Okay, I haven’t posted ANYTHING since my intro, and after checking out my peers’ blogs, I’ve realized that I need to catch up! So here I go:
After Reading Ch. 3&4 in our textbook Social Determinants of Health, I’ve become pre-occupied with thinking about the income disparity that exists in our great nation of Canada. What struck me the most from these two chapters is:
- the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer
- the middle class is disappearing as the healthy apple shaped economy is hollowing out
- “the 246,000 privileged few who rank among the country’s richest 1% took almost a third (32%) of all growth in incomes between 1997 and 2007." (http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National%20Office/2010/12/Richest%201%20Percent.pdf)
- the government is not doing much to equalize the growing income gap as they reduce social programs such as employment insurance
- corporations have a big influence on government policy making and they see to it that they don’t lose out on their profits
- although taxation and government transfers alleviate low incomes, the major culprit is low wages
Since reading these chapters, I feel appalled that living in a country as developed as Canada, we can allow this to happen. Now that Occupy Wall Street has hit the media and is having a snowball effect across western nations, I can understand why “the 99%” is speaking out against the corporate biased government. I don’t want to get too political, but if we want to be a healthier nation, we need to have more equality amongst our population by enhancing our social programs and evening out the income disparity. Here are some articles that are relevant to this topic:
http://thetyee.ca/News/2011/10/15/OccupyVancouver/
This article talks about the different reasons why protestors are “occupying” Vancouver. The main reason is speaking out against corporate greed and its negative implications towards the general public, but there are many causes people are advocating for and they see this as way to have their voices heard.
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/10/18/Billionaire-Occupy-Wall-Street-Allies/
this article speaks about billionaires accepting that it isn’t fair that they aren’t being taxed enough…interesting…
and here's one of my favorite images:
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