Social Agenda, Inc., the advocacy ngo I work for, has estimated that expanding the federal child tax credit to include 25 million caregivers of adults — just over half the total number in the US — and making it fully refundable would create 354,942 new jobs and generate $47.9 billion (US). It would do this without creating additional bureaucracy, since the funds would be distributed directly to citizens and administered by the Internal Revenue Service. Just as important, it would facilitate “aging in place.” The bottom line is that no new social service will help seniors remain in the community if loved ones can’t afford to miss out on paid market income.
Diane Pagen
Social Agenda, Inc.
New York, NY
Ploys in the Hood II (freeform)
The city’s plan’s been to reduce low income housing across Vancouver and force the poor into a skid row radical decades of activism have made a traditional community dependent on a geographical area besieged by gentrification-violence and 2010 olympics’ doomsday countdown with cops an ethnic cleansing army the residents assaulted with depraved indifference HIV infection rate one of the highest in the world and life expectancy lower than the rest of vancouver & money / power preparing for 2010 olympics with “broken windows theory” scapegoating dope not prohibition & homeless mentally ill robbed of millions of dollars allocated years ago & junkies’ resource centre given by federal health minister but the money and building’s hard-fought years of effort & even the front door keys vanished in midst of vancouver’s first public health emergency a motion I made on the health board when I was then a member raising a cry of pandemic suffering until engineered off the board never again a white trash junkie poet from the gutter in real political power position but residents torn by traumatic histories of suffering beyond physicians’ & psychiatrists’ prescriptions while we planted thousands of crosses for thousands of executions with sirens the street symphonic scream of relentless emergency & several organized criminal gangs & corporations mutilating the poorest people in canada who are ravenously hungry for just food these forces of annihilation stalled by decades-long resistance & creative cornucopias withstanding vacant hearts of greed that are even eliminating binners even locking up bins themselves it required demonstrations occupations illegal injection sites pressuring for unique Insite & previously unheard-of organizations of addicts (VANDU) humans becoming courageous before disbelieving prejudicial eyes of media & rcmp with brutal enforcement & bankrupt D.A.R.E. prevention schemes while harm reduction misrepresented & shrunken without education, housing, health-care, employment, concrete compassion, instead a neutron bomb across from my co-op 9 floors of $300,000 suites hyped insanity: “luxury without limits / leisure without borders / water without end” and noise electrocuting nervous systems the DTES is a spiritual gift to the city of vancouver with possibility out of impossibility new life & extraordinary tolerance out of seeming death the DTES the only home I’ve ever known where I didn’t feel to quote raymond chandler like “a tarantula on a slice of angel food” & unlike the towers rising catastrophically the first nations’ totem pole in oppenheimer park stands tall, strong, silent – transcendent & so I truly thank you, peter valing, for your kindness & understanding of a very complex area & urgent situation which your article helps enlighten others.
Bud Osborn
Vancouver, BC
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