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Joined 27 days ago
Cake day: March 8th, 2025
  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•What does 'middle class' mean in Canada, and who does it leave behind?English
    1·
    2 hours ago

    While there is no established, traditional definition, I’m pretty comfortable with the one I invented (claiming no originality, but so far not finding it elsewhere):

    the intersection of working class and capital class

    I think it captures the underlying idea that a middle class person is somewhere between the two real classes (rulers/owners and subjects/workers) in a way that dovetails with democratic ideals: collective self-rule/governance and economic self-determination/independence.

    Further explanation:

    To fit this definition, you need to be wealthy enough to own real assets (like your home, a small business, a farm, etc.) but you can’t be so wealthy that you (and the rest of your household) don’t need to work (unless you’ve all reached retirement age). It’s still a loose definition – does owning a car count, is a house really yours with a mortgage, etc. and why doesn’t being able to afford renting an opulent apartment count – but that’s because to me it’s not about lifestyle or social status. It’s only partly about how well your needs are met. Power coupons have real influence, but money is still only a social construct – and worse it’s based on power taken from someone else. It can and will be manipulated by those who already have the most of it. But assets and especially land have intrinsic value based on utility that cannot be indirectly manipulated; when the price of land goes up, what’s really happening is the value of money going down.

    I think the heart of the matter is, what is the nature of your stake/holdings within your own country? Do you have a form of power and agency that the political machinery must respect but does not revere? The numbers aren’t what matters and would necessarily vary wildly across the nation anyway. What matters is how vulnerable you are to the effects of wealth inequality. That vulnerability is what should be getting highlighted, and I think it captures what was on people’s minds back in the 90s as they talked about the middle class shrinking. It was not just wealth but power concentrating either on you or (far more likely) away from you.

    In capitalism, capital is the only real power and politics only a moderating force. So the health of a democracy can be measured by the distribution of power – i.e. the size of the middle class. While you can live a good life in the lower class (which may be inescapable due to such things as being disabled), it’s by the grace of whomever holds power over you or the social systems that a majority (hopefully) dictates shall respect persons rather than property and ability. The lower class has no intrinsic power, so when middle class falls below majority

    Below middle class, you are disenfranchised even if you still have a vote, because the economy sees you only as a burden and markets have no natural incentive to consider you. If you are lower class and the system hasn’t the grace to protect your interests and quality of life, that is the system’s failure. Above middle class you are privileged with the capacity to force economic changes others do not want, and on top of having a vote the political system will defer to you wherever you hold the capacity to help or harm – and ignore the voting power of your lesser opponents. That’s to say nothing of your ability to influence lower and even some middle class people to vote your interests instead of their own. If you are upper class and the system hasn’t the fortitude to both constrain and redistribute your power, that is the systemic failure that most erodes middle class power. Once middle class no longer holds the majority of power, capitalism spirals into “late stage” and steadily grows the lower class while undermining their supports.

    Middle class is where fair equity lies, by virtue of resilience against the abuses of wealth inequality. And yet though it should be as big as possible, middle class is the only one that can definitely be entirely empty.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Remember the time pp was pals with the people who wanted to hang Trudeau, burn down parliament, and overthrow the government?English
    2·
    1 day ago

    Trudeau did me a real solid by resigning. 2015 was the last time I voted Liberal and I’d since vowed never to vote for a Liberal under Trudeau again until electoral reform was delivered. If everything else today was identical but swap Carney with still Trudeau, I’d be seriously conflicted.

    I think I have a pretty even-handed opinion about him that fairly considers his strengths and failings overall. But I can never see still having FPTP as anything less than a cynical, partisan betrayal of the nation. It is the singularly important time that he chose to rule rather than represent, and by extension denied Canada our best chance to rehabilitate our own demons. Instead, the reasserted disenfranchisement powered growing anti-establishment movements that aren’t even completely wrong while they threaten our very core values.

    Addendum: to clarify, I’m not saying I think he deliberately put party over country. His choices and conclusions, however, demonstrated motivated reasoning at its finest. I think history has already proven him wrong. And while his own views evolved enough that he could acknowledge his mistake, he still didn’t try to fix it.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Carney unveils signature housing plan he says will double pace of home building in CanadaEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Aw dang, I was all set to upvote and let lie. But I feel compelled to clarify I do not blame the speculators nor the wealthy (really, I don’t), nor do I think the apparent prosperity of the 90s belies there being consistent problems going back even further than that and even just in terms of housing. A poorly engineered structure does not become flawed only as it collapses, and it was never going to end any other way. I see no reason to expect the moment it actually starts to be particularly special or interesting. If it were, I might have believed I could predict it. If I really could, there’s be good money in that.

