Credit where due

I suspect there's still going to be plenty of room for argument as to how much attention we ought to pay to inequality in the development of economic policy. But let's give Kevin Milligan and other UBC economists full credit for their observations when prompted by Pete McMartin on issues of inequality and economic structure, including both in terms of why the GDP-above-all-else model has sometimes fallen flat with the public...

The majority of respondents in that poll agreed with Milligan. They, too, felt that, overall, the HST would benefit the economy.

But...while they recognized the HST would benefit the economy, they also felt that, on a personal level, none of the HST’s benefits would accrue to them.

A message resided in that distinction, Milligan felt, one that perhaps spoke to a greater malaise.

“With all the growth in the economy the HST promised,” Milligan said, “these people couldn’t bring themselves to vote for it because they didn’t see that growth benefiting them.”

Read that way, the HST vote wasn’t a referendum on a tax: It was a referendum on the nature of the economy.

It was a signal, perhaps, that many British Columbians felt they were disenfranchised from an economy that no longer worked in their interests. Their incomes were flat or falling. They struggled to cover their bills and mortgages. They watched all the economic gains of the last 15 years go to an increasingly affluent minority. Why vote for a tax that would, in their eyes, only exacerbate those trends?

...and their policy prescriptions to ensure an economy where everyone benefits:

So what, they were asked, would they recommend to close the income gap opening up in Canadian society?

Well, there were no easy answers, was their reply, but there were broad themes. Some of those:

• End programs such as the Temporary Foreign Workers Program that artificially encourage low wages in service industries.

• Recognize that unions — once a bulwark of the middle class — have encouraged better wages not only for unionized workers but non-unionized workers as well, and reconsider government policies that have made the process of union certification more difficult.

• Concentrate efforts for income equality where it is now most needed, not with seniors, who have fared relatively well, but with younger workers, young families and single parents, who have suffered most from income inequality.

• Improve the tax-and-transfer system to increase social assistance to those in the lowest income brackets.

• Re-examine the flatness of our tax structure, which lags behind that of the U.S. in that regard, and the fact we don’t have increasing tax rates for very high incomes. Said Riddell, “We definitely should be looking at higher tax rates at the very top of the income distribution.”

• Begin a national conversation to look at the issue of income inequality, to consider if Canadian society is going in the direction we want it to go. It needn’t be something so cumbersome and official as a Royal Commission, but a task force, perhaps, that shines a more focused light on the concerns the global Occupy movement has brought to the public eye.

And if we can get enough of the Economist Party on board with a similar set of prescriptions in response to an acknowledgment that inequality is an issue worth addressing all along the income scale (rather than merely for the bottom 10%), then there may well be some prospect of incorporating its overall principles into a political platform that succeeds as a matter of both policy and politics.