On Frugality, and Poverty Thinking. Louis Shalako.

The Empty Chair, Charles Spencelayh.

Louis Shalako

Frugality.

 

I’m afraid to spend any money.

Going from the Ontario Disability Support Program onto senior’s retirement benefits has resulted in a raise calculated at $589.00 per month. That is seven grand a fucking year, more than I had last year, ladies and gentlemen. All I have to do is live one more year.

And I’m afraid to spend any money—

I need a new pair of shoes. I need a winter coat. I need new pillows, I need new bedsheets, I need winter socks, the proverbial woollies, although they’re more likely to be cotton and polyester blend these days. I need a new pair of winter boots, new underwear, and a new sweater…

My microwave is a wreck. My pots and pans are shit, the dishes and utensils, mismatched crap from forty years past. The list is seemingly endless, and I just can’t bring myself to even start.

I need a new shower curtain, I need new towels. I do not have a table and chairs in my dining area. We could throw that on the fucking list as well. I would like to have a cat, and yet the thought sort of scares me for some reason. But, if I get a cat, or a dog, well…then I would probably need to get a bigger bed, don’t you think…??? The master bedroom is empty, just empty. I’ve never used it for anything. It’s just there, and yet that might make a pretty nice little office, or I could set up a bench and start building model airplanes or something crazy like that…if only I could bring myself to begin.

I'm the only guy I know who has an empty room, an empty closet...empty cupboards in the kitchen.

I’ve always seen this place as temporary, maybe even precarious. Sooner or later, it has to end, right.

That all seems pretty logical to me, and I am nothing if not logical.

Perhaps a little too logical, but then I’ve just come off of thirty fucking years of pain, poverty, deprivation, depression, and quite a bit of bureaucratic and criminal harassment, including the police, the courts, the psychiatrists, a few neighbours and their droogs, and yes, even the fucking social workers.

There were times when it seemed everyone and everything were against me—and it all seemed pretty damned logical at the time.

It was logical enough.

It’s a kind of poverty thinking on some level.

It’s pretty easy to look down on yourself when you’re cutting your own hair, and washing it with dish soap, and brushing your teeth with baking soda, and making sure to grab a new toothbrush next time you’re at the good old Sally Ann (Salvation Army. – ed.) asking for another handout of groceries. When your coat stinks and the shoes on your feet smell like dead baby goats.

It is pretty easy to look down on yourself when everyone else in town seems to be looking down on you too—what the hell did those people ever know, but it really is insidious over the long term.

It’s not like I have never looked down on myself, and it was valid enough at the time, ladies and gentlemen. Every so often, you are right, after all. It’s a little something we call shame.

Might want to take a lesson from all of that and maybe try and do better next time.

***

What in the hell are you talking about...???

People talk about quality of life and I have no idea of what they are talking about.

For a gallon of white ceiling paint, and a gallon of a nice, sunny yellow colour, what they call Brenchley Peach, I could begin repainting my apartment. I’ve been here almost ten years in this unit, I am a smoker, and the ventilation has never been very good in these old walk-ups. Baseboard heating means aerial convection drags the smoke, the bacon grease hovering in the air, the moisture and humidity from the shower and boiling the kettle, it drags all of that right up the walls.

What would it take? A hundred fifty dollars and a few tools to get started, a small step-ladder. It’s the mental barrier, perhaps lugging all that shit up three flights has something to do with it.

It’s not like I couldn’t pay some kid twenty bucks an hour, we could do a room in one day or less, once you get started…right? Half a day is a more reasonable estimate.

And I still can’t quite bring myself to do it. For one thing, it’s a big job, one that has to be finished, albeit on a room-by room basis. One room at a time, right, start with the easy ones and work my way up to the bigger challenges…

And I will probably never do it.

It really isn’t about the money, although there is something to be said for having a little cash in the bank.

Where in the hell would I ever find the guts or even just a shred of optimism.

It is poverty thinking and it may take a while to overcome.

People get a little too used to being poor, and they think it will never change.

In which case, why fight it.

Right?

 

END

 

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audiobook format. His books are fairly inexpensive, mostly because he’s never had the nerve to charge a proper price—go figure.

(Louis has given away hundreds of thousands of ebooks and audiobooks over the last fifteen years, presumably in some forlorn hope of getting someone to love him. – ed.)

“We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor.” Poor People Don’t Plan Long Term. (The Guardian)

What is Poverty Mindset?

Thank you for listening.

 

 

 

 

 

A Basic Income for All. Louis Shalako.

The freedom to do what you want.

