Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Katie Allen discusses the Equality Trust's research into tax rates in the UK - which shows that the poor actually pay the highest share of their income in taxes, even as the public has been led to believe the opposite:

The poorest 10% of households pay eight percentage points more of their income in all taxes than the richest – 43% compared to 35%, according to a report from the Equality Trust.

The thinktank highlights what it sees as a gulf between perceptions of the tax system and reality. Its poll, conducted with Ipsos Mori found that nearly seven in ten people believe that households in the highest 10% income group pay more of their income in tax than those in the lowest 10%.

The survey of more than 1,000 people also found a strong majority – 96% – believe that the tax system should be more progressive than is currently the case.

- But then, the poor can hardly afford to match the constant PR offensive put on by the corporate elite to demand preferential treatment. Which leads to Maria Konnikova's observation that poverty presents far more obstacles that a lack of money alone:

When we think of poverty, we tend to think about money in isolation: How much does she earn? Is that above or below the poverty line? But the financial part of the equation may not be the single most important factor. “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity,” Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at Harvard who is a co-author of the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” tells me, “is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.”

“There are three types of poverty,” he says. “There’s money poverty, there’s time poverty, and there’s bandwidth poverty.” The first is the type we typically associate with the word. The second occurs when the time debt of the sort I incurred starts to pile up.

And the third is the type of attention shortage that is fed by the other two: If I’m focused on the immediate deadline, I don’t have the cognitive resources to spend on mundane tasks or later deadlines. If I’m short on money, I can’t stop thinking about today’s expenses — never mind those in the future. In both cases, I end up making decisions that leave me worse off because I lack the ability to focus properly on anything other than what’s staring me in the face right now, at this exact moment.

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(T)he most unfair aspect of the whole thing is that the bandwidth tax doesn’t affect everyone equally. If you aren’t your fully strategic self all the time, so be it. If I miss one deadline — or even two — it’s far from the end of the world. But if I’m also poor in the traditional sense? Suddenly, the lack of time has a nonlinear, compounding effect: My bandwidth isn’t just a bit more taxed. The tax is completely off the charts, and I have little recourse to repair the damage.
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The poor are under a deadline that never lifts, pressure that can’t be relieved. If I am poor, I work or I churn until decisions like buying lottery tickets begin to seem like attractive alternatives. I lack the time to calculate the odds and think of alternative uses for my money.
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If poverty is about time and mental bandwidth as well as money, how does this change how we combat its effects? “When we think about programs for the poor, we don’t ever think, hey, let’s give them programs that don’t use a lot of bandwidth,” says Mr. Mullainathan. Instead, we fault people for failing to sign up for programs that are ostensibly available, even though we don’t factor in the time and cognitive capacity they need to get past even the first step.

- Conversely, an excess of concentrated money tends to beget brand-new ways of distorting the economy. And Janet McFarland reports on a study by Michael Wolfson, Mike Veall and Neil Brooks which finds that past measures likely underestimate inequality in Canada by failing to take into account money funneled through privately-held corporations:

Using data that includes CCPCs changes the picture of Canada’s top income earners because these are the people most likely to set them up. Only 5 per cent of people in the bottom half of income earners own a stake in a CCPC, and the study shows that, over the past decade, up to 80 per cent of those in the top 0.01 per cent of income earners owned a stake in a CCPC. Some people own stakes in four or more CCPCs, the report shows.

CCPCs are typically used to hold a private business, so they could be created by the owner of a store or restaurant to incorporate the business. Dr. Wolfson said they are also legally used by doctors, lawyers, accountants and other professionals as a way to incorporate their business activities, allowing the corporation to be paid income rather than having the individuals paid in the form of salaries.

There can be many advantages to having income go into a corporation rather than receiving it as a salary, including the ability to defer income, split income with a spouse, and reduce capital gains tax.

Researchers have long found it difficult to measure income for top earners and that has led to an inaccurate picture of the degree of income inequality between the rich and the poor. Including CCPCs has given a better portrait of high income earners and revealed the sizeable impact of these private holdings.

The report shows that income for the top 10 per cent of earners increased an average of 16 per cent when CCPCs were included in the income data. The increase was even more dramatic for those in the top 0.1 per cent. Their average income rose to $2.1-million when CCPCs were taken into account, compared with $1.3-million if CCPCs were excluded. That’s a difference of 55 per cent.

- Shannon Gormley comments on how the Harper Cons' paranoia is leading Canada toward a policy of citizenship-stripping normally applied by only the world's worst human-rights abusers.

- Finally, Alice Funke provides a thorough review of what actually happened in Ontario's provincial election.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Margaret Somers and Fred Block write about Karl Polanyi's critique of the free-market myth and its increased relevance today:

(F)ree-market rhetoric is a giant smokescreen designed to hide the dependence of business profits on conditions secured by government. So, for example, our giant financial institutions insist that they should be free of meddlesome regulations while they depend on continuing access to cheap credit—in good times and bad—from the Federal Reserve. Our pharmaceutical firms have successfully resisted any government limits on their price-setting ability at the same time that they rely on government grants of monopolies through the patent system. And, of course, the compliance of employees with the demands of their managers is maintained by police, judges, and an elaborate structure of legal rules.

