Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- The Star's editorial board calls for Canada to take its poor ranking among other developed countries as a prod to action in building a more secure and equitable health care system. And Abdullah Shihipar discusses the need for access to dental care in particular.

- Mike Crawley reports on the attempt by Ontario's business lobby to turn modest minimum wage increases into yet another round of corporate tax giveaways. And David Bush sets out a partial timeline of past and present attempts to cry wolf about the viability of wage increases.

- Meanwhile, Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Robert Benzie discuss the need for Ontario to do much more to protect vulnerable workers. And Ethel Tungohan writes about the Libs' choice to keep foreign live-in caregivers in Canada isolated from their families rather than processing permanent residency applications at a reasonable pace.

- The Ontario Association of Food Banks points out the reality of summer hunger (particularly in families which otherwise rely on school meal programs) as a symptom of a broken food system.

- Alex Soloducha reports on the complete lack of support for Saskatchewan fathers seeking shelter with their children. And the Press Association highlights a new study showing the large number of homeless UK children in temporary housing.

- Finally, Michael Savage highlights the UK's growing housing crisis based on a combination of increasing costs and decreasing public support, while Tim Harford zeroes in on the glaring need to build more homes. Likewise, Stephen Quinn points out that Vancouver's latest housing strategy based on laneway houses falls far short of actually ensuring the construction and maintenance of adequate homes for citizens. And Mindy Esser writes about the similar disappearance of affordable rents in Philadelphia due to housing being treated solely as a commodity - and the need for collective action to reverse it.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Scott Santens rightly notes that even if every single person without a job was willing to accept absolutely anything, we have no reason to expect job markets to make enough work available to support a livelihood for everybody:

(T)here are more unemployed people than jobs available across each sector of the job market, even including health care, and that one's considered practically a slam dunk at this point in terms of finding employment.

There are simply not enough jobs for everyone to have a job all at the same time.

Doesn't this sound kind of familiar? This idea that we walk around and around looking for something along with others looking for the same thing, only to find that some, and possibly even us, must in the end be excluded from what we seek?

It sounds like a game we all played as kids...

The job market is actually a game of musical chairs.

There is however a key difference between a game of musical chairs and the way our job market works, and that's that when the music stops in musical chairs, the winner is sitting while the loser is just left standing. But because the only way to gain access to the resources we need to survive is through the earning of income, those unable to earn an income aren't just left standing. They are left in poverty. And poverty hurts.

So now let's imagine a game of musical chairs played on a hot bed of coals. There are 10 people and 5 chairs, the same ratio as exists right now in 2015. Everyone is hopping around trying not to get burned, when the music stops. Five people are rewarded with security from pain, and five people begin to burn.

- Ella Bedard examines the demographic shifts within the union movement over the past few decades. And Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig describes the massive benefits the workers who form part of the movement earn through collective bargaining.

- Meanwhile, Nicole Charky discusses how just-in-time scheduling places massive burdens on workers to serve the sole purpose of expanding corporate profit margins. And Ethel Tungohan looks at human rights abuses by an Ontario employer as yet another example of the dire need for change in Canada's use of temporary foreign workers.
 
- Josh Hoxie points out that calls for austerian belt-tightening invariably seem to leave plenty of money to be showered on those who already have the most. And LOLGOP comments on the grossly outsized influence the wealthy few exert on U.S. politics.

- Finally, Leehi Yona calls out the Cons' continued climate negligence going into the U.N.'s next set of climate change negotiations, while Scott Vrooman suggests we should stop being so polite about the issue. Crawford Kilian reports on the scientific case to stop new tar sands developments. And Andrew Nikiforuk observes that Alberta is now among the many jurisdictions facing an increased danger of earthquakes due to fracking.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Mariana Mazzucato writes about the creative state - and the need to accept that a strategy designed to fund the economy that doesn't yet exist will necessarily need to include some projects which don't turn out as planned:

Like any other investor, the state will not always succeed. In fact, failure is more likely, because government agencies often invest in the areas of highest uncertainty, where private capital is reluctant to enter. This means that public organizations must be capable of taking chances and learning from trial and error. 

If failure is an unavoidable part of the innovation game, and if government is crucial for innovation, society must be more tolerant of “government failure.” But the reality is that when government fails, there is public outcry – and silence when it succeeds. 

...

Private venture capitalists cover their losses from failed investments with their profits from those that succeed; but government programs are rarely set up to generate significant returns. While some argue that the government’s return comes through taxes, the current tax system is not working, owing not only to loopholes, but also to rate reductions. When NASA was founded, the top marginal tax rate was over 90%. And capital gains tax has fallen by more than 50% since the 1980s. 

In order to build support for public investment in higher-risk innovation, perhaps taxpayers should receive a more direct return, by channeling profits into a public innovation fund to finance the next wave of technologies. When investments are in upstream basic research, the spillover effect across industries and sectors is sometimes enough of a social reward. But other cases might require creating alternative incentives. 