Louis Shalako

I’m just putting together my final income, mileage and expense report for the Ontario Disability Support Program. I’m retiring after 30 years on ODSP.

I will drop that off downtown tomorrow morning with the greatest of pleasure.

And then, I will be free—

Maybe even rich.

I will actually get a raise of five hundred a month, just for going off of disability.

I earned $1.470.00, working part-time, for 21 days in August of 2024. Now, you wouldn’t want to live on the pension, and you probably couldn’t live on the earnings either. I also drove 1,558 k on business last month. Taken together, they seem to add up to something a poverty-stricken person could actually live on, assuming one has lived in a rent-controlled building for thirteen years, and assuming Landlordie McLandlordface doesn’t suddenly get some sort of a fucking brainstorm.

Even now, I’m still paying just under $10,000.00 a year in rent, and assuming I got renovicted, it’s pretty clear I couldn’t get anything under $20,000.00 or more per year.

The point is, that the disability pension represents a kind of basic income, providing an income floor, below which, a citizen is theoretically, not supposed to fall.

The ODSP pension was always a good thirty to forty percent below the poverty line. The guidelines for business and employment were always restrictive. The mileage rate, an allowable deduction, was for many years a ridiculous $0.17 per kilometre. You were only allowed to earn up to $200.00 per month, before they would apply a claw-back of $0.50 on the dollar. Yet you could receive a gift of up to $7,000.00 per year, with no penalty at all—no, the heinous crime was that you had earned it. The disabled, showing signs of independence, earning a little money, and clawing their way up out of poverty.

It was more than they could bear, what with all that stigma going around.

Staff worked their no-good, sorry asses off trying to prevent such a thing, and for the most part, they were very successful…so successful, that quite a number of us are currently residing in tents down at Rainbow Park.

You will forgive me if I choose not to be among them.

I have better things to do.

***

Nowadays, you can earn up to $1,000.00 per month without penalty and the deductible mileage rate is up to $0.40/k.

My point here, is simply the one word, ‘restrictive’. A no-questions-asked, basic income, for citizens who fall below a certain cut-off threshold, (one that tapers off with rising income), regardless of ability or disability, (and no bourgeois moral judgements), would be very desirable in terms of lifting hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of our fellow Canadians, not just out of poverty, but into the middle class.

It might even keep a few of us out of homeless encampments.

If having a strong middle class is a be-all and end-all for social policy, and it is one of the pillars of a strong democracy, no argument there, then surely a basic income (for those who qualify), would be a very good thing.

When I went to work for #superdough I was maxing out my credit card every winter and it would take half the year to pay it off again. Groceries and gasoline, right. I was fortunate, in that the job is out in the country, and I could deduct $0.40 per kilometre in mileage. So I earn maybe $60.00, then write off twenty. This means I could earn more, and the actual fuel costs are less than twenty dollars. You’re not making a profit. $0.40/k in no way reflects the true costs of vehicle ownership.

You’re just trying to stay ahead of some kind of a curve. It is about cash flow, and living on the margin—a very slim margin at times.

When I first began, I wasn’t getting too many hours. Ah, but we needed clean totes for our deliveries—and if no one else wanted to wash totes, then all the minutes or hours a week spent washing totes were mine for the taking. When no one else had the confidence to call the distributor, and order fifteen or twenty sacks of flour, well, I had the guts where maybe they didn’t. I took responsibility, ladies and gentlemen, and predictably enough, I ended up running the place. Where others saw it as a crappy job, or a chore, or an unwelcome obligation to the family business, I saw the opportunity, to make the most of what was there. And it can be a crummy job at times.

The Boss was getting older, and no one else wanted it…the Boss offered me a chance to buy in, all sweat equity, and now I own a little piece of the business. It’s what we call ‘free enterprise’, or maybe just freedom. The fucking freedom to do what we needed to do.

I have no illusions there, like when the mixing machine, all $12,000.00 of it, makes loud noises and isn’t working properly, and guess whose job it is to fix it? Mine. That’s why I downloaded all the drawings and parts sheets for the machine. I’ve studied them, and I could take that thing apart and put it back together if I really needed to. And when I take things apart and put them back together again, not only do they run, they run better than before…

(Hell, I might even run for city council next time around.)

Quite frankly, the service techs we’ve called in the past seem remarkably unwilling to take on that job, and I don’t blame them. It really would be one big, greasy mess and you never quite know what you might find in there…the machine, I mean. Not city council.

When it comes to city council, it's pretty obvious what we're dealing with. One big, greasy, fucking mess, ladies and gentlemen.