Polanyi effectively brings the role of government and politics into the center of the analysis of market economies. And in doing so, he opens up possibilities that are often obscured in other currents of left thought. If regulations are always necessary to create markets, we must not discuss regulation versus deregulation but rather what kinds of regulations we prefer: those designed to benefit wealth and capital, or those that benefit the public and common good? Similarly, since the rights or lack of rights that employees have at the workplace are always defined by the legal system, we must not ask whether the law should organize the labor market but rather what kind of rules and rights should be entailed in these laws—those that recognize that it is the skills and talents of employees that make firms productive, or those that rig the game in favor of employers and private profits?
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There is too much public discourse, even within the Democratic Party, that accepts and even propagates the right-wing propaganda that a restoration of economic growth requires austerity and greater deference to the needs of business. The reality is that austerity usually results in rent-seeking behavior, with the consequence of further stagnation and crises rather than productive investment. Polanyi teaches us that periods of prosperity and rising living standards, by contrast, were a direct result of democratic gains in politics and civil society. The greatest prosperity in living memory in Europe and the United States came during the social democratic moment—in the 1950s and 1960s—when the constraints on business were the greatest. In short, more democracy and more economic justice are the necessary foundations for the path to socialism and a more vibrant, prosperous, and sustainable economy.

- And Elias Isquith interviews Shar Habibi about the role of privatization in simultaneously eroding public services and linin the pockets of the wealthy:

What did you find when you examined privatization/government outsourcing?

What this report really looked [at] was the effects of government outsourcing, at the local and state levels, on jobs and the impacts it has on the community and ultimately on the issue of income inequality. What we see is that … when state or local government outsources, these jobs are no longer good, public-sector jobs that provide a decent wage and benefits, but instead become jobs for a contractor that pay very low wages and typically have very few or no benefits. And really what is kind of alarming about this is [that] outsourcing public services sets off a downward spiral in which reduced worker wages and benefits can hurt the local economy and the overall stability of middle- and working-class communities. By paying family-supporting wages and providing important benefits like health insurance and sick leave, governments have historically created what we’re calling “intentional ladders of opportunity” to allow workers and their families to reach the middle class. And this has been especially true for women and African-Americans, for whom the public sector has been a source of stable, middle-class careers. Unfortunately low-road government contracts reverse this dynamic. So while corporations rake in increasing profits through taxpayer dollars and while CEO compensation continues to soar, the examples in our report show that the workers employed by state and local government contractors receive those low wages and few benefits.
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How big of a role do you think privatization plays in the larger phenomenon of growing inequality?

I think that it’s often overlooked, but it’s a sizable piece of the puzzle … We don’t have exact numbers of how many workers this affects because state and local governments aren’t keeping good, systematic records of this (and fixing that is one of our recommendations in the report) but … we do know on the federal level there are three times as many contract workers as civil-service workers and so we also know that there are about 14.5 million full-time, and almost 5 million part-time, state and local government workers. So if the proportion is anything near the federal ratio of contract-to-direct-government-worker, that’s millions of jobs that we’re talking about. There’s also some very rough estimates that total state and local procurement can be valued around $1-1.5 trillion — that’s a very crude estimate. But contracting anywhere approaching that fiscal magnitude means millions of jobs are being created through state and local contracting. So when states and local governments use low-road contractors that slash wages and benefits and create low-wage jobs, this is really a factor in growing income inequality and the disappearing middle class. It’s often overlooked, but it’s very significant.

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman discusses how the U.S.' corporate elite has lost control of the movement it set up to take political power, then follows up with the ultimate sign of establishment desperation:

Corporations and plutocrats had a good deal going: they bankrolled politicians who talked cultural populism during campaigns, but more or less ignored all that and focused on tax cuts and deregulation after the polls closed. And Cantor fit that profile perfectly.

But now the big money has lost control; the base is demanding politicians who don’t just talk the crazy talk, but walk the crazy walk. For a couple of months the story line was that the money was regaining control, but between Cantor and Cochran that narrative has been blown out of the water.

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How bad is it? So bad that some establishment Republicans — which means people who work for the corporate side — are pining for another run by, yes, Mitt Romney.

- But if the business sector may be having trouble controlling its political puppets, it's having rather better luck avoiding any accountability to the public at large - as David Atkins highlights how corporations are going to greater and greater lengths to avoid having to answer for the injuries they inflict on others.

- Finally, Jessica McDiarmid offers a prime example, pointing out how the rail industry is demanding that governments across Canada and the U.S. keep the public in the dark about the risk it's creating. And Andrew Nikiforuk discusses how abandoned oil wells are doing severe environmental damage by releasing methane and other gases.