For example, some of the profits from the government’s investment in Tesla could have been recovered through shares (or royalties), and used to cover the losses from its investment in Solyndra. Repayment of public loans to business could be made contingent on income, as student loans often are. And the prices of drugs that are developed largely with NIH funding could be capped, so that the taxpayer does not pay twice. 

One thing is clear: the current approach suffers from serious shortcomings, largely because it socializes the risks and privatizes the rewards. This is hurting not only future innovation opportunities, but also the government’s ability to communicate its role to the public. Acknowledging the role that the state has played – and should continue to play – in shaping innovation enables us to begin debating the most important question: What are the new visionary public investments needed to drive future economic growth?

- Meanwhile, Kevin Carmichael points out that the Cons' small thinking is dooming Canada to economic mediocrity at best. PressProgress notes that the Cons once again seem to be focusing their sole efforts on tax trinkets for those who need them least. And Armine Yalnizyan offers some suggestions to fix the inequality and revenue loss which we can expect from the Cons' out-of-control tax free savings accounts.

- Canadian Journalists for Free Expression examine C-51 by the numbers, and find that nothing much about the Cons' terror spin adds up. And even business leaders are joining in to decry the Cons' plan to end privacy and data integrity.

- Anders Lustgarten discusses how callous disregard for the lives of people in developing countries generally is reflected in the needless deaths of refugees. And Ethel Tungohan follows up on the need for more fair refugee policies from a Canadian perspective.

- Finally, David Dayen notes that the TPP is just the latest deal to lock in corporate profits at the expense of human interests.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Joe Gunn argues that it's long past time for Canada to live up to its climate commitments. And Carol Linnitt writes that further delay will do nothing but damage to our economy and our democracy as well as our planet:

Taking meaningful climate action would mean increasing green infrastructure, prioritizing sustainable cities and investing in renewable and low-carbon sources of energy.

It would also mean slowing the rate of expansion of oil and gas projects including the oilsands, which would eventually put a stop to new pipeline projects. That would come with the added benefits of respecting the rights of local municipalities fighting pipelines and First Nations actively engaged in legal battles against both the provincial and federal governments for industrial incursions on traditional territory.

These are called co-benefits. They're something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted in a recent report, saying climate action comes with a host of "co-benefits, synergies and tradeoffs" that naturally result from responsible and practical long-term thinking.

In general, countries getting serious in the fight against climate change are setting themselves up to enjoy all sorts of co-benefits that Canada might miss out on, like energy efficiency, clean energy, pollution reduction, water conservation, greener cities, increased recycling, sustainable agriculture, forest preservation, healthier communities, stronger human rights practices, better protection for indigenous peoples and their way of life, cleaner oceans, more democratic and collaborative politics and more.

- Paul Krugman reminds us that it's entirely possible to push for fair wages while helping the broader economy:

(T)he market for labor isn’t like the markets for soybeans or pork bellies. Workers are people; relations between employers and employees are more complicated than simple supply and demand. And this complexity means that there’s a lot more wiggle room in wage determination than conventional wisdom would have you believe. We can, in fact, raise wages significantly if we want to.

How do we know that labor markets are different? Start with the effects of minimum wages. There’s a lot of evidence on those effects: Every time a state raises its minimum wage while neighboring states don’t, it, in effect, performs a controlled experiment. And the overwhelming conclusion from all that evidence is that the effect you might expect to see — higher minimum wages leading to fewer jobs — is weak to nonexistent. Raising the minimum wage makes jobs better; it doesn’t seem to make them scarcer.

...
(I)t shouldn’t be all that hard to raise wages across the board. Suppose that we were to give workers some bargaining power by raising minimum wages, making it easier for them to organize, and, crucially, aiming for full employment rather than finding reasons to choke off recovery despite low inflation. Given what we now know about labor markets, the results might be surprisingly big — because a moderate push might be all it takes to persuade much of American business to turn away from the low-wage strategy that has dominated our society for so many years.

There’s historical precedent for this kind of wage push. The middle-class society now dwindling in our rearview mirrors didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was largely created by the “great compression” of wages that took place during World War II, with effects that lasted for more than a generation.

So can we repeat this achievement? The pay raises at Walmart and McDonald’s — brought on by a tightening job market plus activist pressure — offer a small taste of what could happen on a vastly larger scale. There’s no excuse for wage fatalism. We can give American workers a raise if we want to.

- Amy Minsky reports on the Cons' cuts to transport safety, while Kelsey Johnson exposes the Cons' concurrent cuts to meat inspection which are raising the risk of another listeria crisis. And Andrea Huncar reports on Alberta's actions to cut injured temporary foreign workers off from needed health care, while Ethel Tungohan introduces us to some of the people the Cons have declared to be illegal in Canada.

