Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Brian O'Boyle discusses how Ireland's choice to act as a tax haven for the ultra-wealthy has done nothing to help its citizens. And the Center for Working-Class Politics notes that a strong majority of Americans support a jobs guarantee, making it both a desirable means to boost worker interests and a political winner. 

- But then, Martin Lukacs highlights how Canada's media has gone far out of its way to manufacture sympathy for landlords at the expense of tenants. And Katya Schwenk reports on Wall Street's mass takeover of housing.  

- Cecilia Nowell writes about the dangers of ultra-processed foods - both in encouraging overeating, and in causing a variety of health issues. And David Barnett talks to Patrick Grant about the deteriorating quality of clothes (which isn't being matched by any lowering of prices).  

- The Canadian Press reports on new Leger polling finding a majority of Canadians to support the Loblaws boycott against profiteering and monopolization. 

- Cloe Logan writes about the work being done by labour activists to try to protect workers from the effects of extreme heat. 

- Finally, Tom Perkins reports on both new research showing the ubiquity of "forever chemicals" in the Great Lakes basin, and a study finding glyphosate in a majority of sperm samples at an infertility clinic. 

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Jo Snyder discusses how poverty makes everybody less healthy, and recognizes the need for higher basic wages as a result. And Laurie Penny highlights the futility of trying to badger young adults into service jobs which offer no opportunity for personal, professional or financial progress:

The British gov­ernment, like many others, is no longer even pretending to care about how or if the next generation gets to thrive. It is demonstrably content to sacrifice its young. That quality is not just spiteful; it is a recipe for social and cultural self-annihilation.

What are the alternatives? “Finding work” for young people, even the lowest-paid and least secure work, seems to be the only solution on the table, even from well-meaning groups such as the Prince’s Trust. The government’s sole response to the survey was that it was doing “everything possible” to help young people find work – chiefly “incentivising” them with the threat of eviction in a stagnant job market. What it is not doing is helping any young person find work that pays a liveable wage, or a wage at all – and in the meantime it’s getting harder to afford the rent and bills.

The assumption that work is a passport to dignity and security, that work is what makes life worth living, is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is almost heretical to think otherwise. But the problem isn’t just the lack of work. It’s also the lack of hope. Young people leaving school and university can no longer kid themselves that their future is likely to include a stable place to live, love and get on with growing up, even if they do manage to find paid work.

- Meanwhile, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a reminder as to the cost of trying to live with poverty. And Josh Eidelson interviews Frances Fox Piven about the connections between the Republicans' attacks on the poor and their appeals to racism.

- David Atkins points out Fintan O'Toole's commentary on the disastrous effects of corporatist policy (from deregulation to austerity) in Ireland.

- And finally, Andrew Coyne sees both Stephen Harper and Chris Christie as perfect examples of a warped political system in which political leaders are assessed largely on their ability to avoid taking responsibility for the scandals of their own hand-picked insiders:

It was all there [in Christie's press conference]: the repeated declarations that he “took responsibility” without in fact taking any; the expressions of contrition that made it clear he had nothing to be contrite about; the evocations of what a toll the whole affair had taken on him emotionally; and the almost instantaneous conversion of what ought reasonably to have been a moment for humility and introspection into yet another occasion to list off his many wonderful qualities. Change a few words here and there, and you could have been listening to the prime minister’s year-end interviews.

Indeed, the explanation both have offered is remarkably similar: My closest advisors and confidants conceived and carried out an ethically abhorrent plan, for my benefit but without my knowledge, then lied to me about it for months. Even supposing we take these at face value, it is hardly “taking responsibility” to blame it all on your staff, nor is it especially difficult to say you are “sorry” for other people’s mistakes. They are simply words politicians have been taught to say: They test well with focus groups, almost as well as “I’m not a focus-group tested politician.”
...
We have been taught not to expect [genuine responsibility] from our leaders. The measure by which we assess them now is their own expedience — “what they need to do” or “what they should say,” by which we mean not what is true or right but what might work. 