On sucker's deals

Shorter Brad Wall:

But what you less-sophisticated, not-so-business-savvy people don't understand is this: when you pawn the furniture, you get CASH MONEY UP FRONT. How can that be anything but a great deal?

Update: On further reflection, this calls for a photoshop:

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Lana Payne discusses the need to address inequality through our political system. But that will require significant pressure from exactly the citizens who have decided they're not well served by today's political options - and Trish Hennessy's look at Canadian voter turnout reminds us of the desperate need for improvement.

- Meanwhile, Tim Harford points out just how far we've gone in focusing on dollars over all other considerations - as even Scotland's referendum on independence is being spun mostly as a matter of dueling fiscal projections rather than community, culture or other policy questions.

- Tavia Grant's report on the deadly legacy - and continued danger - of asbestos is well worth a read, particularly for this reminder that the Cons' offical policy is to promote the material which serves as Canada's largest source of workplace deaths:

In asbestos policy, Canada is at odds with other developed countries, almost all of which have both banned asbestos and launched national campaigns to educate their citizens on its dangers.

Regarding exports and imports, Canada’s long-standing position is that “safe and controlled use” of the mineral poses little risk to human health.

Health Canada’s website maintains that chrysotile (the form of asbestos mined in Quebec) is safer than other types of asbestos, and that asbestos poses risks only when its fibres become airborne and “significant quantities” are inhaled. It plays down the causal relationship between asbestos and some forms of cancer. The website does not inform Canadians that asbestos is the No. 1 cause of work-related deaths. (In contrast, the U.S. Acting Surgeon General, Boris Lushniak, reminded the American public in April that there is no known safe level of asbestos exposure.)

Between 2006 and 2011, Canada was the only developed nation to oppose bringing asbestos under the control of the Rotterdam Convention, a United Nations-sponsored treaty, signed in 1998, that requires the exporters of hazardous substances to disclose the risks.

Indeed, the Conservative government has been a stalwart friend of the industry. “Only the Conservative party will defend this industry here and everywhere in Canada,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in Quebec on the campaign trail in 2011. While the Tories were fighting international efforts to restrict trade in asbestos, the government was simultaneously spending millions to remove asbestos from the Parliament buildings and the prime minister’s residence.

- In a similar vein, PressProgress finds that the Cons' cheerleading for the oil sector has reached the point where they're trying to paint the extraction and burning of dirty fossil fuels as a win for the environment. Mitchell Anderson discusses Canada's massive subsidies to big oil (as well as the Cons' pathetic attempts to pretend they don't exist), while Mike de Souza finds that the National Energy Board is spending twice as much moving its offices into a sinkhole as it could muster for new pipeline monitoring, and the CP finds that Alberta's new environmental policy for fracking is "do what you want". And Bruce Johnstone writes that the Cons can't be taken seriously on climate change.

- Finally, David Dayen discusses the astroturf effort to challenge Elizabeth Warren's work in making student loan payments more affordable.

Musical interlude

Darren Porter - Terraforming

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Neera Tanden points out that a wide range of citizens rely on a strong safety net at one time or another - and suggests that it's long past time to start discussing how important social programs have been in our own lives:

I believe we have a historic opportunity to address poverty today, because the interests of low-income people and the middle class are converging. Median wages—the wages of middle-income earners—have been stagnant for twelve years. People recognize there is growing inequality in this country and that something is amiss when companies are doing well but people aren’t—when dividends, stock prices, and CEO salaries rise but wages don’t.

And while we have a clear opportunity to make the connection between the interests of people in poverty and the interests of the middle class, we have our work cut out for us. Conservatives have successfully pitted people in the middle against people struggling near the bottom. They are skilled at exploiting economic anger and anxiety, fear and distrust. For example, they have convinced many Americans that many people who turn to the safety net want to be on welfare rather than having a job. This mistaken notion is particularly troubling right now, when the hardest-hit communities face high unemployment rates of 20 to 30 percent. Conservatives say we have to break up the safety net or people won’t pursue jobs. But the truth is those jobs just don’t exist right now. So the real effect of these heartless policies will be more people hungry, more people homeless, and more children with fewer opportunities to succeed—children just like my brother and I.

For my family, as for many American families, the safety net was a bridge that carried us through hard times. That’s why it’s important that I tell my story.
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When we take on the assumptions and stereotypes directly—and actually look at the lives of poor people—we see in fact that their lives are full of struggle (including the struggle to navigate a welfare system that seems designed to make it as hard as possible for people to receive benefits).

- Alex Boutilier writes that the Cons are now scrambling for accurate labour market information in an effort to figure out what to do with temporary foreign workers - after having slashed exactly that type of data collection as part of their war on evidence. But as Andrew Coyne points out, there's a fairly obvious answer if the Cons are willing to let newly-arrived workers have a future in Canada by eliminating the "temporary" part of their designation, rather than wanting to make sure they remain disposable at an employer's behest.

