I am a senior citizen on a fixed pension subsidized by our savings and I don’t have a problem with that. Before this goes to print, I’ll be 78 and I worked until I was 74. I worked this long because I didn’t want to depend on government to take care of my wife and me, to keep our lifestyle and because I could.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have this ability or privilege.
Every year our property taxes go up, our utilities go up, the bus fees go up and the city keeps spending more money on things that should not be in their horizon like chicken gate and bicycle lanes that weren’t thought out at all and cost us over a million dollars.
On top of all the increases, our power and natural gas rates usually go up, as do our insurance, car gas and groceries. There is no end to price increases and no increase to pensions either when you are retired.
To add insult to injury, our various levels of government just keep increasing their entitlements and lavish spending (sick joke); they claim it is on our behalf.
The crap by all levels of government, federal, provincial and civic, saying that “Keeping seniors in their homes is a priority” is a load of brown bananas. With all these cost increases, many seniors don’t have the financial resources to absorb these cost and are being forced out of their homes.
Low-income earners can’t afford to send their children out to play organized sports because some don’t handle their finances properly but mostly because they just can’t afford to send them to organized sports, it’s too expensive. If all the children could go to organized sports, our facilities would have to be doubled. This way we have graffiti, loitering, petty thefts, hanging out, drugs and getting into trouble and tying up our court system, which is another joke.
What a poor variety of choices.
More thought and planning is required for the low-income earners and their children. A society doesn’t exist only on doctors, lawyers, judges and wealthy CEOs, it also needs the low-income wage earners to sweep floors, clean bathrooms, shovel dirt snow gravel etc., and the labour and trades people to do the construction. We don’t need engineers and scientists to do these menial tasks that are also important to all of our well being.
Healthy children are tired of watching TV, playing video games, go to school and home again and repeat the same agenda day after day and year after year. Is that all the life we can give for our young, healthy, energetic children? If that’s the best we can offer, then we have failed as adults, parents and society.
Please tell us seniors and low-income earners where we are to get the extra money to cover these annual expense increases. I’m sure that those who are still working would be happy to give their children more education and choices, and to put more money away for their retirement if their wages were better.
E.T. (Tom) Skoreyko
Red Deer