    Ok so my rant continues for a while and it sounds like I might be preaching to the choir anyway. I’m pretty much doing it for my own benefit of getting these thoughts out at this point – so no hard feelings if you’re done. 😛

    TLDR takeaway: I concur. Hooray for building more housing – even if it’s an imperfect solution, and even if a deeper problem remains.

    the deeper problem

    Some of the debt-nervous measures I mentioned were enacted during the 80s and 90s. The averted y2k and dot-com bust that really wasn’t didn’t stop plenty of people (like practically everyone around me from about 1997 onward through the rest of high school and all of university) from accurately predicting with some detail the next two decades of downturn. Housing squeeze was already rising in the discourse then, as was the middle class marginalization via wealth drain. Maybe it runs earlier than that, but I was too young to pay attention. The only key element that to my memory was absent back then, was the use of housing as an investment vehicle being inherently problematic. Also I should acknowledge that for a lot of people the general malaise and pessimism only truly started as a fairly direct reaction to 9/11, which got rolled into their economic views.

    I don’t even blame (most of) our politicians (much). They were never in a position to dictate the world order, yet were subject to the rise of globalism and the advent of nations having to compete (sacrifice both monetarily and ecologically) for corporate participation. It was that or follow the various hard-left states that become impoverished pariahs if not outright overthrown. A major upside to potential U.S. collapse now is the possibility that the rest of the western world can collectively agree to stop doing that. It could then instead make capitalism pay-to-play with public cartels (collaborating nations) setting progressive prices that keep wealth distributed and fund kickstarting every new generation.

    What I blame is laissez faire capitalism for rewarding and thus encouraging speculation and hoarding, neoliberalism for rebranding learned collective helplessness as a virtue, and most especially the economists and capitalists whose motivated reasoning laid this system’s foundation. We (as a nation) should have forcibly maintained a balanced housing supply indefinitely, and should never have promoted homes as an investment vehicle. Middle class wealth should have been as much as possible invested into our own productivity and continued influence as shareholders. Those are maybe our own national-scale unforced errors.

    I really don’t know how it became the prevailing wisdom that we should all pour our wealth into the only physical asset that magically appreciates as it deteriorates – like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to expect.

    When I hear Carney praise the power of markets, it makes me sweat even as I know he’s still clearly the best option. It is a tremendous relief seeing this housing initiative because it rewards my hope that he’ll actually deign to put his hand on the tiller. I’m still worried this could go poorly in terms of positive effect vs reduction of public resources and future recourse, but I was/am way more worried about the consequences of not even trying.

    Even if it delivers fantastically, it won’t be enough. The natural forces that make power (of every kind, but most especially wealth) converge into few hands can only be slowed without the active management that’s impossible when neoliberalism is the world order. But who know? Maybe we can at least add a layer of financialization and abstraction that shifts the next looming collapse away from people’s homes.

    Props for finding some actually pretty good long-term data on Stats Canada, BTW. It is kind of nuts seeing all the numbers stay around roughly the same ballpark, all the way back to when we had half today’s population. Despite no major fluctuations or spikes, literally fewer housing starts in 2010 than 1970.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Carney unveils signature housing plan he says will double pace of home building in CanadaEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    According to the article you linked, there is no housing crisis, since our income has kept pace with cost of living. 🤨 I’m struggling to contradict that with hard data, but I don’t believe it for a millisecond. (Or to put it less argumentatively, I don’t understand how that data fits into the bigger picture.)

    Anecdotally, I as a very early millennial was very lucky to get my first and current house during a brief window where I’d finally mustered the means and housing prices hadn’t yet completely galloped away. That was after over a decade spending more on rent than a mortgage would cost but next to nothing on transportation, and without having children, which was an economic non-starter even if I’d wanted them. (My partner and I did lots of cycling year round and bought a cheap utility vehicle before a house only because it was a prerequisite to accessing cheaper semi-rural housing.) If I could have gotten into a house 5 years earlier, I’d have about double the net wealth today. If my parents had been able to financially support me – heck, even just house me – through university, I’d have easily been able to do just that instead of graduating with what back then seemed like a tremendous student loan debt burden. It would be quaint today.

