“Yesterday, the Fraser Institute released a study they say shows the cost of raising a child is not the $10,000 a year assumed by other experts, but a mere $3,000. The total left out extra housing, transportation and child care. Some Canadian parents had their own take on FI’s calculation…”
Readers won’t be surprised by my sympathy for the messages here but I have to note the opening Tweets in the BIV article were composed and posted by BIV writers. I suppose that creating evidence of controversy is more efficient than doing research to establish it.
By the way, for a few good smiles, read Twitter entries with the hashtag #FraserInstituteKidTips. Most Fraser Institute material has little worth for anyone beyond the creator and Sourcewatch provides a succinct explanation,
“Research from think tanks is ideologically driven in accordance with the interests of its funders.”
Chris Sarlo’s The Cost of Raising Children provides amusement but its greatest value may be in providing irrefutable evidence of the Fraser Institute’s deceptive and valueless research.
Categories: Fraser Institute
in-sights.ca 
They hold similar situations for journalists. Academics are recruited with promises of publication and financial rewards. Some people can be convinced, others can be bought. The Fraser Institute funders can afford to do a lot of buying.
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A few years ago I heard about a workshop that the Fraser Institute was giving. It was for students but teachers could attend. In fact they had to attend since I doubt the speaker from the FI had a criminal record check. I did not take any students. It was an amazing session. First Nations people were attacked for consuming too much tax dollars. And the education and health care systems were attacked for the same reasons. I was shocked at what I heard. It was a total brain-washing experience for students. I asked a teacher why he took his students to such an event. He said that the students would get another perspective on politics, etc.
A few points were overlooked. First, nothing in the presentation dealt with goals of the curriculum. Secondly, did the FI speaker have a criminal record check.
It was an unbelievable display of arrogance on behalf of the FI.
This is how the Fraser Institute tries to brain-wash students and set themselves up for the future.
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The Fraser institute, a “conservative” think tank,…. hmm becoming more delusional by the day, seems like the disease infecting the Canadian Parliament, known as the Conservative government, is starting to believe its own rhetoric. Manipulation and obfuscation, seems to be the political flavor with this government, the “institute” being always willing and able to float the trial ballons, necessary to obscure the “real” motivations behind the issues.
Sooner or later our current, “greed and pillage the planet cycle” will come to an abrupt end. The Fraser institute's of the world, will have to get their messages straight, but then again why should they, we the majority , don't believe them to begin with. Talk about money poorly spent….
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The only reason any FI crud gets published at all is the same as why the media is so gentle on the BCLiberals and the Harpercons. Advertising $$$$$. The “fellows” trumpet the lines that their backers are too bashful to say out loud what they think themselves. Going through the FI or some other like venue is an attempt to legitimize a debate and drive an agenda through controversy.
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Once again the Fraser Institute( what a great name for an asylum on the banks of the Fraser) vomits forth unbelievably biased screed that 99% of the population neither believes, reads or will follow.
Perhaps the billionaires club that supports this pathetic propaganda could get a better bang for their buck by firing all the useless swelled heads in the publishing bureau of the Fraser Institute and donating the money to help reeducate/job train unwed teenage mothers.
3k a child per year…….unbelievable drivel.
Nonconfidencevote
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It's the Fraser Institute's modus operandi to provoke controversy. Yes, MSM print it as if it were gospel but alternative and opposing publications also cite its bogus reports by way of criticism. The Institute wins by this: it gives the cursory appearance that the topic is debatable instead of deplorable, kind of like how creation science is supposed to be a bona fide contender in debate with real science. Educated people know creation science is baloney yet Bible-addled voters have pressured politicians to insert it into school curricula; regardless of the fact that one is true and the other false, allowing the “freedom” to choose misconceives that both have redeeming qualities.
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WEll it looks as though the MSM needs convincing that the Fraser Institute is just a propaganda machine as they are the ones that reliably print what is given to them.
So everyone email them already and start a twitter campaign to put them in the pathetic place they belong.
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By Fraser Institute's reasoning, because some children (teenagers, for example) are costly to feed but others (breast feeding newborns, for example) do not add marginal costs, no allowance for food cost need be included.
I'd love to conduct a survey of the 47 billionaires and millionaires that make up the Fraser Institute's board of directors I'd wager that none of them could state the cost of a 4L jug of milk, a loaf of bread or the average cost of school supplies for a grade 8 student returning to school in September.
