Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Mark Tenforde, Kiva Fisher and Manish Patel study the activities most likely to spread COVID-19 - with restaurants, gyms, bars and churches ranking as the obvious sources of community transmission. And Bruce Arthur warns not to count on an increasing number of vaccine deliveries as a magic bullet against the coronavirus pandemic - particularly when variants are spreading among unvaccinated populations.

- Jim Stanford writes that the model being used to distribute vaccines - ensuring that the people who need a vital good most receive it at no cost - is one we should look to expand to cover more of the essentials of life. And Bernard Ho, Osman Raza and Andriy Katyukha ask when the Libs will live up to their promise to make that happen in ensuring access to medicine in particular. 

- Christine Dobby discusses how concentrated capital has caused a rental housing crisis even when there are far more homes available than people to occupy them. And Stephanie Allen makes the case for community land trusts to ensure that community-based housing is developed and made available for the people who need it.

- Lars Osberg writes that instead of using the end of the pandemic as an excuse to revert to neoliberalism as usual, we need to once again recognize and account for our interdependence. And even the Economist recognizes that we can't afford to simply go back to the status quo ante in designing our social supports.

- Finally, for those with time to explore some new online resources, saskoil.org offers a thorough look at the impact of the fossil fuel sector in Saskatchewan. And The Breach will soon be offering a needed independent national media outlet.

Wednesday Evening Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- The results of Stockton, CA's experiment with a guaranteed income show a predictable improvement in both well-being and economic success for people with income security. Lorne Calvert makes the case to introduce a guaranteed liveable income in Canada. And Will Wilkinson writes about the folly of holding basic supports for children hostage based on the actions of parents.

- Lars Osberg tracks Canada's inequality over the past 75 years. And Ricardo Lamour and Amel Zaazaa examine how taxes and public payments have all too often served to entrench racial disparities.

- Justin Ling takes a look at Canada's profoundly broken system of incarceration. And Brendan Devlin points out how "critical infrastructure" laws are being used to turn legitimate protest into an entry point for the criminal justice system. 

- Daniel Boffey reports on the agreement among EU countries to cooperate in shutting down corporate tax avoidance. And Global Financial Integrity offers its recommendations to embed protections against money laundering into the global economic system.

- Finally, Althia Raj reports on Canada's embarrassing rating at the bottom of the world in protection for whistleblowers.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Yutaka Dirks reviews Lars Osberg's The Age of Increasing Inequality, with a particular focus on how matters have been getting worse in recent decades.

- Ryan Nunn, Jana Parsons and Jay Shambaugh study (PDF) the connection between geography and inequality, including the role of decreasing migration in locking in and exacerbating existing disparities. And Danny Dorling examines the link between higher inequality and lower life expectancy around the globe.

- Mary Bousted points out how educational inequalities arise out of social and environmental factors long before students ever set foot in a classroom. And Alex Hemingway argues that at the very least, public money shouldn't be spent subsidizing those inequalities through elite private schools.

- Rachel Shabi discusses UK Labour's turn toward democratic socialism - and the resonance of the prospect of economic democracy within the general public.

- Dirk Meissner reports on the denial of cancer treatment to a homeless man as an unconscionable example of the gaps in our health care system. And Hasan Sheikh offers a response to the desire of Doug Ford and others to make the availability of necessary care even more contingent on one's wealth. 

- Finally, Andrew Coyne discusses the climate nihilism of a sadly growing number of anti-carbon-tax demagogues. PressProgress offers a reminder that we stand to lose tens of billions of dollars a year from extreme weather events caused by climate change alone. And Zoya Terstein argues that the primary problem with carbon pricing as it stands is that we're nowhere close to properly measuring the damage we're doing to our planet. 

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Lana Payne offers a reminder (with reference to Lars Osberg's new book) that extreme and growing inequality is a choice rather than an inevitability - but that it also represents a self-reinforcing trend:

“The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise Of Canada’s 1%” doesn’t merely detail years of data about how inequality has grown in Canada, but argues why ever-increasing equality is so harmful to our democracy.

Osberg has been saying that for some time. It is a predictable outcome. Those with money get more say and the more money they get, the more say they get. The rich also have no trouble exercising their unlimited access and influence over the political class and political decisions.

Osberg argues that Canada is at risk of instability because of rising wealth disparity. There is little doubt this is also at the root of the rise of populist politics across much of the world, including Canada.

The bottom half of Canada’s population is economically stuck. While the top half have improved somewhat over the past several decades, they find themselves further and further behind those at the very top, the 1 per cent.