- Meanwhile, Paul Adams discusses how Stephen Harper has become a leading figure for climate denialists around the globe (much to Canada's embarrassment):

More than anything, Abbott admires Harper because he sees him as a world leader in the fight against doing anything meaningful to contain global warming.

Like Harper, at one time Abbott was close to being an outright climate change denier. “The argument (behind climate change) is absolute crap,” he once remarked.

Nowadays, Abbott, like Harper, could best be described as a “skeptic”. He acknowledges that climate change is occurring but doubts the role that carbon emissions play in it. He got into a scrap with a UN climate change official and Australia’s own Climate Council over the possible link between climate change and his country’s unusually severe wildfires last October.

(Abbott took a page out of Harper’s book by abolishing the state-funded Climate Council, whose mission is to provide independent scientific information...)
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Like Canada, whose economic dependence on dirty tar sands oil has grown under Harper, Australia has an emissions problem. In fact, Abbott seems bent on increasing the growth of his country’s coal industry, which is closely linked to China’s economic expansion.

That’s why Abbott is joining Harper in forming a cabal of nations trying to slow efforts to contain emissions. He is trying to repeal the carbon tax imposed by Gillard. And he has been an outspoken critic of President Obama’s recent climate-change initiative.

As chairman of the G-20 meeting slated for November in Brisbane, Abbott is resolute in keeping climate change off the agenda.

- Finally, Justin Ling reports on the Canadian military's extensive monitoring of Idle No More protestors. And CBC finds the Cape Breton and Central Nova Scotia Railway to be rather less subtle in its efforts to shut down any discussion of rail safety - including by threatening elected officials with legal action if they say or do anything about crumbling rail lines.

New column day

Here, on how the City of Regina has taken a first step - but only that so far - in making sure that new development doesn't result in the perpetual subsidization of developers by current residents.

For further reading...
- Shawn Fraser's thoughtful post on the new interim phasing and financing plan is here. And the plan was approved (PDF) (with an amendment for a single project) earlier this week.
- The Calgary study on the time it takes for a neighbourhood to start providing net benefits to a city is discussed here.
- And for those with reading time to spare, the full report from Regina's administration can be found here (PDF). Among the points referenced in the column, I'll highlight two.

First, there's the limited scope of participation in the study:

The Administration engaged the Regina & Region Home Builders’ Association (RRHBA), developers, and major landowners of the 300K growth areas. Four in-person sessions were held and two opportunities for written feedback were provided.

This was then matched by the one-sided turnout at the Executive Committee meeting which considered the report:

The following addressed and answered questions of the Committee:
-        Stu Niebergall, representing the Regina and Region Home Builders Association;
-        Bob Linner and Pat Mah, representing  North Ridge Development Corporation;
-        John Nostrand, Rev. Jerven Weekes and Daryl Brown, representing Rosewood Park Alliance Church;
-        Paul Moroz, Ned Kosteniuk and Evan Hunchak, representing Dream Development;
-        Kevin Reese, representing The Creeks;
-        Blair Forster and Chad Jedlic, representing Harvard Developments; and
-        Lorne Yagelniski, representing Kensington Greens Corporation

Second, here's the contrast between the respective views of the administration and the participating developers on the issue of municipal debt:

[The] Administration concluded that the City cannot afford to continue to pay for growth-related capital projects in accordance with the current...policy...without phasing growth. The reason for this is there would be too many projects that require SAF funding that would not generate the required revenue to pay for the projects until years after the capital expenditure had been made. This would result in the need for the City to exceed its debt limit and taxpayers to take on significant risk. Furthermore, based on the current policy, the City, and thus taxpayers, would be required to generate considerably more tax revenue to pay for its share of the plan, approximately equivalent to a one-time 7 per cent mill rate increase.
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A number of Stakeholders reject debt limitations as a rationale for the need to phase development or increase SAF rates. Alternatives suggested include requesting an increase to the City’s debt limit or allocating more of the available debt to financing development.

Thursday Morning Links - #VoteOn Edition

This and that for your Thursday (and Ontario election day) reading...

- Joseph Heath makes the case against Tim Hudak's PCs in particular, and the shift from public to private goods in general:

(I)t’s fairly clear what the PCs are planning. They are proposing a general shift in Ontario away from consumption of public goods towards increased consumption of private goods. For example, they aren’t making any noises about privatizing things, shifting production out of the public sector into the private, but where the general profile of consumption would be the same. They are proposing that we actually produce and consume less of the sort of goods that are best produced by government: in particular, less primary education, less environment protection, less public transit, and no provincial pensions. This will be done in order to lower taxes, so that people will have more disposable income, to buy various private goods.