- Susan Delacourt argues that a focus on the Duffy bribery scandal is largely serving to distract us from more important issues. And Marina Hyde laments that the UK's election seems to be running on little more than auto-pilot in terms of both candidates' actions and the press' coverage.

- But the Independent writes that at least UK voters are enjoying far more choice as a result of years of coalition government.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Joseph Stiglitz writes that while we should expect natural resources to result in broad-based prosperity, Australia (much like Canada) is now turning toward the U.S. model of instead directing as much shared wealth as possible toward the privileged few:

There is something deeply ironic about Abbott’s reverence for the American model in defending many of his government’s proposed “reforms.” After all, America’s economic model has not been working for most Americans. Median income in the US is lower today than it was a quarter-century ago – not because productivity has been stagnating, but because wages have.

The Australian model has performed far better. Indeed, Australia is one of the few commodity-based economies that has not suffered from the natural-resource curse. Prosperity has been relatively widely shared. Median household income has grown at an average annual rate above 3% in the last decades – almost twice the OECD average.

To be sure, given its abundance of natural resources, Australia should have far greater equality than it does. After all, a country’s natural resources should belong to all of its people, and the “rents” that they generate provide a source of revenue that could be used to reduce inequality. And taxing natural-resource rents at high rates does not cause the adverse consequences that follow from taxing savings or work (reserves of iron ore and natural gas cannot move to another country to avoid taxation). But Australia’s Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, is one-third higher than that of Norway, a resource-rich country that has done a particularly good job of managing its wealth for the benefit of all citizens.

...

Australia should be proud of its successes, from which the rest of the world can learn a great deal. It would be a shame if a misunderstanding of what has happened in the US, combined with a strong dose of ideology, caused its leaders to fix what is not broken.   

- Meanwhile, Julian Beltrame reports that Canada's combination of corporate tax giveaways and gutting regulations has done nothing to change stagnant business investment. (Though as Armine Yalnizyan notes, that's sadly accompanied by the C.D. Howe Institute insisting on more of the same failed corporatist policies.) Don Pittis writes that stagnant wages are leaving Canadian workers with nothing to show for economic growth. And Dennis Howlett's mild optimism about Ontario's single-year budget is more than outweighed by his recognition that Ontarians are far worse off for decades of austerity and tax slashing:

For years now, Ontario governments (both Liberal and Progressive Conservative) have been inflicting austerity policies while failing to comprehensively collect revenue from large corporations and the wealthy. This sloppy fiscal management persisted - long after it was obvious that it just doesn't work.

Cuts to public services have caused a lot of pain and not much gain in terms of reducing deficits. Those cuts also boosted unemployment, slowed economic recovery and reduced tax revenue.

We can no longer afford the steep price tag that comes with avoiding revenue side solutions. Governments need to be clear about the real costs of tax cuts and loopholes.
...
After so much tax cutting, Ontario kick starting a $1 billion reversal is a pretty small step. But it is a step in the right direction. But further steps in this direction are needed in the next budget, including possibly some modest but broader income tax increases.

There's a caveat though.

Boosting taxes on the rich and on corporations will not result in more revenue if governments don't close tax loopholes and take stronger measures to go after tax cheats. On this front too, though there were some encouraging words in the Ontario budget:

"Reducing corporate tax avoidance and closing tax loopholes is a priority for the Ontario government. The government supports the principle that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes, including corporations."

Word is that Ontario government will be pushing the federal government and the Canada Revenue Agency to step up their efforts. This is welcome news. Each and every Canadian province loses revenue from corporate tax avoidance schemes that take advantage of tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. It is time for a strong stand by all provinces at the premiers meeting scheduled for August. They can no longer avoid tackling what has become a chronic problem.

- Stephan Lefebvre points out how yet another set of free-trade spin is based on flat-out lies about the effect of NAFTA.

- Ethel Tungohan highlights the absurdity of the Cons' temporary foreign worker tinkering which does nothing at all to help actual workers of any kind:

If Kenney and Alexander truly want to protect temporary foreign workers from abuse, they would include robust measures that take into account the reality of these workers’ lives.

Workplace audits should be accompanied by a guarantee that abused temporary foreign workers will not be deported and will be given jobs in other companies for the duration of their stay in Canada.

Temporary foreign workers should be given open work permits that tie them to a specific industry, but not to a specific employer to mitigate abuse.

And, most importantly, the Canadian government should recognize that temporary foreign workers provide important economic contributions to Canada. Like other immigrants, they come to provide for themselves and their families. They should be provided pathways to Canadian citizenship.

If they are good enough to work, they are good enough to stay.

- Finally, today is another NDP Day of Action - this time focusing on climate change to celebrate Jack Layton's birthday. You can search for an event here - and I'll point out my home riding's canvass and barbecue in particular for anybody in Regina interested in getting involved.