But these are not simply crises to be managed. They go to the heart of each man’s claims to leadership. It is pointless to offer advice on how they should “handle” the issue, because they are the issue.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Andrew Jackson rightly questions Greg Mankiw's faith-based assertion that increasing wealth accumulation is based solely on merit and contribution to society rather than hoarding and rent-seeking. And Martin Lobel highlights a few of the distortionary policies that have served to exacerbate inequality in the U.S.:

Everyone admits that our current tax system is broken and many "reform" proposals are being considered. But, our current tax code is too fragile to support most of the current "reform" proposals that powerful interests want to layer on it. Instead, we need to strengthen and simplify the tax code to provide a broad tax base before carving out another loophole, like territorial taxation, to "reform" the tax code. We need to reform the tax code so that it doesn't continue to increase the disparity in wealth between the very rich and the rest of us. We also need to remember that the more complicated the proposal, the more likely it is that some lobbyist is proposing another unjustifiable tax expenditure (aka tax subsidy, tax loophole) to benefit his wealthy client. In fact, any business that doesn't seek a tax subsidy is a fool because the rate of return is far higher than it could get in the market. According to a recent study, multinational companies had a 22,000 percent return on tax expenditures they lobbied for, although small in comparison to the 77,500 percent return earned so far on the $116 million the prescription drug industry spent lobbying for legislation to prevent Medicare from bargaining on drug prices.
...
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1 percent of households (the upper class) owned 35.4 percent of all privately held wealth, and the next 19 percent (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5 percent which means that just 20 percent of the people owned a remarkable 89 percent, leaving only 11 percent of the wealth for the bottom 80 percent (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1 percent of households had an even greater share at 42.1 percent. In terms of types of financial wealth, the top one percent of households have 35 percent of all privately held stock, 64.4 percent of financial securities, and 62.4 percent of business equity. The top 10 percent have 81 percent to 94 percent of stocks, bonds, trust funds and business equity, and almost 80 percent of non-home real estate.

 Or to put it in a different perspective, from 2009 to 2011, "Top 1 percent income gains grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery."

Yet, individual income and payroll taxes on the middle and lower classes have increased over the last 60 years while estate and corporate income taxes have declined substantially as a percentage of receipts. The only logical conclusion is that government tax policies have been instrumental in the shift of income from the middle and lower classes to the rich. This conclusion has been supported by almost all of the non-industry supported research, including the Congressional Budget Office which recently reported that over 50 percent of the 10 largest tax breaks went to the richest 20 percent of Americans and 17 percent went to just the top 1 percent, while the middle quintile only got 13 percent and the bottom quintile only got 8 percent.

Besides taxing the almost $2 trillion of stateless income offshore, there are other alternatives to make our tax and economic system more efficient. Although the Republicans talk about cutting tax expenditures and did cut some in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, they ought to get serious and cut all the corporate tax expenditures which now cost the taxpayers just about the same amount as the corporations pay in taxes. We could also eliminate the cost and distortions of tax accounting and just tax the profits that these corporations report to their shareholders.

- And Brendan Fischer writes about a much-needed pushback against privatization in the U.S.
- even as Canadian governments earmark massive amounts of public money for the sole use of private contractors.

- Meanwhile, James Bloodworth takes another look at Ireland to see whether the poster child for corporatist economics is seeing any public benefit as a result. Spoiler alert: not by a long shot.

- Glen Pearson rightly questions why 200,000 people are homeless in Canada in the midst of what's supposed to be unprecedented wealth and prosperity. But the answer can likely be found in a government more interested in putting the screws to marginalized individuals than improving their standard of living.

- But of course, we should be glad to see examples of inspiring leadership where they arise. And so Lana Payne's column on Naheed Nenshi's response to Calgary's flood is well worth a read.

- Finally, Lorne writes about the plight of disposable labour in Canada - with temporary foreign workers treated particularly harshly for lack of any ability to push back against abuse.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Justin Ling writes that the Cons' aversion to accountability isn't limited to their own government, as they're one of the few holdouts against transparency in resource-sector reporting of payments to governments abroad.

- Meanwhile, Stuart Trew discusses an international citizens' initiative to keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership from imposing harmful copyright rules:

A coalition website, launched this week as a 17th round of TPP negotiations gets underway in Lima, Peru, calls on TPP negotiators to "reject copyright proposals that restrict open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and fundamental rights." The website gives people an opportunity to send the same message and receive regular updates on Fair Deal campaign actions and successes.

"A fair deal on copyright in the TPP takes into account the interests of Internet users, libraries and archives, those with disabilities, educators and business innovators as well as creators," says Susan Chalmers from InternetNZ, one of 30 founding members of the new campaign. "We're all part of the Internet economy. The Fair Deal coalition is promoting fair copyright standards for the TPP that reflect the needs of the broadest cross-section of society."