The point is, I took the base income, and built upon that income, to the extent, that I could invest not just time but money—my bank was only too happy to loan me $10,000.000 in order to purchase a good, used minivan. A minivan which I use to deliver our orders to our customer, which pays an hourly rate, it takes me back and forth to work, and it has more than earned its keep. I paid off a four-year loan in 31 months. And if I could do that, I might even be able to save up a little bit of cash…right?

Right.

The base ODSP disability pension does not cover such luxuries as good vehicles, or significant cash reserves. It barely pays the rent, food, and not much else these days. That’s especially true for singles, although for families, when the children ‘age out’ of the system, the expenses remain basically the same, and the income can take a real big hit—it’s a shocker for those experiencing it.

Maybe they should look up once in a while, rather than keeping their faces to the floor all of the time…you might have seen that one coming.

I won’t bore you with statistics, but if you’re into that sort of thing, there are a couple of story links below.

A basic income for low-income Canadians means they would have, and would generate, additional opportunities for education, starting a small business, save up for a car, maybe even a small house if they’re lucky enough to be able to see that far ahead, or maybe they just have a little more lifetime ahead of them as compared to an old crock like me.

I suppose that’s why the bougies are against it. It’s a threat to the established order, that much is true.

And when someone tells you a basic income means we have to give Bill Gates $1,000.00 a month, that person is not your friend.

They’re just lying to you.

Truth is, they’re full of shit and they know it.

The question is, do you know it?

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audio format.

Sam Altman's Study on Basic Income.

Tax the Rich.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Workable Plan for the Reduction of Poverty In Ontario. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

This is a workable plan for the reduction of poverty in Ontario. Yes, it will cost a little money, which will result in savings elsewhere. Only one example, this would be in hospital admissions for mental health/addictions, which term has had an unfortunate tendency to become all one word in media coverage of issues related to poverty.

It is an unfortunate tendency to lay the problem of poverty on mental illness and addictions, which is an unfair moral judgement as well as a conflation of two separate and distinct issues.

***

The roots of poverty are structural, and therefore the solutions must also be structural.

This program specifically addresses the Ontario Disability Support Program and Ontario Works, (welfare). As a highly-trained Canadian journalist, the author has been embedded in this story for 24 years, and he is very familiar with the ODSP program in particular. He is proficient at interpreting guidelines insofar as that relates to his employment and business interests. When the landlord is taking seventy percent of an ODSP pension in rent alone, working means eating. For whatever reason, this writer has become rather fond of eating over the last 59 years or so—

Raise the rates, annually, at greater than the rate of inflation, which currently stands at roughly two percent.

Raise the allowable earnings limit, which currently stands at $200.00 per month for a single adult.

Lower the rate of clawback on earnings over the limit from its current fifty percent to thirty or even twenty-five percent.

Under CPP (D) guidelines, clients can earn up to $5500.00 annually, and they don’t even have to report it. I would recommend the same level for ODSP/OW clients, in order for the province to be more in line with federal policy. This would save much administrative time for Ministry staff, resulting in higher morale, less staff turnover, and real financial savings. 

Presently, with $100.00 in Work-Related benefit and an ‘automatic’ business deduction of another $100.00, it now stands at $2400.00 per year. (That automatic deduction is a trap. Staff would prefer that clients NOT keep track of each and every receipt, each and every kilometre. It is, after all, a real headache to administer such a client, who is perfectly within their rights to pursue employment and business interests.)

Raise the mileage rate for employment/business/medical travel from $0.40 per kilometre to $0.45 or $0.50 per kilometre. Note that medical travel is a cash disbursement, while the rate for employment/business travel is a deduction from gross income. It is interesting that Ministry staff probably receive (in cash disbursements) more like $0.55 per kilometre when traveling on business when using their own vehicle. The per-kilometre costs of operating a vehicle are well-known and have been studied extensively. This government might ask what the Canada Revenue Agency recognizes as a legitimate rate of mileage/reimbursement, and 

model their own program accordingly.

Raise the work-related benefit from $100.00 per month per single adult to $200.00 month per single client. Adults with families should get an additional hundred a month benefit per child.

Keep rent controls in place, as presently constituted, for three to five years, in order for the province’s most vulnerable citizens to have some reasonable time to catch up.

Raise the provincial minimum wage to $20.00 per hour by 2024.

A special housing benefit to augment the federal housing benefit, slated for 2019, although details are presently sketchy.