Now I guess it’s worth noting that the PCs have not even tried to make the case for this (nor has Coyne, really, although we did get into it a bit once). In other words, they haven’t said one thing about why they think that it would be good for us, as a society, to shift consumption away from public (or quasi-public, you know what I mean) toward private goods. And at first glance, I’m not sure what that case would be. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in middle-class suburban homes in Ontario, and when I look around there, I don’t usually say to myself “you know what these people really need?… more shit from Costco.”

So if you were to put it in the form of a debating club proposition: “be it resolved, that what the people of Ontario need is more private goods and fewer public goods” I would be more than happy to take the negative. In fact, when I hear people complaining about their various work-life/financial woes, I find that a large fraction of them can be traced back to a chronic undersupply of public goods.

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(O)ne of the central characteristics of the public goods whose level of supply is being debated (primary education, reduced congestion, better air quality & other environmental goods) is that they are not subject to competitive consumption. As a result, increasing the supply of these goods stands poised to generate real, sustained increases in individual welfare. This is a point that has been made most persuasively by Robert Frank (in various place, including here, here and here). The pervasive tendency in our society will be to underestimate the severity of negative externalities (precisely because they are not priced) and to overestimate the value of market goods (because we ignore positional effects). This is sufficient to license a general presumption that, whatever the politically achievable level of government spending, it is probably too low, relative to the actual consumption preferences of citizens. Further reducing it will do absolutely nothing to solve the problems that people hope to solve with it, and is likely to produce nothing but unnecessary suffering.

So that is why a Conservative government would be bad for Ontario — because their basic plan, if implemented, would make life worse for pretty much everyone.

- And Linda McQuaig points out that Hudak's obviously-flawed math is far from the only problem with his party's plans to crush Ontario's wages and working conditions:

This folksy persona has tended to obscure two key things about Hudak that have become evident in the current campaign: He remains committed to anti-union legislation aimed at making Ontario more like Arkansas, and he’s capable of a breathtaking level of cynical dishonesty.

His claim that he will create one million jobs isn’t just based on faulty arithmetic — it’s based on nothing, really.

And yet, even after his numbers were exposed as grossly inflated (multiplied erroneously by eight), Hudak simply shrugged, trotted out platitudes (“economists never agree”) and refused to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of his jobs claim.

Hudak is extremely anti-union. He used to be up-front about this, openly advocating that Ontario adopt so-called ‘right to work’ legislation — laws found primarily in the U.S. south which are aimed at curbing unions.

By preventing companies and unions from signing contracts with an automatic dues check-off, such laws make it difficult for unions to survive, leaving workers with little clout to push wages much above the U.S. federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. (In Arkansas, the state allows a lower minimum wage of $6.25 an hour.)
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It is this preposterous decision to multiple by eight which has captured most attention and caused Hudak to be ridiculed about his math.
But the whole package is riddled with ludicrous assumptions based on Zycher’s (and presumably Hudak’s) belief that by increasing “economic freedom” to the level of Arkansas and Mississippi, Ontario’s GDP per capita will grow — even though our GDP per capita is already higher than these economically “freer” states and Hudak has said he won’t introduce the anti-union laws that allegedly increase “economic freedom” anyway.

- David Reevely looks behind the surface of a "decline your vote" astroturf site, and predictably finds a right-winger trying to convince marginal voters they shouldn't bother with democracy. And Alison makes clear that it's the politicians least interested in serving the public - Hudak's PCs - who would benefit if citizens give up in the ridings targeted for voter demobilization.

- Which is naturally just fine with some of our corporate media overlords, as Jesse Brown offers an inside scoop on the owner-mandated orders to override the Globe and Mail's editorial board to hand Tim Hudak an endorsement - followed by a sad attempt to claim the endorsement actually reflected editorial judgment rather than orders from on high. But of course the real controversy is that a union representing media workers had the nerve to express its own opinion.

- In what's surely unrelated news, Canada's corporate class is corrupt even by its own account. 

- Finally, Johannes Wheeldon sets out the options available to Ontario's political parties after today's election - with a particular focus on the (seemingly likely) event that no party holds a majority. Bill Tieleman observes that strategic voting tends to benefit precisely the party one wants to stop. And for those looking for more reading material on the Ontario election, Ron Waller's blog is a great place to start - particularly in reminding us just which party actually offers an alternative to Hudak's corporatism.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Exploratory cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Richard Shillington studies the Cons' income-splitting scheme for the Broadbent Institute, and finds that it's even more biased toward the wealthy than previously advertised:

• The average benefit of income splitting across all households is only $185, though nine out of 10 households will receive nothing. When one factors in the $3 billion cost in lost federal revenues that will result from this tax policy, income splitting stands to impose net costs on many Canadian households.

• To gain from income splitting, a family with children under 18 must have two parents in different tax brackets to share income. Thus single parent families (20.2%) and those with partners in the same tax bracket (28.9%) are automatically excluded from benefitting. The detailed calculations accounting for available refundable and non-refundable tax credits estimate that 54.1% of families would see no benefit.
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Where significant benefits do accrue, they are to higher-income families, particularly those in a traditional model. This policy, which benefits a higher proportion of families in some provinces than others, stands to increase income inequality in Canada.

