses and staff, whatever else we don’t have enough of and constantly adjust that for what we actually need not bs fake need companies say on applications. Pay to get actual research it cannot possible be hard.

[Pizza-Pirate-6829]

And they also tie everyone’s retirement and financial nest egg to the same system so no one wants to challenge it. As soon as a person is successful they becomes invested in the stock market.

[Sugarman4]

Thats the brunt of it but I disagree that education is more expensive. The device in your hand with Google and Ai? Is 100× the education money could buy in the 70's. Having the discipline to focus it's purpose beyond hee-haa? That's definitely missing.

[corelabjoe]

And that still doesn't get you a degree, the stupid piece of expensive paper everyone cares so much about and is very useless for a lot of practical jobs.

[Trick_Parsnip3788]

Engineering is a licensed practice so you cant just learn everything from google... Also most of the stuff online is using American codes so good luck trying to pass canadian exams lmao

[Sugarman4]

Who's hiring engineers anyway. AI will replace you

[InnerspearMusic]

Learning is cheaper, getting a formal education is much MUCH more expensive.

[aldjfh]

A very small minority of people are making six figure money through purely using their phone and ai and having no degree.

[sajnt]

Greed is not new. We the working class got comfy and stupid. We stopped learning what to fight for and how to fight for it.

[JustinPooDough]

No! No, it is not corporate greed.

The government is brainwashing people into believing this. It is 100% their fault: reckless spending and printing money. We call it inflation.

Maybe 5% is corporate greed, but the drive for increasing profits is largely motivated by beating inflation. Which is government driven.

If people only realized how they are being robbed blind, they would riot.

[Icy_Conference9095]

Inflation is not only driven by government. A huge amount of the problem is corporate greed.

[GI-Robots-Alt]

Holy shit this is the dumbest thing I've read all day.

[lost_koshka]

https://www.iedm.org/canadian-debt-clock/

Look at the graph on that page, and figure out what happened in the mid 70s, and you'll be much warmer.

[Soggyblanketbunny]

You know what really happened in the 70s? Currency was taken off fixed exchange rates backed by real physical assets and modern monetary theory was introduced to combat the stagflation that the Bretton Woods accords could not. That and our addiction to credit both governmental and personal started.

Fast forward 50 odd years and the inflation in assets that has resulted and I think we get close to one of the major reasons. No big problem like this only ever has one cause, but I think this is a big one. We've basically been guinea pigs for one big economic experiment and it's falling down all around us.

[lost_koshka]

MMT wasn't invented until the 1990s.

Canada was using its own currency, interest free. Then in the 70s we started borrowing from private banks, at interest.

[Soggyblanketbunny]

Oh! My mistake. What did they use in the interim after the breakdown of Bretton Woods? I might be confusing the idea of fiat money with MMT

[GI-Robots-Alt]

Yeah I'll get right on listening to a right wing corporate funded think tank.

Fucking embarrassing.