The 1 % - Week 24 - Oct 12-17

Okay.  Enough with the link roundups.  This start this week with something fresh.  There's been a lot of talk of income inequality in the US.  The Top 1% has 40% of the wealth, etc.  How does Canada fare.

There's no numbers here, but this graph shows we're not quite as bad as the US.  That's not quite what I'm looking for (The Gini coefficient does seem to be the standard for how these things are judged), but I guess it makes sense that we're somewhere in the middle, well behind Denmark but ahead of the US.  It does suggest that we're getting worse.
 
That Stat doesn't really cover things.  There's no nice comparable to the top 1% headline grabber in the US.  Digging deeper,  here is the motherload.  Let's got to page 73, table 8-1.  Assume 25 million people in Canada and that each household is 5 people.  That might not sound quite right, but the assumptions should balance out in the end.  So, 5 million households and each quintile is approximately 1 million.  Average household wage is $61,000.  Multiply that out, and we have $305 Billion in wages earned by Canadians.  Of that, the bottom 20% earns an average of $7,100 per year.  Which isn't much.  The top 20% earns an average of $156,300.  Let's multiply that out:

Bottom 20% - $7.1 Billion total earnings - 2.3% of total income
Top 20% - 156.3 Billion total earnings - 51% of total income

So the top 20% of Canadians earns 51% of the money in Canada.  Not sure about the top 1%.  And not sure about total "wealth".  This isn't quite as tidy as I'd hoped to make this, but the Globe and Mail doesn't seem to be able to put a nice little bow on this story either.  Update - According to this link, the top 20% of Americans earn 60% of the income.  Our bottom 20% is actually worse off than the US, who earn 3.5% of total income.

Guess who thinks the old Liberal Government did a great job of running Canada's finances?  Tony Clement!  It's funny what these guys will say when they don't think Canada is listnening.  Maybe Paul Martin will run for Liberal leader again?

I'm not really a union backer.  But I kind of agree that Canada Post workers got royally screwed and I think a lawsuit is a good idea.

John Baird...When you want to give the impression that you're in it for the little people, don't fly in to a country that you've just "liberated" with executives from oil & gas, pipeline and engineering firms.  It suggests that your motives may have been suspect.