That’s because the 1 per cent are taking an ever-growing share of income and wealth. This reinforces a sense of unfairness and insecurity as those at the top are so far ahead of everyone else.

- Meanwhile, Gauri Sreenivasan rightly argues that Canada should know better than to race the U.S. to the bottom when it comes to corporate tax rates and regulations.

- Doreen Nicoll reports on Doug Ford's closed-door meetings to sell off even more of Ontario's fresh water over the objections of affected municipalities. And Ed Finn discusses how corporatist politics are destroying natural forests.

- Finally, Aaron Saad comments on the tragi-comic state of carbon pricing politics in Canada. And Cameron Fenton is dubious that an already-compromised National Energy Board can carry out any meaningful review of a Trans Mountain pipeline expansion within the rushed timeline set by the Trudeau Libs.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Dana Flavelle and Rachel Mendleson both cover Lars Osberg's study on the harmful effects of inequality. But let's highlight the key conclusion from the original source:

(T)he continuation of a divergence in income growth trends necessarily creates changing flows of consumption and savings. Although aggregate demand can be maintained in the short run if the savings of the increasingly affluent are lent to those with stagnant incomes, their increasing indebtedness leads inevitably to financial fragility. The trend in the U.S. and Canada to rising income inequality thus leads to periodic financial crises, greater volatility of aggregate income and, as governments respond to mass unemployment with counter-cyclical fiscal policies, a compounding instability of public finances.

The conundrum in all this inequality-induced macro-economic instability is that it clearly can be avoided. A steeply progressive income tax system can reduce the imbalances of financial flows, lessen the volatility of GDP and help pay off government deficits. Yet, in both the U.S. and Canada, the progressivity of the income tax system has been substantially eroded, over the same period in which the pre-tax incomes of the top 1% have grown most strongly. Even if an occasional deviant multi-billionaire protests that his income tax rate is absurdly low, indeed less than the tax rate of his employees, he is outgunned by the other billionaires who contribute to anti-tax crusades. There appears to be little likelihood of a return to the progressivity of tax regimes during the era (1946 to late 1970s) when income shares were roughly stable in North America, and massive financial crises were avoided.

The recent historical experience of Canada and the U.S. is clearly inconsistent with the simplistic political economy theories that predict that the ‘median voter’ in a more unequal society will vote in more redistribution and more progressive taxation. Indeed, recent history offers much more evidence consistent with the ‘deeper pockets’ model of political influence — that one can expect great wealth to be used in the political process to accentuate further wealth inequality.

- Meanwhile, Renata D'Aliesio manages to pitch Canada's drop from second to sixth in the OECD's latest quality-of-life assessment as good news. But it surely can't escape our notice that it's continued inequality that's pushing Canada down in the world. And that goes doubly when (as Glen Pearson notes) we have plenty of money to eradicate hunger and poverty if we're willing to limit how much we spend on military vanity projects.

- Jim Stanford points out that corporate-oriented free trade agreements have proven a flop on all counts - even in measuring the trade they're supposed to encourage:

Total exports of goods and services were equivalent to 31 per cent of Canada’s GDP last year – down from 38 per cent when the Harper government was elected (and 46 per cent in 2000). If the goal is truly boosting trade (as opposed to enshrining business-friendly economic rules or propping up authoritarian governments in Latin America), then this government is failing miserably.

Canada’s export failure cannot be blamed on foreign trade barriers. Instead, we must look in the mirror – at the structural inadequacy of our business sector. Canada has chronically failed to nurture and develop domestically based globally active firms that produce innovative, high-value products for world markets. Working to fix that problem (through proactive technology, innovation and sector-development strategies) would do more for our actual trade than all the free-trade talks in the world. If you truly believe in trade, don’t be distracted by the trade deals.

- And finally, Bea Vongdouangchanh reports on the copyright bill the Cons are set to force through Parliament, featuring this apt observation from Tyrone Benskin on the difference between holding hearings and actually listening to concerned citizens:

Mr. Benskin told The Hill Times last week, however, that the “sweeping bill” was “rushed” and more importantly, the government did not listen to stakeholders. 

“This is their argument for every single solitary bill they’ve put forth: we talked about it in 1792. It’s ridiculous. Yes, they did see hundreds of people and yes they did hear hundreds of hours of testimony. And they ignored each and every hour of that. It’s one thing to say, ‘I heard it,’ it’s another thing to say, ‘I listened to it.’  They have selective hearing,” he said.