Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Armine Yalnizyan points out how inequality is bad for everybody - including those at the top who are fighting to exacerbate it:

Say the word "inequality," and many people automatically assume you're talking about the poor. But a mounting body of research shows that, left unchecked, a growing income gap affects the rich, the poor and everyone in between.

Economic growth used to be touted as the surest ticket to broad-based prosperity. But during the strongest period of economic growth in the past 30 years, between 1997 and 2007, a third of all income gains went to the richest 1% of Canadian tax filers.

Think that's normal? In the 1960s, the most recent comparable period of sustained growth, the richest 1% took only 8% of the gains from growth.

Not since 1920, when Ottawa began to collect income data, have Canada's elites pocketed a larger share of the income gains from economic growth. Top marginal tax rates for millionaires also are at rates last seen in 1920.
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No matter your political leanings, most people understand that endless concentration of income, wealth and power is bad for the economy. After all, businesses rely on rising purchasing power of the many, not the few, to deliver growth and profits.
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It's the promise of their own upward mobility that has many Canadians willing to brush aside the handsome gains enjoyed by the rich in the past 20 years. But rising inequality, in good times and bad, makes it increasingly feel like the game is rigged, destabilizing foundational values and expectations.
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A system that lets a small group gain more while the majority is forced to settle for less, despite ever-greater effort, is a prescription for trouble. No one knows the tipping point, but lock enough people out of the promise of gains and at some point, instead of stability and growth, you get social unrest.
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History has shown us, time and again: When too much is controlled by too few, something has to give. Continuously rising inequality is unsustainable.

Everyone has a stake in fixing this. And the fix has no political colour. It is about the future of Canada and where we're heading as an economy, a society, a democracy. That's why even conservatives are worrying about Canada's rising income gap.

- Susan Delacourt digs into the use of the phrase "if it matters, measure it" - and notes that it fits neatly with the Cons' efforts to stop measuring anything to do with social or environmental issues in an attempt to pretend they don't matter.

- Meanwhile, Aaron Wherry notes that Jim Flaherty and the Cons seem to have finally developed some tolerance for listening to expert opinions - as long as it involves excuses to slash the public sector.

- James Wood reports on the number of aboriginal candidates in this fall's Saskatchewan provincial election - with the NDP's total (11 candidates out of 54 nominated so far) looking particular noteworthy in exceeding the aboriginal proportion of the province's population.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk points out the Wall government's stunning achievement in managing to run deficits in two out of the last three years even with nearly every possible economic factor working in its favour.