Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Lana Payne writes that there's no reason to turn Donald Trump's giveaway to the rich into an excuse for similarly destructive policies in Canada:

If tax policy levers need adjusting, there is a more effective and sophisticated approach that can be taken, rather than a swinging a machete through the corporate tax rate. Walmart doesn’t need a tax break.

For example, targeting tax incentives to those who need the support in order to invest in machinery, productivity and wages makes for smarter policy. It’s ironic how those who argue against universal social programs have no problem supporting universal tax cuts for corporations. No matter the problem, it’s their panacea.

Why give tax cuts to corporations stockpiling cash on their balance sheets? Why give them to corporations socking away billions in global tax havens rather than investing the capital in Canadian jobs and wages? Why give them to companies who are going to make certain investments anyway?

It is bad policy and it depletes much needed revenues to invest in priorities like child care, more affordable or free post-secondary education, better health care and green transit.

And it is leading to a place where researchers predict in the next 10 to 20 years, corporate taxes will be a thing of the past unless massive collective action is taken. That’s how effective corporations have been at convincing governments to do their bidding.

- David Climenhaga argues that progressive governments need to begin acting at least as decisively as conservative counterparts, rather than allowing policy to drift in the wrong direction. And Ian Bailey reports on some of the worker-friendly developments in British Columbia under John Horgan's NDP government.

- J.W. Mason's review of Quinn Slobodian's Globalists discusses the history of neoliberalism as a philosophy favouring the use of state power to reinforce existing inequalities in income and wealth.  And Drew Brown notes that if anything has changed in the relationship of the uber-rich to the rest of us, it's their explicit intention to disengage from humanity as a whole.

- Jason Furman discusses how work requirements and other access barriers to basic social programs serve solely to hurt poor families without accomplishing anything positive.

- Craig Scott writes that Doug Ford's trampling of municipal democracy in Toronto might well violate fundamental constitutional principles.

- Finally, Andre Picard comments on Canada's Epipen shortage, while noting that it fits into a larger pattern of essential medical products having fragile supply chains which leave public health at risk.