These beliefs are shared by many TPP participating countries. Peru's chief negotiator, Rodrigo Contreras, wrote in a popular Peruvian magazine this week that the country should avoid limits on access to knowledge online and the over-extension of copyright protection terms for books, movies or music, that limit their availability in libraries and schools, and that would make it more expensive for lower income people.

- Paul Krugman looks at Ireland as a prime example of gross economic numbers bearing no particular relationship to the actual strength of an economy - as profits moved there out of convenience are doing nothing whatsoever to reduce 14% unemployment. (Needless to say, it's always a good time for a reminder that's exactly the model the Saskatchewan Party wants to inflict on the province.)

- And Leif Larsen reports that still more Irish workers who have lost their jobs to corporatist mismanagement are being used to hurt workers in Canada - this time to avoid the possibility that workers on Manitoba construction sites might attempt to unionize.

- Jessica Bruno writes that the Cons' cuts to research extend to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada,

- Finally, Rosie DiManno rightly criticizes the gall of Toronto's police in rewarding themselves for the civil rights abuses perpetrated at Toronto's 2010 G20 meeting.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Geoffrey Stevens discusses the basic problem behind the Cons' insistence on cutting back actual help to people while wasting billions on prisons and fighter jets:

(I)f the government did have a weakness (which, as noted, it does not concede), it might be that it does not suffer fools gladly — “fools” being loosely defined as anyone who fails to applaud everything the Conservatives do. This is quite a large category, encompassing (or so pollsters tell us) two-thirds of the Canadian populace.

Not only does the government not embrace criticism, it does not trust experts. The overhaul of the old age security system that Harper announced, minus details, in Davos (safely removed from the fools in Parliament) illustrates the point. As Harper sees it, the changes — which apparently will require seniors to wait longer and accept smaller pensions — are needed to make OAS sustainable for future generations. But is that really the case?

Non-partisan experts argue that if the Conservatives factor in economic growth and increases in the working-age population though immigration, they will discover a quite different picture, and not a bleak one at all. One of those experts is Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer (and a troublesome fellow in Tory eyes) “We don’t have a long-term sustainability problem,” Page says. “I think he (Harper) is doing it for broader problems.”

Common sense would suggest that the Conservatives acknowledge that independent experts just might have a point worth considering (by a royal commission perhaps?). At very least, the public deserves a more convincing explanation and some reassurance before the best finance minister on the planet attacks a pension system that has served the country well over the years.

- Bea Vongdouangchonh reports on Joe Comartin's efforts to make Parliament more open and democratic.

- Sixth Estate laments the embarrassment of riches in trying to choose a single weekly Flack Award.

- Last week's column looks to have been particularly well-timed, as word gets out that the Wall government is trying to recruit some of the same people taken in by Ireland's false promise of an economy built on corporate giveaways to help build a similar set of bubbles in Saskatchewan.

- Finally, kudos to the team of labour activists which succeeded in demonstrating that the Wall government's essential services legislation was unconstitutional. And Murray Mandryk nicely sums up how Justice Ball's findings that the Sask Party's essential services legislation was the most draconian in the country serve to undermine the Wall government's pretense at moderation.

New column day

Here, on the Wall government's insistence that public-sector cuts are the answer no matter what the question - and the cautionary tale we should draw from their Irish model.

For further reading...
- The CP documents Wall's latest demand for austerity at any price.
- Paul Krugman has done plenty of work showing where Ireland has gone wrong in both its initial economic model and its subsequent austerity program. See posts here, and especially here among others.
- And for more on the IMF's admonition that governments not engage in gratuitous cuts if they can afford not to, see the BBC and Stephen Gordon.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Will Falk points out how the right's calls for health-care privatization are both aimed at largely fictitious problems, and likely to make any genuine concerns far worse:

What the authors of (Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe Institute studies) don’t say is that the decade before last had a much lower rate of spending and from 1991-96 averaged just 0.9 per cent growth. We actually had real spending declines on a percentage-of-GDP basis for most of the 1990s.

Yes, we have had spending growth over the past 10 years, but what did we expect when we guaranteed the provinces 6 per cent more a year? Privatizing health financing would just add more fuel to the fire. The Fraser Institute does Canadians a disservice when it produces a political conclusion based on such nonsensical projections. C.D. Howe’s authors did a better job over a longer time frame. Their projections were age-adjusted with a variety of important variable factors around technology, relative price and GDP growth. However, their projection is at heart another neo-Malthusian straight line.

