Pie for the rich,
crow for you and me

Dp REAL, unqualified af-
fluence — an abundance of
wealth — exist in Can-

ada?

You bet your sweet tooth it
does. But only for a few. These
are the top money makers in our
country: the owners and con-
trollers of wealth.

They make sure they get a
hefty slice of the nation’s
wealth. And they make sure,
through the ever-increasing
growth of monopolies, that few,
if any, of the rest of us get a
bite of their slice.

Let’s examine how many
Canadians make how much. In-
come tax and labor force statis-
tics are useful for this purpose.
They give these startling results:
In 1961, of a total of 5,366,977
wage and salary earners, a little
more than 1.4 million did not
earn enough to pay any income
tax.

Of those that did pay taxes,
some 573,000 earned less than
$2,000.

This meant that almost two
million wage and salary earners,
or 37 percent of the total, either
did not earn enough to pay in-
come tax, or earned less than
$2,000 a year.

At the other extreme, only 95
persons made $200,000 a year or
more, while only another 507
made $100,000 or more. This
was .01 percent of all wage and
salary earners.

Making from $25,000 up to
$100.000 were 18,730 persons,
or a little more than one-half of
one percent of wage and salary
earners.

and the rest of us pay more in-

. come tax.

In fact, the tax figures. for
those in the $25,000-and-up
category don’t tell nearly the
whole story. They exclude the
lavish expense accounts open to
top executives.

A brief prepared by the Unit-
ed Electrical Workers’ union,
and presented to the royal com-
mission on taxation last year,
estimated expense accounts to
total $500 million a year. The
fact that this source of income
does not have to be declared
meant a tax loss of $125 million.

Had the $125 million been col-
lected in taxes, it could have
meant either a reduction in
taxes for the lower income
brackets or a significant expan-
sion of social security measures.

Another way the big boys
prosper is in the fact there is no
tax on capital gains — a device
used by our financiers to further
line their pockets.

Neither expense account liv-
ing nor capital gains are a pos-
sibility for us “average” wage
earners. So the rich get richer

Where does the money for
the rich come from? Out of
profits of course. And the rich
have never had it better, as a-
glance at the profit report of
any big company will show.

An examination of corpora-
tion profits for just the past five
years shows they have grown
steadily. They were almost $1.7
billion for the year in 1958. In
1962 they were almost $2.1 bil-
lion. And they ranged upward
between these figures in the in-
tervening years.

Last year they were still
going up. They were more than
$1.6 billion for the first nine
months of 1963, compared with
$1.5 billion in the first nine
months of the preceding year.

These profit figures don’t in-
clude depreciation allowances,
now at a fabulous rate. Because
of continuing plant expansion,
the corporations continue to en-
joy these allowances, and the
tax rate they should be paying
continues to lag behind.

And where do the profits
come from? Out of the sweat
and toil of the rest of the wage
and salary earners — the work-
ing people of this country.

This is the basic injustice of
the capitalist way of life.

Next time an eminent banker
or big industrialist makes a
speech warning us we're “Jiving
beyond our means” in our “af-
fluent” society, and exhorting
us to “tighten our belts,” ask
him if he’s prepared to do the
same.

AST YEAR Joe made $5,718.
This is better than average
wages for a worker—but at

the end of the year Joe found
himself one year older and
deeper in debt.

How come? Let Joe tell it.

“I’m 30 years old, married,
with four children. I’ve~ been
working 14 years in one shop.
No layoffs, no time lost. Yet I
haven’t been able to get ahead
financially — I have to run like
hell to keep from slipping back.”

Joe brought out a piece of
paper on which he had scrawled
down his expenses for the year
in round figures:

Taxes $ 554
Hospital insurance 50
Unemployment insurance 50
Auto & personal ins. 238
Union dues and
pension fund
Medical bills (cash)
Rent and taxes
Heat (gas)
Phone
Food
Car maintenance
Gas and oil
Hydro and water
Clothes

“Add it up,’ said Joe, “The
total comes to $5,542, leaving
me (theoretically) the sum of
$176 to buy smokes, the odd
bottle of whiskey and a few
cases of beer, and pay for a
holiday.

“Hell, it’s
year I had to
my bank to i
week’s holiday W!
we parked the
in-laws. d

to go to a pla
town. Most of 0

at home or at som
place,. where WE yo”

drinks, dance ail

“Ym buying 4
me $13,000, and I
$11,000, I own an

nov” ha
still “eet

t affluend

Today's instan

AN A MAN end up owing
$2,250 plus seven percent
interest a year (another

$157.50) after putting into his
ocket an actual borrowed sum
of $1,430.50?

Apparently he can. This is
how things stood after a mort-
gage loan concluded Sept. 3,
1959, between Ralph Douglas
Sampson and Barfried Enter-
prises Ltd.

How can a family lose a stove,
refrigerator and television after
making payments on them for a
year and a half? It happened to
a Toronto family whose bread-
winner also had his wages gar-
nisheed five times and lost a job.

These true incidents illustrate
what can happen when you
dream the dreams of the
Joneses, but have to make ends
meet on the $60 or $70 weekly
salary of Mr. Ordinary Joe. They
are the sordid sides of a fantas-
tic fairytale of affluence tied to
a soaring castle of consumer
credit.

Is credit buying the key to in-
-stant affluence — an Aladdin’s
lamp that lets us enjoy things

we might never possess if we
had to buy now, consume later?

-Or is our complicated, over-
extended credit system really a
time bomb waiting to explode,
tearing apart our illusions and
leaving us staring in fright into
the gaping jaws of a dragon —
Depression?

The extent of the credit way
of life is revealed by the recent
estimate that only one in 10
Canadians is living on a “pay as
you go’ basis. For the nine
tenths caught in the credit whirl
(some would call it a whirlpool),
the real question is not whether
they can live better on credit—
but how they can manage to get
by any other way.

For example, Gwyn Williams,
reporter for the Toronto Tele-
gram, last year wrote: “Spokes-
men for banks, insurance com-
panies and finance houses em-
phasize that it is single people
and families whose children
have grown up that do the vast
majority of saving. Young fami-
lies can’t afford to save.”

In the Depression Thirties
many Canadians may have

March 20, 1964—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 6

thought themselves lucky when
they had food, clothing and a
roof over their heads. In the Six-
ties that yardstick is outdated.
Today, a TV, refrigerator, a
reasonably comfortable dwell-
ing, an education for the off-
spring, some cultural pleasures
and probably an automobile are
necessities of life.

Unfortunately, our steam-
engine-age incomes, while higher
than at any time in history, are
still not geared to satisfy the
needs of a rocket-age standard
of living.

A government official in On-
tario has estimated that the in-
come of the average bread-
winner supporting an average
family of five is $4,000 to $4,500.
This family has a hard time ac-
quiring the necessities of the
Sixties.

Marcel Caron, an executive
officer of the Federation des
Caisses Populaires Desjardins,
explained the situation this way:

“The average working man’s ~

wage in Quebec is $4,200, but
the image presented on tele-
vision is that of a $6,000 life. He

is being crushed between this
image and his salary.”

To live up to this $6,000
image, Canadians have put
themselves into hock to the tune
of about $5 billion for autos,
washing machines, television
sets, furniture and all the other
consumer goods. They have

~ mortgaged homes and property

for another $8 billion.

Here is a picture of some of
that debt:

@ Bank loans or finance com-
pany contracts have helped to
pay for more than 80 percent of
the autos bought so far in the
1960’s. In December, 1961, $47
million was owed on oil com-
pany credit cards — a monthly
carbon-monoxide headache for
motorists.

e@ Evenly divided among the
two million Canadian homes
built since 1935, our $8 billion
in outstanding residential mort-
gages would mean $4,000 is still
owing on every single one of
these homes. This is one way of
looking at our mortgage debt.

e@ Even the government has

come up with a ©

swer to high-fly!
fees — a “learn 1°
plan. The proposé
to students may
the heat off high
they graduate,