Which leads in turn to Rick Smith's observation:

"If the government set out to specifically design a policy to make inequality worse, this would be it," Smith said.

"This policy is an inequality generating machine."

- But then, the Cons would hardly be alone in pursuing increased inequality as a policy goal, as Toby Sanger highlights the Hudak PCs' proposed handouts to millionaires at the expense of the general public:

The biggest beneficiaries of corporate tax cuts would be the most profitable of Ontario’s large corporations and, in particular, banks, insurance and other financial service companies. Almost 40 per cent of the tax benefit would go to Ontario’s finance, insurance, and real estate sector, which only employs one out of 13 Ontario workers. This industry would get a tax break estimated at $957 million a year, rising above $1 billion by 2019 and totaling $7.6 billion over eight years.

The other top four industry sectors that would gain the most are trade, with about $3 billion over eight years, manufacturing with an estimated $2.4 billion, and professional services with an estimated $2.2 billion. Almost 80 per cent would go to these four industry sectors: a total of over $15 billion over eight years.

Ontario and federal corporate income and capital tax cuts over the past decade have already reduced the taxes paid by these four sectors by about $7 billion annually. And how much has total employment increased in these four sectors in return for these massive corporate tax cuts over the past decade? A grand total of minus 8,000 jobs – and that’s during a decade when total employment of other sectors in Ontario increased by over 650,000.

If $7 billion in annual tax cuts provided by the McGuinty, Harper and Martin governments didn’t lead to any job growth, it’s hard to believe that Hudak’s additional corporate tax cuts of almost $2 billion a year will do any better.

- And Hudak is being particularly obvious about his distaste for those worse off by refusing to even discuss the idea of reducing poverty - even after his party was shamed into supporting anti-poverty legislation not long ago.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne looks at the prospect of another false majority in Ontario's election, and questions why Canadians still put up with first-past-the-post politics which can cause wild swings in governance based on small numbers of voters.

- Finally, Adam Riggio discusses the effect of creeping privatization and corporate funding on Canadian universities.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Buttonwood weighs in on the disproportionate influence of the ultra-rich when it comes to making policy choices which affect all of us:

But the analysis backs up earlier work by Larry Bartels of Princeton, author of a book called “Unequal Democracy”, and the general thesis of the late political scientist, Mancur Olson, that government can be in hock to special interests. This may be truer in America than elsewhere since its campaign-finance laws are so liberal: $6 billion was spent on the 2012 elections. This system forces candidates to spend much of their time raising money from the wealthy and from business. Even if no direct quid pro quos are involved, candidates may simply absorb the views of the better-off by osmosis.

The danger is of a vicious cycle in which politicians adopt policies that favour the better-off; this gives the wealthy more money with which to lobby politicians, which leads to more favourable legislation and so on. The surge in inequality over the last 30 years could perhaps be attributed, in part, to this process.

(Though of course I'd dissent from the column's conclusion that the most important problem with a concentration of wealth and power at the top is that it might cause people to start questioning their betters.)

- Joe Fantauzzi discusses how austerity has been used to attack social connections in Ontario and elsewhere. Kev reminds us of the disconnect between continued (though not enhanced) productivity gains and stagnating wages since the neoliberal revolution took hold. And Russell Jacoby contrasts Thomas Piketty's call for somewhat improved equality against Karl Marx's focus on a struggle over ownership:

(E)galitarianism as an idea and demand also contains an element of resignation; it accepts society, but wants to balance out the goods or privileges. Gays want equality, the right like everyone else to marry. Fine, but marriage is still marriage, the imperfect institution that society cannot give up or improve upon. R.H. Tawney, the British leftist historian, noted the limits of equality in his 1931 book Equality, a broad defense of egalitarianism. The working class movement, he writes, puts its faith in “the possibility of a society,” where a higher value is placed on people and a lower value on money. But that movement is liable to fall short. “When it does so, what it is apt to desire is not a social order of a different kind, in which money and economic power will no longer be the criterion of achievement, but a social order of the same kind, in which money and economic power will be somewhat differently distributed.” This straightforward sentence cuts to the heart of the matter. Equalizing pollution pollutes equally, but does not end pollution.
...
Piketty anchors inequality in what he calls “the central contradiction of capitalism,” the disjuncture between the rate of return on capital and the rate of economic growth. Inasmuch as the former inevitably eclipses the latter, favoring existing wealth over existing labor, it leads to a “terrifying” unequal wealth distribution. Marx might not disagree, but again his focus is on work, which is where inequality originates and plays out. Marx argues that the accumulation of capital leads to partial, casual and permanent unemployment. It would be difficult to declare that these are not pressing realities in the world today, but they do not surface in Piketty.