The political elites are engaged in a game of self-fulfilling prophecy. Straight-line cost projections and guaranteed federal revenue increases will ensure the cost increases they project.
...
(O)ur challenge this decade is different. Then it was about fixing hospital care; now, we must harvest productivity gains from new technologies and virtualization of care. From a human point of view, this time will be easier. We have very low nursing unemployment — a third of new nurses come from abroad. It is a difficult task but not so challenging we shouldn’t try.

Let’s stop talking about how we finance 6 per-cent-plus increases or privatize health care and instead tackle improving the system to preserve it for the next generation.

- While the Wall government is no longer quite so eager to portray itself as following in the footsteps of the collapsed Irish economy, there isn't much doubt that it's still sticking to the same direction regardless of what lessons we should be learning from Ireland's financial meltdown. Which means that we too can all too likely look forward to being next in line to have our pensions raided in an effort to spare the corporate sector any of the cost of rebuilding from its destruction.

- Which leads nicely into the Mound of Sound's observations as to how it is we're considered powerless to shape our own destiny:

The question becomes how did major corporations gain the power to threaten our governments, our societies - the power to write our legislation? The answer is simple. We gave it to them.
...
Yes, corporations threaten us when we want to do something they don't like but that's only because we've loaned them the knife. Why don't we take that knife back? Why aren't we the ones able to threaten corporations? Why don't we reclaim our sovereignty so foolishly surrendered by people of the ilk of Reagan and Mulroney? All we have to do is call their bluff. There will be "repercussions" initially but, then again, haven't we been living with the horrible repercussions of Free Trade for decades?

- And the likelihood that we'll end up bearing the cost of blindly following corporate wishes is all the more reason to want to make sure our policy choices are based on real evidence and logical assessments as to how to develop our economy, rather than faith-based appeals to the market gods.

Reason to reevaluate

Yesterday, I figured it should be obvious why it would be reckless for the Sask Party to figure that it can coast on policies that haven't been given any thought since 2003. But in case there's any doubt whether anything has happened in the meantime that would cause any remotely competent government to reconsider its economic model...

So the Irish government bailed out the banksters, cut public spending, and their economy is in the (#@*^&).

Unemployment is up to 13.8 percent (it was as low as 4.2 percent as recently as 2005); public spending has been savagely and repeatedly cut since 2008; the deficit has risen to 14.3 percent; and current predictions suggest that 100,000 people will emigrate in the next several years, from a population of 4.3 million. The bill from the struggling banks may, in the end, total upward of $135 billion 100 billion euros, in an economy with a G.D.P. of $220 billion 160 billion euros.

Truly, the Wall government doesn't plan to settle for any mediocre failure when it can instead continue down a road which leads to an all-out catastrophe. But the rest of us don't seem to have much reason to want to go along with a plan to turn Saskatchewan into the next Ireland - and if Wall isn't willing to learn anything from the mistakes of his ideological cousins elsewhere, then our only chance is to make sure he's not in a position to set the province's direction.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- Aside from the occasional attempt by the likes of Jim Flaherty to pretend that Ireland's disaster could never have happened to a country which so zealously bought into the free-market religion, few seem to be foolish enough to put forward the Irish experience as a model to follow for the moment. But in tracing Ireland's decline, Bruce Campbell points out that its boom wasn't anywhere near what it was hyped to be either:

Foreign direct investment—led by the computer and pharmaceutical sectors--poured in. It became the preferred location of (mainly US) multinational corporations seeking to keep their profits out of reach of their home country tax authorities. (Google, for example, is reported to have saved $3.1 billion over the last three years by setting up shop in Ireland). Ireland became the largest jurisdiction outside the US for declared pretax profits by American firms. The transfer of profits out of Ireland accounts for 20% of Irish GDP.

While indigenous Irish industry expanded, it never lived up to expectations. The hallmark characteristics of an enclave economy—weak linkages to the domestic economy, benefits accruing to a narrow segment of society—were clearly in evidence. Industry remained dominated by a relatively small group of multinationals. Data from the Irish Development Agency, show that while the foreign and domestic sectors each employed about 150,000. The foreign-owned sector accounted for over 80% total output.

While it created a lot of employment—much of it in the form of low wage service jobs—the Irish boom accentuated income and wealth inequality. Rather than apportioning gains to strengthen the welfare state to be more in line with European norms, the Irish model gave precedence to the interests of foreign capital and to a small domestic elite that had successfully ridden the Irish prosperity wave.
...
Income and capital gains tax cuts left the government coffers with a narrower tax base much more vulnerable to collapse of the construction and real estate sectors.

