Barber Shop Wisdom

I was having my hair cut the other day. In a barber shop. There are few of them left. Salons are the thing. I'm not with it.

My barber is called Jack, the master of corny jokes. Most of his customers are mature. As I was sitting in the chair, one of those waiting spoke up. He liked Stephen Harper. It was time to cut the spending on welfare cheats, etc., etc. - you know the line.

It occurred to me that for every dollar given to low income people, deserving or not, there must be at least ten dollars, maybe a hundred, handed out to the wealthy in the form of tax breaks, "forgivable" loans, subsidies and so on. A lot of that money leaves the country for the tax havens of the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands. The money handed out to the less fortunate gets spent locally for goods and services. Whether it is spent on food, rent, lotto tickets or beer, it stays in the economy. Just as my ten bucks to Jack allows him to buy ten dollars worth of whatever and in turn allows retail workers to get their share, so does the money spent by welfare recipients benefit the community. Money being spent and re-spent many times over produces a multiplier effect. There is a name for this thing, and there is a multiplier number, but it eludes me.

Why are so many people blind to this?