Tuesday Morning Links

This and that (with a B.C. flavour) for your Tuesday reading.

- Yes, the CCPA's report showing that taxes in British Columbia are downright regressive is stunning enough on its face. But the real story may lie in the response of the province's finance minister:

Finance Minister Kevin Falcon said he didn't put much stock in the study's numbers, and suggested his staff would find problems with the report.

"They keep coming out with these reports, and I rarely agree," said Falcon.

In other words, Falcon is determined to keep on making the tax system ever more regressive - and will pre-emptively ignore any study showing that doing so will only make for even more unfair treatment of most of the province in order to justify continued steps to favour the wealthy over the rest of the population. And it's not hard to see how that attitude can lead to exactly the outcome that Falcon refuses to consider possible.

- Meanwhile, Falcon's declaration that any study showing an unfair tax system should also thoroughly undermine can be ignored based on nothing but his ideological leanings should also call into doubt other politically-motivated spin from the B.C. Libs - such as, say, their government's attempt to shut down any discussion of poverty in the province by quibbling over the definition of the poverty line.

- But then, Rafe Mair notes that there's plenty more reason for concern about the B.C. Libs' lack of integrity:

Campbell and Hansen supported the 2009 budget in that year's election almost certainly knowing it was false, and then added well over a billion dollars to it after they won. If they did not know, the entire finance ministry ought to be fired, because they knew trouble was coming because of falling sales tax and stumpage receipts.

They had to know. The stock market failures were another sign and were sufficient for two fiscal ignoramuses, my wife and me, who cleared out of the market before the crash.

If Hansen, and through him Campbell, didn't know what was happening in the world when they went to the polls based on a phoney budget, they were bungling incompetents. As one who was in cabinet prior to the 1981 recession and saw the finance minister predict it by assessing diminishing receipts, I can tell you that Campbell and Hansen knew. These sorts of deals don't come together overnight, and if you believe that the government wasn't negotiating with Ottawa long before the '09 election, I have a bridge for sale you might want to have a look at.

Campbell and Hansen denied during the '09 election that the HST was even on the radar screen, and then safely elected, implemented it. Hansen had a full and damning finance ministry report on his desk two months prior to the election.
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We will be asked, in an election...likely to be called in advance of the set day, to support a premier who was there for most of the Campbell scandals, and now wants us to save the province from the NDP!

If we don't give a damn about corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy and falsehoods, we will approve that conduct and let the Liberals go at it again for another four years.

- Finally, I'll echo those pointing to Ryan McGreal's post as the definitive commentary on what the Cons' attack on CUPW means not only for Canada Post, but also for the wider economy:

I also want to comment on what I've come to regard as revenge egalitarianism among those people who are incensed that the decent wages and benefits letter carriers enjoy haven't yet been stripped away.

There was once a time when public sentiment on wages and benefits turned around the idea that they should trend upwards. You know, for everyone - not just a thin crust of the deserving rich.
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(Since 1980), (o)ur economy has generated strong growth in overall wealth, but most of that wealth has accrued to the very wealthy, while the wealth of Canadians below the median has actually fallen in real terms.

It's no coincidence that this trend coincides with two major changes:

* A steady flattening of our income tax structure that lowered tax rates for the wealthy and extended exemptions and tax shelters for the wealthy, while actually increasing tax rates on the poor.

* The rate of unionized workers fell from 34.6 percent in 1997 to 29.3 percent in 2009. Unionized workers tend to earn more than non-unionized workers, so a falling unionization rate is a drag on overall median incomes.
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The bottom line is that every time a corporation (or government) breaks the back of another union, we all lose out. The median income further stagnates, and the workers whose wages and benefits have been cut have less money to inject into the economy.

Finally, the labour market in general shifts more bargaining power from employees to employers, resulting in downward pressure on wages right across the broad middle class.

- And Andrew Jackson notes that the link between the attack on unionization and increased income inequality is backed by solid evidence.