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Really, raising a child on $3K per month. Well tuition at St. George's must be at least $20K per yr by now. So could the Fraser Institute come again on those figures.
Whomever the fraser insititue was trying to kid, must not be dealing with reality. Or it could be they are shrilling for the lieberals.
The fraser insitute must be afraid of people advocating a higher min wage and welfare rate because people can't afford to feed, cloth, and provide shelter for their children on the amounts alloted.
When your son grows almost 6 inches in one yr, when he hits his teens, the food bill alone could be $3K. If the writer of this article, along with the Fraser Institute, think you can raise a child on $3K per yr. I'd like to see them raise their child for a yr on that amount or one of their grandchildren. They too would be lining up at the food bank or having to tell their child they can't play in organized sports. Lets see how many children in Canada can't play organized sports because their parents can't afford it?
If the whole family lives in a 1 bedroom apart. for $700 per month, you don't buy cloths, don't send them to school, don't take them to the dentist or doctor. Don't buy prescriptions, no toys, etc, perhaps you can do it for $3K a yr.
People who are forced to raise their children on $3K a yr. are not able to provide their children with an adequate diet or adequate much of anything, except perhaps parental love. The Fraser Institute needs to hang their heads in shame.
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Any politician who cites these Fraser Institute numbers should be publicly shamed.
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You got to be dead to read a Fraser Institute paper.
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The screed on costs of raising children comes from a minor academic at a school whose economics department would not rank in North America's top 5,000.
Author Chris Sarlo teaches at a small college in North Bay Ontario, 350km north of Toronto. Nipissing University was previously known as North Bay Teachers' College. Its primary focus remains teacher training. The Nipissing employee directory shows 137 people associated with Education but only three people involved with Economics: the Chair of Political Science, Philosophy and Economics, the Program Coordinator of Economics and Sarlo.
The only publisher of Sarlo's academic work seems to be the Fraser Institute, where peer-reviews are conducted by dead people.
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The disastrous criminal now in the White House may look like a comfortable old friend when his his replacement is elected in 2016.
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It doesn't matter what the Fraser Institute says. I highly doubt those who voted in the BC election based their vote on F.I. proclamations.
Charisma Barbie won the day for the Liberals.
No surprise really, my Grandmother bought into positive, superficial messaging about hygiene, health, love of family, hearth and home etc during the prelude to WW2. It worked for the dark forces in Europe.
Brace yourselves people. Looks like we may be in for more of the same in 2016:
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/19/ready-for-2016-we-arent-either-but-here-comes-christie-and-rubio-and-palin/
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The tragedy? The fact that the FI and its contributors are so self-absorbed that they don’t even realize what a laughing stock they make themselves when publishing articles such as this.
Each time I read some release from the FI it gets farther and farther removed from the reality common folk face every day.
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The cost for one child, to play sport is about $1000 a season, this includes team fees & insurance, boots and/or special shoes & sport equipment (mouth-guards, etc.), cost of gas going to games and practices and other team sponsored events. And that is for sports like soccer or rugby. Sports, such as hockey cost a hell of a lot more!
Even in school, one must ante up an extra $500 or so for tripos, sports, school supplies, etc.
For $3000 a year, you get kids hanging around malls, delinquents, and a god awful lot of other horrible things. I guess the $3000 a year claim is to keep out jails well occupied in the future, so the f.I. can write a report saying we spend too much on jails and inmates.
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The Fraser Institute, you say? Ha, ha, ha. These guys are professional liars who support extreme right wing causes. They are modeled after American right wing (Fascist?) think tanks and both have little credibility. It is sad to say, that for many who claim academic superiority who write for the F.I., there is little evidence that a university education has broadened their reasoning. In fact the F.I. is a showcase of failed intellectuals, who hate everything, except themselves.
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Norm anyone with half a brain and raising a child will find plenty of holes in that article. Perhaps they (the Fraser Institute members) were sterilized in their youth and never had kids (we should be so lucky). Even most CONServatives and REPUGnacants will disagree with it.
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Until Canadians are benefiting from far better governing than they've been enduring for many years now, there is no news.
There's just same-old same-old (easily preventable) pathetic and costly bullshit, 95% of which wouldn't have even occurred if capable leadership was in place.
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