To the Editor,
Re: Someone has to pay for increased disability benefits, Letters, Aug. 11.
This person saying negative and ignorant things about the disabled is appalling. We are disabled persons and we haven’t had a raise in nine or 10 years.
We don’t get enough money for our rent and we are cut money because we are a couple by about $300 a month which the government says two can live cheaper than one. We are law-abiding, taxpaying citizens. The raise includes we have to pay $104 a month for our bus passes for two people, leaving us with a $50 raise for the both of us which isn’t much. There is no free social housing and we aren’t in subsidized housing. There are disabled Canada pension plans and are you against those too?
You try to live on social housing and social innovation benefits from the provincial government and see how far it goes for you.
Donna NordstromNanaimo
To the Editor,
Re: Someone has to pay for increased disability benefits, Letters, Aug. 11.
I do understand what the writer is saying, but I’ve been on both sides of this issue. For many years I was a responsible wage earner and I paid my taxes like everyone else. But I came from a severely fractured, broken family. My mother had schizophrenia and my father spent his off-hours lost in a bottle of booze. I married a wonderful man in my late 20s and several years later he was killed by a drunk driver.
I haven’t worked from that day to this. When my insurance money ran out, I applied for support. I retreated, not trusting anyone. When you’ve never really had anyone to turn to, or rely on, life becomes a burden, and often overwhelming. I’ve been on anti-depressant medication for over two decades now.
I’m now on federal income through OAS and CPP and my life has financially improved somewhat and it’s made life more tolerable, but never assume that these people are using the system and getting loads of freebies. You’d never want to live in the circumstances I’ve lived in. I have bedbugs, and my kitchen floor tiles contain asbestos. The police are routinely called out to my apartment complex because of violence, drugs and domestic disturbances.
I’d really like to ask you to live for six months in my shoes and then write your letter to the editor.
Catherine MelnykNanaimo
To the Editor,
Re: Someone has to pay for increased disability benefits, Letters, Aug. 11.
The letter, in the course of fretting over the growing financial burden being placed on him/her by the social needs of others, asks, “Where do you think all this money comes from?”
The simple answer is, the same place all money comes from in a world in thrall to notion of privately created fiat currency: out of thin air, courtesy of the ‘magic’ of banking legerdemain.
As a fiction of law, money, in reality, has only the substance of the government-authorized legal ether it’s drawn from, although, existing as a debt instrument which we’re all taught to worship and revere, it is an extraordinarily effective vehicle for the transfer of wealth from one to another as it doesn’t matter if a loan is privately or publicly incurred, the money to pay the interest and banking charges lenders append to loans, yet never create, must flow from others, through the borrower, by way of wages, commerce and/or taxation, to the lender. Thus it is, as the Duchess tells us, “the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours;” thus it is that money, as long as the ‘laws’ governing its creation insist it be allowed as a debt instrument, rather than make the world go round, will continue to systematically undermine the economic foundations of all social order; and thus it is that we should expect to feel burdened by the needs of neighbours as our assets, both public and private, disappear.
David S. DunawaySouth Wellington