A dedicated university fund, initially $25-million per year, in order for ODSP/OW clients to get the skills and education required to break the cycle of poverty and to address the skills shortage presently plaguing the province.

There’s more, which I will address in a future post.

END

Please read this additional coverage.

Nuns Back On the Bus.

Food Banks Urge Government to Address Hunger Crisis.

Image. Louis Shalako.

Thank you for reading.

What Is the Value of a Free Ebook? Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Last year I gave away probably ten thousand ebooks. In my opinion, any business may promote itself, and any business might claim this expense as a legitimate business deduction.

Yet I have a funny feeling the ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program) won’t see it that way at all.

I regularly sell ebooks for $0.99, $1.99, or $2.99. I’ve had them priced higher and sold a few books. The reason I don’t do this all the time is that volume suffers, and pretty quickly—and rankings are determined by an algorithm. Lower volume, lower the ranking.

Sales and net earnings drop. This is why I resist the urge, and the overwhelming advice to raise prices. The fact is, they don’t know anything and some of them are also full of shit.

That’s just my opinion after seven or eight years of study—such algorithms are proprietary and rightly so. Otherwise it would be too easy to game the algorithms for the average person, although I do a bit of it myself.

Let’s take a baseline figure of $0.99/ebook, rounded off to the dollar to keep the math simple. 

I gave away 10,000 ebooks, that’s a promotional expense for the calendar year 2016.

Ebooks have perceived and intrinsic value. That’s why people pay money for them and they take them in impressive numbers when they’re free.

It takes effort to produce them, I have to have the internet, a phone, a camera, I have to purchase stock photos for the covers. I have to put the hours in and my time is valuable if not exactly precious sometimes. There are all kinds of expenses involved. Some people spend a lot more than I do, but then, I do all the work around here.

That’s how I learned how—that’s how I trained myself.

That’s how I got all the wonderful skills, ladies and gentlemen.

And yet the ODSP will deny the validity, or more accurately, the monetary value, of an ebook—just as I kind of did myself, over the last seven or eight years. I say that because while I know I’ve given away over 120,000 ebooks since Sept. 2010, I’ve never reported that to the ODSP.

At an estimated royalty of $0.35/per book, mostly for the sake of completing our little math exercise, that would add up to $3,5000.00 CDN in promotion.

At one time, there were a lot of book commentators, traditionally published authors for the most part, blogging and bleating on the subject of ‘devaluing’ literature and especially ebooks by setting them at free or $0.99 or whatever. By the very nature of the product, this is possible. A free print book is much more expensive to produce, I will grant you that.

I saw it for what it was at the time. It was just polemic. They were just trying to destroy all the credibility and all the legitimacy of independent publishing. They were trying to destroy ebooks, ladies and gentlemen. Their own position was threatened by this revolutionary technology.

They had an interest in sapping the confidence not just of the writers, but also of the readers.

They wanted to control the situation. They wanted to keep us out of the market, didn’t they?

The government of the Province of Ontario, not very popular at the moment, has an interest in controlling costs too. They want to control the situation too.

The way they do that with the 750,000 disabled clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program is to make us think that we are stupid. That we can’t do the math. That we are somehow the enemy, and that for whatever imaginary reason, we must be punished.

We live in such fear of our benefits being cut and not being able to pay the rent that we tend to take the easy way out and go with the flow. We don’t ask too many questions, We tend to avoid our social worker rather than seeking them out.

We tend to keep our mouths shut and our heads down. We tend to keep moving.

Well.

Fuck that.

No more.

No more.

Nothing great was ever achieved without risk, without thought, effort, and ultimately, sacrifice.

Hopefully that’s not going to be me, but this government would do well to lower the rate of claw-back on earnings for ODSP clients who work or operate a business to $0.35/dollar rather than the current rate of fifty percent. They would do well to raise the allowable earnings limit, bearing in mind the poverty line in this province and across the country is estimated by this very government to be $22,000.00/year for a single adult.

Your pension pays a bare $13,000.00 or so and that is simply not good enough, ladies and gentlemen.

Not good enough.

This government would be doing the right thing by putting a line for ‘promotional expense’ on the reporting form for business and expenses. Not to do so would appear disingenuous, especially so now that this government has been duly notified of the moral repercussions.

I might have a few other ideas as well, as time goes along.

Naturally, these are suggestions rather than demands, which would presuppose a rather different power relationship than that which presently exists between the disabled and the government of this province.

Thank you for reading.

Oh, and don't be afraid to grab a free ebook once in a while. You might be surprised by how helpful that can be sometimes.

END