Of course, Marx begins with a different proposition: labor as the source of wealth. Again, today this might seem quaint, but also signals something about capitalism that hardly is resolved. Capitalism both requires and dispenses with labor. In other words, capitalism both hires and, increasingly, unhires. It needs workers as it expands, but sheds workers as it cuts costs and automates, reducing its work force. Marx discusses at length how an advancing capitalism produces “a relatively redundant working population.” This takes two basic forms, releasing workers already hired and ceasing to add new workers. As a consequence capitalism produces “disposable” people or a reserve army of unemployed. As wealth and capital advance, so do the underemployed and unemployed, the truly unequal.

- Meanwhile, Brad Hornick examines the link between the resource economy and class politics in British Columbia:

It is not "the people" that are at the forefront of championing this fossil fuel economy against any alternatives. It is the corporate CEOs, the shareholders, the investment bankers, the marketing companies, the corporate lawyers, the conservative pundits that lock us in to this particular future against any substantive alternative.

That is why we can say that we are not in this together, that this great problem we are now facing is not "anthropogenic" climate change. All humans do not all equally contribute to the problem of climate change. Nor do we all equally invest in the system that leads to climate crisis. The crisis we presently face is "capitalist" climate change, driven by those who champion a certain kind of economy that serves the interests of a certain group of people.
...
Fossil fuel capitalism operates within neo-liberal economics and politics where even the pretense of social solidarity and justice has been increasingly abandoned. But the climate crisis is opening up political and ideological space to discuss the entire system we live in (that is, the centrality of capitalism). There are signs that both economic crisis and ecological destruction are de-legitimizing political systems and helping people to question capitalist ideologies that ignore the social and ecological costs of fossil fuels.

It is because this system excludes populations from both economic activity and political participation that new antagonisms and struggles are developing. One only needs to observe among many other examples the plebiscite in Kitimat, the growing challenges to Kinder Morgan in Burnaby, or the intervention by the UN special rapporteur, James Anaya, over the concerns of proposed projects in First Nation territories.

There are political and activist forces coalescing today within British Columbia to challenge not just fossil fuel interests, but also the systemic forces that drive large capital. They are challenging fossil fuel capitalism at the point of production and extraction, and attempting to network allies amongst the traditional environmental forces.

- Ron Waller takes a look at the unrepresentative nature of first-past-the-post politics - but also rightly cautions Ontario voters against falling for "strategic voting" scams.

- Finally, Sean Holman offers a reminder that Daniel Therrien isn't the first federal Privacy Commissioner to represent a controversial appointment - though the Cons, like the Libs before them, have chosen not to make the selection process more palatable. And Robyn Benson argues that we have no reason at all to trust the Cons when it comes to our privacy.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Robert Reich proposes that the best way to address corporate criminality is to make sure that those responsible go to jail - rather than simply being able to pay a fine out of corporate coffers and pretend nothing ever happened.

- And Shawn Fraser suggests that Regina developers should pick up the tab for the costs they impose on the city - even as the city itself has opportunities to both better shape residential growth, and turn a profit through its own own development corporation.

- Meanwhile, the CP reports on the clash between biased markets and free speech - as Greenpeace was rejected in its effort to purchase billboard space from the same business which didn't hesitate a second to provide a platform for climate change denialists.

- Andrew Coyne writes that Stephen Harper is racking up scandals and abuses of power at an unprecedented pace. But Chantal Hebert notes that none of the Cons' manipulations can help them avoid responsibility for governing - including by deciding between serving their oil-industry masters and listening to the public about the Northern Gateway pipeline.

- Susan Delacourt takes note that political parties are increasingly looking to brand themselves through means that have nothing to do with politics - while identifying what that says about their seeming mandate to discuss policy choices:

When a political ad arrives through the mail, does the average citizen pore over its contents to determine who paid for it? Again, probably not. A marketing-research fact sheet distributed by Canada Post a few years ago said that the response rate for all direct-mail advertising — not just political ads — was a scant 2.18 per cent. Political parties, in short, might be better off mailing those pamphlets directly to the local recycling stations.

The trick these days, it seems, is to make political advertising look like something slightly more useful: a World Cup schedule, for instance, or the front page of a newspaper.
...
Advertisers, private or political, are always going to try to slip their sales messages into products that are useful to consumers or citizens: pens, T-shirts, newspapers, World Cup schedules. 
...
A harder question, though, is why political advertising is held in such low esteem that it now has to masquerade as something more relevant to Canadians. Educating the public doesn’t have to be a mission that’s gone entirely out of fashion.

- Finally, Vaughn Palmer reviews the B.C. Libs' consistent pattern of bad faith in dealing with teachers.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Jim Armitage discusses how the privatization of public services in the UK is being mashed up with the principles behind subprime lending and debt bundling - leading to a bubble which promises to take down investors and the public alike.

