CERB splurgers not our biggest problem

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/08/2020 (2047 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the internet, money diaries are prime click-generating hate-read content, right up there with How I Get It Done columns that almost never mention the nanny.

Money is a taboo subject; North Americans, especially, don’t love talking about where their money comes from or how much they make or how much debt they carry, which may explain the allure of these anonymous personal-finance confessionals. They can be aspirational, but they can also allow people to feel smugly superior or at least not as bad as those poor souls who have served up their bank statements, butterflied, to a hungry, judgmental public.

Which is how we get to last week’s furor over a viral Toronto Star money diary about a millennial woman who lost her job as a server owing to the pandemic and used some of her CERB money on Botox and weed.

Apparently, that some millennials are spending some of their CERB money on (checks notes) economy-stimulating goods and services is “selfish” and “irresponsible” to some people. (It’s worth noting she also spent nearly $1,000 on food and rent — for a basement suite she must share with two other people — but that’s not as sexy a headline.)

Meanwhile, the piece spurred angry calls for profiles of responsible millennials who are spending and saving their CERB wisely, with people voicing concerns that this one anecdote from Toronto might be held up as evidence that the entire program is, as Premier Brian Pallister has repeatedly suggested, a disincentive to work.

It actually shouldn’t matter how responsibly a person spends their CERB. If an eligible worker qualifies for it, they receive it. The end.

Employers don’t get to dictate how their employees spend their paycheques. If you choose to slip a $5 bill to a person navigating the lonely, humiliating and often violent reality of homelessness, you do not get to determine how that $5 is spent. The money belongs to someone else now.

People who are financially illiterate or lack impulse control or are simply bad with money exist in every single socioeconomic bracket, and yet, it’s often the poor and young who are shamed for their choices. Debates like this one expose deeply entrenched, boot-strapping belief systems about whose money is “earned,” and who “works hard” and who “gets handouts.”

Funny how inherited and hoarded wealth is almost never included in discussions about what is “earned” and what constitutes wasteful, excessive spending. It would seem that many people believe it’s OK for the rich to spend frivolously but it’s absolutely not OK for people who are broke or poor — mostly because being poor is still thought of as the result of bad individual choices when it is, more often than not, the result of bad systems designed to keep people struggling.

CERB exists because it helps people who need it. There should not be a value judgement placed on who gets access to or “deserves” it. Is it true some people exploit government benefits? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn’t have those benefits? Of course not.

Would there be an uprising about a 70-year-old woman using her CPP money on Botox and weed? No. You’d want to hang out with her.

Let’s remember that the woman in the Star article is sharing a basement with two people and has lost her job. Millennials are carrying such astronomical student debts that they may always be in debt. No wonder many have taken a YOLO (you only live once) approach to personal finance; many of them will never retire or be debt-free.

Want people to go back to work? Make it safer. Improve jobs. Improve wages and salaries so that people actually have a fighting chance to climb out of debt. Improve access to child care.

Those are real problems to solve. Not one woman who decided to splurge a little during a pandemic.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti