Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- David Olive points out the growing consensus that those who have benefited most from free-market economics and bailouts alike should be expected to contribute more to the price of civilization - and the unsustainability of the system that's led to growing inequality:

“My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” wrote Buffett, whose tax rate last year was just 17 per cent, compared with an average of 36 per cent for his colleagues at his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. head office in Omaha. “It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”

Buffett no doubt braced for a backlash from the affluent. And Conrad Black, for one, has fretted that Buffett is exhorting lawmakers into a “tokenistic fiscal persecution of the most affluent” – a demographic to which the disgraced former press baron remains loyal, though his membership has lapsed.

But the real story here is the scarcity of objections to Buffett’s call for a level playing field, in which all income groups are able to participate fully in society.
...
The salient backdrop for the current distemper is a 30-year stagnation in middle class incomes, while prices for fuel, shelter, tuition and even food have been soaring.

The gap between rich and poor has widened markedly in Canada, where the top 1 per cent of income earners accounts for almost 40 per cent of total national income. That same top 1 per cent collected one-third of growth in national income between 1998 and 2007. In the 1950s and 1960s, that figure was a mere 8 per cent.
...
The Conference Board usefully calls for a discussion on the efficacy of the 189 tax loopholes in current legislation, and the attractive alternative of a higher basic exemption. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives would add an examination of the deleterious effects of EI and welfare programs grown miserly in the past decade, and the impact on income inequality caused by our own tax-policy changes favouring the affluent.

We can have that discussion peaceably in school auditoriums across the country. Or we can have it in the streets. But there will be a reckoning, because the status quo is untenable.

- But then, Gerald Caplan notes that there are still plenty of forces working toward even more glaring inequality - even if they're becoming more reluctant to make the case directly and publicly:

Ten years after the trauma of 9/11, the richest 1 per cent of American households earn as much as the bottom 60 per cent and have as much wealth as the bottom 90 per cent. But you ain’t seen nothing yet. Combine low taxes with tax credits, tax havens and tax loopholes, and you’ll come upon a capitalist nirvana where many of the largest corporations pay no taxes at all and where, according to estimates by the Tax Justice Network, trillions of corporate dollars are hidden away, costing perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars in foregone taxes. No prizes for guessing where it goes instead of to the public good.

There are more filthy rich folks now than at any other moment in history and they’re leveraging their astounding wealth to make sure they get filthier at the expense of the rest of us, still of course the vast majority. What is true of America is equally true of Britain and increasingly true of Canada. While the middle class shrinks, the working class slips backwards and social mobility erodes, the rich buy themselves politicians, lobbyists, legal beagles, slick accountants, “trained economists,” television networks, “think” tanks and whatever other apparatus is needed to make them even richer. Their success surpasses even the most piggish of expectations.

Osama bin Laden inflicted a terrible crime on the American people. America’s elites and their allies have done the rest.

- Bruce Johnstone raises an important point in making the case as to why a vote on the Canadian Wheat Board should matter. But I'd argue his examples of other areas where votes matter serve more as the next frontier of attacks on the collective good rather than entirely safe examples of institutions immune from similar individual-choice language (for the identical purpose of turning them into corporate cash cows):

The reality is that no right is absolute. We infringe on people's right to choose when we have single-payer public auto insurance or health-care systems. But we accept this infringement of our rights as reasonable, given the advantages of the single-payer system (universal coverage, low cost, greater efficiency, etc.).

The CWB's single desk is not unlike our health-care and public auto insurance systems. Would you want those systems taken away without at least a vote on the matter? Shouldn't farmers have the same rights as the rest of us?

- Finally, I have every suspicion that one of the Cons' goals early in their majority is to make sure that there's no scandal so avoidable or important that their base won't eagerly fall in line to minimize it. And Bob Dechert looks to have taken an important step in that effort.