    I view my place in history as straddling the tipping point of Canada’s cost of living (not just housing) crisis. I’ve since watched others in my same field but with a later start on life have basically no chance to advance. Their inflation-adjusted junior professional salary is similar to what mine was, but between student loans and exploding rent they’ll take even longer than I did just to be able to start saving for a down payment. By then…

    I tried to source some proper data to more clearly demonstrate my point, but when it comes to charting historical trends, I don’t think Stats Canada could be more obtuse if they tried. So I’m falling back on this confluence of formula and policy changes to vaguely gesture in the general direction of my point:

    • CPI calculation and budget recommendations that used to allocate shelter around 25% of income (early 80s) and now is at 30%
    • household debt-to-disposable-income ratio: 110% in 1999, 127% in 2007, 173.1% in 2021
    • various policy changes like reducing maximum amortization periods, the First-Time Home Buyer Incentive, or the Home Buyers’ Plan (a key reason I was able to buy a home), and the introduction of the CMHC itself – all housing market controls aimed at postponing increasingly infeasible home ownership and/or hedging against growing household debt risk

    The time span I “repurposed” before wasn’t meant (by me) to indicate a tipping point of this wealth transfer. Rather I was ballparking that as how far this housing plan could roll back the trend (which is to say not all the way, and arguably the 70s isn’t the true beginning either). Saying income has fallen behind inflation may be technically false, yet each new generation is still starting with less while their predecessor’s wealth is/was siphoned into passive income for the investors backing mortgages and then buying the houses outright from retirees left with nothing to pass onto their children. Even if income is outpacing inflation, it’s still falling short of the rate at which speculators can out-compete new generations for assets.

    Anyway, imperfect a solution as it is, I’m all for this housing initiative because a) regardless we need more housing and especially the type not being provided by the free markets, and b) it’ll disrupt the most egregious exploitation of the working class – the new generations with the least means starting out by paying high rent for the privilege of owning nothing and getting nowhere while the rich pad their war chests to snatch up even more of the finite assets.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Carney unveils signature housing plan he says will double pace of home building in CanadaEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    What changed is 20 years of incomes falling behind inflation and more wealth consolidated into the asset owning class. Generational wealth got siphoned to the 1%, leaving millennials set back and gen-z to start with nothing and their labor undervalued to boot.

    Capitalism progressed.

    With this kind of housing plan, enough real assets might be injected back into the working class (and temporarily withheld from capitalists) to roll that imbalance back two or three decades. And we’ll have about that long before we find ourselves right back here again, unless we’ve finally mustered the global solidarity to tax capital and profit enough to sustain middle class wealth and pull up anyone below middle class who’s willing and ready to accept the aid. Or at the very least, drive wages much higher, for as long as capitalists are in fact still largely dependent on human labor.

    Hopefully the big parts of Carney’s plan will be revenue-neutral (i.e. sell the houses at cost), lest next time around we find both the working class and the government wrung dry and leveraged out of options. Pessimistic as that outlook is, though, at least it buys us more time to finally agree robber barons were bad.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Carney unveils signature housing plan he says will double pace of home building in CanadaEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    Not directly, but the response is in there. Corps can buy up the houses (and easily if there’s no restriction on direct sales, which would be stupid). But they’ll be paying the mortgage and taxes whether they’ve got renters or not.

    Once demand cools, they’ll start having to rent more competitively, and be among the first to start selling holdings that don’t rent lest they lose money on the resale after competitors flooded the market.

    In my area, prudent property management businesses are already priced out by barely-wealthy individuals speculating on unbounded appreciation. On the assumption of that return – and not understanding the commitment, costs, and risks – they overbid for their chance to join the capital class, managing rental property as a side gig. They’ll be the first to fall, because they’re already just treading water or even running a deficit until either the mortgage is paid or some property incident renders them insolvent.

  • HonoredMule@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Mainstreet polling, Mar 29English
    12·
    5 days ago

    Its interesting (and not particularly surprising) that as Poilievre is cornered into distancing himself from Dumpster, some of CPC’s most recent decline matches a small PPC uptick. I’d wager that’ll continue. LPC on the other hand is riding so high they pretty much had to come down some, and where they (marginally) go next is anyone’s guess, likely mostly up to whatever minor events arise during the campaign rather than anything already set in motion.