Juno News - October 20, 2021


Are politicians to blame for the cost of living increasing？


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

181.92558

Word count

616

Sentence count

2


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the current state of cost of living in Canada and how it is affecting middle class families. Cost of living has been on the rise in recent years and is becoming a major issue for many of us.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 cost of living in Canada is really becoming an issue right now inflation is happening and it
00:00:10.560 is a problem now you don't need me to tell you that you don't need a statistics Canada report
00:00:15.420 to tell you that although there are those reports and more on those in just a moment
00:00:18.920 people don't need to be told that because they're seeing it they're feeling it they're feeling the
00:00:23.680 squeeze they see it on their grocery bills pretty much every day people say you know it used to cost
00:00:28.560 me this much to fill up the cart once a week in the grocery store now it's costing me so much more
00:00:33.520 10 percent 20 percent 30 percent more depending on what they're buying so they see what's going on
00:00:38.480 they know what's going on just drive down the street and you see the price of gas literally there
00:00:43.180 on those prices they're increasing people going wow price of gas really going up there back to those
00:00:49.840 statistics Canada reports latest one saying year-over-year inflation 4.4 percent but that's
00:00:56.040 of course an average across all sorts of different goods a lot of staples of daily life though they
00:01:01.160 are greatly exceeding that average pork going up by about 10 percent canola oil which people use for
00:01:07.560 all sorts of cooking of course that's gone up way more than that and of course this disproportionately
00:01:12.680 affects low-income people these price increases rich people have to pay for them too but obviously
00:01:17.720 they're in a way better position to absorb them if you're just getting by this makes it even more
00:01:22.760 difficult middle-class families who are putting food on the table for multiple kids they're dealing
00:01:27.400 with all of these realities as well a lot of people really frustrated to see all of this happen
00:01:32.920 because there's a lot of macroeconomics at play but there's also things that politicians have done that
00:01:38.760 have created distortionary effects that a lot of economists are saying this is what is at least
00:01:44.360 worsened this current situation for instance flooding flooding all this money into the economy that some of it
00:01:50.600 wasn't needed we appreciate that a lot of the pandemic relief was needed early on in lockdowns but
00:01:55.640 a lot of the stuff the federal liberal government did some of it people calculating going i don't know
00:02:00.680 if this money actually needed to go out the door and that has distortionary effects inflationary effects
00:02:05.880 on the economy likewise all the push for the green agenda if you believe that a a green revolution
00:02:11.800 is coming soon uh regardless in terms of all the r d businesses are doing community-led initiatives
00:02:17.640 personal choice consumer choice and i believe there's going to be a lot of that in the decades
00:02:21.560 ahead okay well let the chips fall as they may but when government says we're going to
00:02:26.520 try and top down micromanage redistribute the economy consistent with a green agenda picking
00:02:32.760 winners picking losers that also has distortionary effects on the economy in terms of the reallocation
00:02:38.440 of resources this is the stuff we're seeing at play basically government interference causing
00:02:44.120 a lot of challenges in the economy and making things more difficult for people's lives so cost of
00:02:50.200 living big problem in canada right now and when all these politicians talk about build back better and
00:02:55.880 so forth look we don't need you creating all these new programs out of thin air throwing money left right
00:03:02.040 and center at the pet projects and special interest groups really you've got regular canadians saying no
00:03:07.240 this is the issue cost of living and us feeling the squeeze day to day in our wallets