“We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.
…
“There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.”
The Ontario Liberals may have come to power on a slogan of helping “working families,” but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the new Liberal credo is “make the middle class pay” — for everything.
You only have to look at this week’s announcement from Universities Minister Mary Anne Chambers that in future, refugee claimants will be eligible for OSAP.
Meanwhile, if you’re middle class, if your combined family income is more than $54,000, you don’t qualify.
But for those who do qualify for the program, the amount parents are expected to pay towards OSAP is almost halved — to $730 a year. So if you’re a refugee claimant, or anyone else who qualifies for the program you could end up paying $730 a year in tuition — even for a de-regulated course that could cost more than $10,000 in tuition to the rest of us paying the full freight.
But what if the refugee claimant leaves the province before paying off the student loan? What if he or she is ultimately refused?
Either way, it’s a potential double-whammy for average working stiffs. First, they don’t get student assistance for their children. Second, they could be helping to subsidize unpaid balances left behind by refugee claimants or others who default on their loans.
If Chambers had wanted to help the middle class, she would have increased the amount parents are allowed to make and still qualify for OSAP.
It’s the same with expensive drug therapies. If you get cancer, you’d better go on welfare. That way, you’ll have your drugs paid for by the government. Since you won’t have to pay taxes any more, you’ll sleep better.
Middle class? Go into debt or rely on the charity of friends and neighbours to raise the cash for your treatment in the U.S.
We couldn’t do the sensible thing and allow private insurance companies to offer insurance for catastrophic drug claims, because that would be counter to the Canada Health Act, which decrees that no one in this country may pay for health care.
Unless, of course, you’re very rich, in which case you go south to Buffalo or Cleveland for treatment.
It’s the same with the government’s decision to buy out the seven private MRI and CT clinics. Forget the rhetoric about two-tier health care. No one paid cash to use these clinics. It was paid for with your OHIP card, the way you pay for other diagnostic tests in private clinics. This government is so ideologically driven, however, that it will spend our precious health dollars buying real estate.
Meanwhile, the new OHIP premium imposed by the Liberals disproportionately hurts the middle class. Those on welfare — who are getting their medication paid anyway — don’t pay anything.
But the richer you are, the lower percentage of your income you’ll pay. If you make $30,000 a year you’ll see your taxes rise a whopping 23%. If you make $50,000, your taxes still go up a hefty 13%. But if you make more than $200,000, you will pay the maximum of $900 — a 2% hike — chump change for someone in that tax bracket.
And what are they spending all that health premium money on? Why, they’re buying private MRI clinics that were doing a perfectly fine job in the first place.
To add insult to injury, provincial judges are getting a massive 21% pay hike that will cost taxpayers $30 million over three years. (In a news story yesterday, I erroneously reported the amount was $5 million a year.) Okay, it’s not the Liberals’ fault that the commission that sets judges salaries recommended the outrageous increase. And they did appeal the decision.
But they’re asking nurses and hospital staff to hold the line on pay increases — while judges get a $30 million hike?
Even the education tax credit for private schools which the Liberals canned — retroactively — hurt middle class parents. The vast majority were people who gave up vacations, second cars and other luxuries to send their children to private religious schools.
Sure, it was spun as a hand-out to the rich, but the fact is the rich didn’t want, need or care for the credit. Cancelling it mainly hurt low-income and, yes, middle class working people who stretched themselves to the limit to give their youngsters a good start.
Middle class? Over-taxed and under-serviced? It’s a new club.
Come on in and make yourselves comfortable.
You could be here for a long time.
Duke University freshmen will be getting a brand new 20Gb iPod loaded with all kinds of useful information like orientation schedules, calendars, campus tours and the Duke fight song.
How nice that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government wants to buy out seven private MRI and CT clinics across Ontario. Now for the big questions.
How much is it going to cost us and how will it improve public access to MRI and CT scans?
As a health ministry spokesman noted yesterday, these clinics aren’t like those in Alberta and Quebec where you can buy your way to the front of the line.
In Ontario that would be (and always has been) seen as a violation of the Canada Health Act.
The province doesn’t allow it. So what we really have here is an ideological move dressed up as a promise to improve the public’s access to health care, which it won’t.
McGuinty did promise in the last election to bring these clinics into the public fold. But to do it, he’s going to use the proceeds from a broken election promise, the one he made about not raising our taxes. Instead, he’ll use a portion of the billions he’s raising from that new health tax he imposed on us on July 1, to buy out these clinics.
Ironically, it was a previous Grit government that established the legal basis for these clinics in the first place.
As Conservative leadership contender John Tory noted yesterday, then premier David Peterson’s Liberal government passed the Independent Health Facilities Act in 1988. That allowed private clinics to provide X-rays, blood work, ultrasound, etc., paid for through OHIP.
The Tories simply added MRIs and CT scans to the list.
Now, the Liberals are going to buy out the MRI and CT clinics, but not the others. What’s the point? Again, these aren’t facilities where you can use your credit card to go to the front of the line. Their services are covered by OHIP.
McGuinty’s announcement will please those who believe, purely for ideological reasons, that all health care services should be provided by the public sector. But it will not increase or improve public access to the system.
Nor will it stop “the rich” from queue-jumping, because the province doesn’t allow them to queue-jump now.
As Tory MPP Frank Klees, who’s also running for the Conservative leadership, pointed out, it seems McGuinty’s first major investment in our health care system courtesy of his new health tax, will be to make a purely ideological point about health care — public good, private bad — without making it better. Indeed, since 30% of our health system is privately funded, McGuinty, using this logic, could blow all the cash he’s raising through his new health tax, without actually improving the health system at all. Scary.
I am a computer nerd with interests in art, philosophy, music, and world domination.
I am good at the things I do, and always try to make myself better. … Also, I don’t kick puppies.
I am attracted to all sorts of girls, and prefer intelligence and sense of humor over bust size. I want someone who is confident about the stuff she knows, and interested in the things she doesn’t. You should like words, science, and video games. But you shouldn’t be ugly either. Or male. Or a zombie dragon, powerful in life, unstoppable in death.
“These are actual registered sex offenders in the state of Georgia”
“Prettiest Eyes” … killed me. And I think you’d have a hard time
finding a guy who would mind being raped by Lauren Annette Summers.
California State Education Secretary Richard Riordan found himself the subject of a planned protest and calls for his resignation after he jokingly told a child her name, Isis, meant “stupid dirty girl.”
Democratic state Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally was quoted thursday as saying the child was “a little African-American girl. Would he have done that to a white girl?” He then set about organizing a protest by civil rights organizations including the NAACP which was subsequently cancelled when they all realized that the little girl is white, with blonde hair.
Dymally’s office issued a statement Wednesday calling Riordan’s remarks “outrageous and irresponsible,” then issued another on Thursday saying, “To err is human; to forgive is divine.” He also claims, “Race is not a factor in this issue,” that Riordan had apologized a second time, and “It is time for us to move on.”
Oh, oh… he apologized twice. That was the magic number, was it? So had he only apologized once, the protest would have gone on as planned?
Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett: Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store.
