ENTITLED MUCH?
An amazing new report was published by researchers out at UBC. Some of it you already know, but together and in detail I think it packs a punch. They tell us that between 2006 and 2010 Canadians 45 and younger earned thousands less (7 to 12% less) doing the same full-time work as that same age cohort thirty years ago. The numbers show that if a 32-year-old was earning the equivalent of $39,000 in 1980, a 32-year-old doing the same work today is making only $34,000. That’s crazy. And, as you know, this is so even though these folks on average devoted years and tens of thousands of dollars more to their post secondary education.
Still more maddeningly, at the same time, a 25 to 34-year-old making median full-time earnings in 1980 had to work just five years to save a 20% down payment on an average home. By 2010, it took the same aged person ten years. (This is for the average Canadian home costing only $380,000, not the current average of a million dollars or more in our major cities.) Of course, here we are comparing pineapples to nectarines. Folks today aren’t saving for a single detached home in the city or anywhere near where they work. They simply cannot. If they haven’t given up the dream of owning entirely they’re saving for a townhouse in the suburbs. That or they’re saving twice as long, an additional five or ten years, for a small apartment. And, according to the report, in addition to working another five (or fifteen) years to save up a down payment, the typical 25 to 34-year-old today must also cover mortgage payments that are around 10% higher that their parents paid.
On top of all this, Statistics Canada shows that we’re spending around $40,000 annually on the average citizen over the age of 65 (mostly on medical expenses) while people under 45 receive less than $12,000 in support (for grade schools, post secondary medical care, childcare, parental leave, family and housing tax breaks, Employment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, etc...)
So there it is: take higher earnings (and compound that by what you know about how the nature, benefits, and entitlement of work has changed); then add to that vastly more accessible housing – from more housing stock to significantly cheaper homes (and multiply that by the fact that those homes have inflated in value, in many locations, quite literally beyond imagination); and then add to that significantly lower costs and living expenses, and fewer of them, than at the present; then take the result and add to it the fact that the state values every senior citizen at no less than three sub-seniors. Got that? Now talk to me about how younger generations are entitled.
Notice that if everyone in my age cohort or younger, at age 65, inherited two-million dollars from their parents (and almost none of them will) they would not even be able to move into the house they grew up in (the one their parents bought at age 25), nevermind recreate anything resembling the lifestyle they had. Yet without such an inheritance, even earning a wage well above the national average, the math simply does not work to allow most folks to own a home, to have a family, and to retire one day – not without moving to rural Manitoba. This is insane. We need to remedy this immediately. I don’t want to be in my sixties and find myself looking at similar numbers, showing the social and economic policy of my generation to be something tantamount to slash-and-burn, or worse: scorched-earth.
The current model doesn’t just feel unsustainable. If you take the model, established over the last thirty years, and run it out over the next thirty years, well, you simply no longer have a society. If wages are just slightly lower, house prices and mortgage rates just slightly higher, you cease to have common home ownership (and thereby wealth accumulation) and you also make it very difficult for most people to both live and work, nevermind start a family or plan for the future. In this way, you make continuity of any kind very difficult. I mean, is there any doubt that we are starving the future, not even to grow the present but just to sustain the past? Even now, what you see when you look out the window is what the slow strangulation of social and cultural suicide looks like, people.
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