Guaranteed liveable income can resolve homelessness

Dear Editor,

Arjun Singh’s op-ed in your June publication raised the issue about homelessness and the view that the community will never end the problem. He is right, of course. The community did not create homelessness. In fact, back in the ‘60s we expected it would go away. But no, starting in the 1980s the financial elite decided they would take a bigger piece of the economic pie, and the bottom half of society took the hit. They lost trillions of dollars of income wealth which was rerouted to the top one percent.

Back then my father was a low-income worker with seven kids. He was able to buy a house. Back then a house cost about three times the average annual wage. Not today. Now it’s 10 to 20 times the annual wage. Lower income workers have lost their purchasing power. Conservative governments and the finance people have taken it away.  

What is the answer? How can this fleecing be resolved? Very simple. We need a government that will guarantee a liveable annual income for all Canadians and who will tax the wealthy to pay for it. We need to rebalance the economy to what we had in the happy decades following the 1950s.

Ken Blawatt
Kamloops

Government bailout of developers must be stopped

Dear Editor.

Big business owns Carney.

It was an eye-opener and very disturbing to read in Juno News that our Prime Minister Mark Carney will spend 3.2 billion dollars to bail out B.C. developers who inflated the market out of reach of prospective homeowners.

We are looking at a massive global financial and economic re-structuring and using our precious and scarce pension dollars to bail out those losers should be considered larcenous, and must be stopped now, before anybody get a single dollar!

His proposal to bail out land speculators is beyond insane. It must be stopped.

Andy Thomsen
Kelowna