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Socialism in action?

Look at the kids you see on the street. They are your pension plan. Maybe you will be looking at one of my kids. My wife and I have made a huge investment in them. We home-schooled them, we took them to lessons, we helped them through university.

Look at the kids you see on the street. They are your pension plan.

Maybe you will be looking at one of my kids. My wife and I have made a huge investment in them. We home-schooled them, we took them to lessons, we helped them through university. They are smart, polite, hard-working, and creative. They will be contributing to your pension.

Maybe you are looking at a kid from a less fortunate family. Not a lot of books at home? No daycare? A poor school? Maybe even worse. It could be a kid of a teenaged motherbarely adult enough to feed herself. She may have smoked or drank at just the wrong time. Shemay not have been well fed when that kid was making key connections in her brain.

Kid Number Two is part of your pension plan too.

And if you have made some very bad investment decisions, kid Number Two might end up costing money instead of supporting you in your old age. Kid Number Two would have been more productive if she had gone to all-day kindergarten, or if she had had a school lunch, or if you had been willing to pay for school shops and phys-ed teachers.

Kid Number Two might have had a chance at university if you had been willing to pay more for education and been a bit less worried about the healthcare you actually voted for.

The fact is we have a kind of socialism in this country. Some of us have kids, some of us put a lot of work into bringing up the kids, and everyone gets to tax the kids to pay their pensions. It makes me think of the famous Russian folk tale about the Little Red Hen.

She found a grain of wheat, she asked the other farmyard animals to help plant it. They all refused. She asked for help to thresh, mill and bake her harvest into bread. The other animals refused. Things changed when the little Red Hen asked who would help her eat the bread. You know what the other animals said then.

In the story, the Little Red Hen kept the bread she baked for herself and her own chicks.

If you ask them, kids always say it's better to share the work and then share the harvest when it comes in. When it comes to growing children, though, Canadians seem willing to share the harvest without sharing the work.

So look again at those kids: whether or not you have children of your own, the kids you see on the street, on the bus, in the school yards or driving around are yours.

They are yours because under the tax system you own some of their labour: you get the fruit of their labour. In our Canadian version of socialism, we all own a share of every child.

The last census showed that young people are having fewer kids.

More of us will be depending on those fewer kids to pay our pensions. We plan to live longer and we plan to live better. We had better start investing a lot more in our pensions.

You might think you can avoid the cost of investing in children by buying gold stocks or RRSPs. Think again.

The fewer kids we have and the less productive they are, the less there is to go around.

The fewer kids there are and the less productive they are, the higher prices will be.

You savings just won’t buy as much. The fewer kids there are, the higher their wages, the more they will get, and the lower the interest they will pay on your savings.

I like to think that all the kids I see are my kids. I want politicians to tell me how they are going to do more for the kids that I can’t help myself.

I am willing to pay more taxes to support other people’s kids. But if good Canadian generosity isn’t enough to make you want to invest in children, look at the kids you see on the street.

They are your pension plan. Are you investing enough in your own future?


 

Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research and Development at Laurentian University.

drobinson@laurentian.ca