When the global crisis hit, the bubble burst: foreign finance dried up, exports tanked, construction came to a halt and property values plunged, exposing the toxic debt at the heart of the Irish banks. Ireland’s budget surplus and low public debt turned bad with lightening (sic) speed.

- Hugh Segal nicely points out how his own party's prison growth strategy makes absolutely no sense as a destination for public money:

At a time of government restraint, prisoners are, in a word, expensive. With all costs factored in, Canadians spend more than $147,000 per prisoner in federal custody each year.

By contrast, it would take between $12,000 and $20,000 annually to bring a person in Canada above the poverty line. Even at the high end of the GAI scale, this represents savings to taxpayers of $127,000 per federal prisoner each year. Those are figures that should be of interest to any federal or provincial finance minister — of any party background.

- But as Haroon Siddiqui notes, we're the ones left paying the price for the Cons putting Stephen Harper's political games ahead of even a minimal level of engagement with reality.

- And finally, Greg asks:

Liberals, is there no Conservative trick they won't fall for?

Only if you count the ones they're in on to begin with. This has been another version of simple answers to simple questions.

Advice worth ignoring

Shorter Jim Flaherty:

In order to avoid the same fiscal risks facing the European Union as a whole, we must follow the lead of its most devastated member.

On responsibility

Brian Topp's take on the Irish disaster is well worth a read. But it's worth offering up a reminder to the converse of Topp's take on why progressives should be concerned with careful money management:

(B)eyond a certain threshold, every dollar borrowed from the markets to finance day-to-day spending by a provincial government is a step towards the disempowerment of the public and its legislature. Over-dependence on debt hands the keys of public policy to lenders and to their advisers.

Small wonder then that the press in Ireland is full of lament for the loss of that country's independence – so expensively won after so many centuries of oppression and struggle.
...
The state is awash in debt (thanks in part to excessive tax cuts); the deregulated private sector has gorged itself in an orgy of speculative greed, and finally expired in a property and banking bubble; and now the working and middle class – and their children, and their grandchildren – get to pick up the tab while the winners enjoy their properties in the Grand Caymans. Nobody in Ireland stood up to the special interests. They “ran like a business.” Now the bill has come due.

These are the real stakes between those who work for moderate, prudent, incremental progressive government, moving forward within its means in the public interest, and the other side – the mouthpieces for greed and reckless irresponsibility. The shills and charlatans of the populist right, and those who fund them.

Put simply, anybody who believes that government has a useful role to play in the lives of citizens should want to make sure that it's not wasting money - both for the sake of avoiding the issues with creditors mentioned by Topp, and in order to ensure that it maximizes the amount of good that public spending actually achieves.

On the other hand, a party which believes that government action is generally illegitimate in the first place can far more easily justify reckless attacks on public finances - knowing that when the bill comes due, it will serve to ensure that the next goverment is limited in what it can do. And while we haven't yet seen quite the same excesses in Canada that resulted in the disaster in Ireland, it's well worth asking whether we can afford to keep power in the hands of parties who agree wholeheartedly with the beliefs that created such a stark cautionary tale.

Compare and contrast

Your friendly neighbourhood Nobel-winning economist:

A couple of months back I asked, does fiscal austerity actually reassure markets? I noted there the curious case of Ireland, which embraced savage austerity early on; quite a few press reports declared that this had gained it the confidence of markets, but the actual numbers said otherwise. And I noted the contrast with Spain, which has been relatively slow and reluctant to embrace austerity, but has been treated no worse by investors.
...
(S)ince austerians were claiming bond market approval as a sign of its policy success, it is worth pointing out that dutiful Ireland looks as if it’s entering a runaway debt spiral, while malingering Spain is looking considerably better.

Your less-friendly neighbourhood Finance Minister:

According to a report in today’s Times of London, our finance minister, Jim Flaherty, has now waded into the dispute. Behind the paper’s pay-wall, Mr. Flaherty is reported to have “dismissed the downgrade, instead praising the Irish Government’s package of austerity measures.”

So apparently we too can look forward to a great deal of pain for its own sake - at least as long as our finance minister is taking a lead role in playing to imaginary confidence fairies rather than acknowledging that gratuitous government-slashing can have serious consequences.