- Dylan Matthews offers what would seem to be a natural conclusion about the simplest, most effective answer to poverty:

As solutions to global poverty go, "just give poor people money" is pretty rock solid. A recent randomized trial found that Kenyans who received no-strings attached cash from the charity GiveDirectly built more assets, bought more goods, were less hungry, and were all-around happier than those who didn't get cash.

But voters and politicians generally prefer giving people specific goods — like housing, food, or health care — rather than plain old cash, for fear that the cash might get misused by unscrupulous poor people. Maybe the recipients will just blow the cash drinking! This particular concern comes up both in domestic and global poverty conversations; Fox News is obsessed with the possibility of people using federal government benefits like food stamps to buy fancy seafood or hang out at strip clubs, but mainstream global development experts often express these concerns too. As Paul Niehaus, the founder of GiveDirectly, once put it, "It is pretty ironic the number of conversations I have had with development people about the poor and their drinking—over drinks."
...
"We have investigated evidence from around the developing world, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia," Evans and Popova conclude. "There is clear evidence that transfers are not consistently used for alcohol or tobacco in any of these environments. This is particularly true when relying on randomized trials."

- Ellen Lawton and Megan Sandel discuss the value of dealing with poverty and other social determinants of health at the outset, rather than placing undue demands on our health care system:

We're starting to understand that poverty causes illness, not just for individuals, but for whole communities. Yet we talk about the effects of substandard housing, poor nutrition, and violence in a vacuum separate from the laws and policies that create and perpetuate these problems in the first place. And then we ask health care to clean up the mess.

Health care has long been in the business of treating the negative health effects of bad social policy. When there isn't enough safe affordable housing, when sanitary codes are unenforced and when cuts are made to housing voucher programs, doctors treat people for the injuries and asthma that ensue. When people live in food deserts without access to healthy food, or their SNAP applications are wrongfully denied, nurses help patients manage the low blood sugar episodes for diabetics who are hungry. And health care spends a lot of money doing it.

Now more than ever, with the prevention mandates of health reform, we are asking health care to be in the business of preventing illness. That's a tall order when so much of what makes people sick are underenforced laws and policies, underfunded public programs and ill-conceived public policies way outside the scope of what health care professionals are trained to do. Indeed research shows that only about fifteen percent of preventable illness can be improved with access to better medical care alone.

Health care providers should screen patients regularly for "social vital signs" -- problems with housing, hunger and domestic violence -- all of which are equal predictors of poor health as any vital sign taken for blood pressure or heartbeat. But we cannot ask nurses and doctors to write prescriptions for healthy housing or food when those "pharmacies" are empty.

- Meanwhile, Kelsey Johnson reports on the NDP's national food strategy - which should serve as a reminder of what could be accomplished by a government which actually saw the public good as something worth pursuing.

- Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor have been reporting on Michael Sona's trial - featuring the revelation that Con highers-up including Andrew Prescott saw Robocon as a national scheme. And Karl Nerenberg highlights some of what remains to be answered about Robocon, while Alison takes a look for herself.

- Finally, speaking of the Cons' standards for public service, Bruce Carson - he of the open door to the Prime Minister's office - is headed to trial for influence peddling. And Tim Naumetz reports on Benjamin Perrin's curious departure from the PMO just a day after Mike Duffy received his hush money from Nigel Wright.

Musical interlude

Delerium - Run For It

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Simon Enoch discusses the costs of turning over a profitable system of public liquor stores to corporate control - as Brad Wall has finally admitted to wanting to do:

A privatized liquor market is very likely to evolve into an 'oligopoly', where only a few corporations dominate and are able to exert monopoly-like power. Local, independent liquor retailers would likely find it difficult to compete. An oligopoly would have the supposed disadvantages of a monopoly, high prices and restricted supply, but lack the major advantage of public ownership, profits that flow in to public coffers...

Like any business, private liquor will seek to advance its economic interests through public policy. Indeed, Alberta-based private liquor companies have been consistently contributing financially to the Saskatchewan Party since its election. The reality is that the interests of the private liquor industry will almost certainly come into conflict with that of the public interest. Currently, under our public system, concerns such as public health can take priority in public policy. Will we be able to continue to make such issues a priority in the face of an economically powerful opposition determined to advance its own interests?

- Meanwhile, Joyce Nelson wonders why the combination of waste and scandal generated by massive privatization in Ontario isn't receiving more attention in the ongoing provincial election campaign. And the Globe and Mail reports on the Ford brothers' use of a privatization campaign supposedly based on efficiency to give publicly-funded handouts to their own personal business partners.

- Charles Pierce writes about the U.S. Democrats' quixotic efforts to restore some ability to regulate campaign finance in the wake of court rulings equating unlimited money with free speec

- David Dayen discusses how the roots of the 2008 crash run deeper than we often presume - and how consumer debt relief remains a necessary step in both boosting growth and reducing inequality:

By reviewing other economic downturns, Mian and Sufi discover two recurring features: a buildup of household debt before the crash, and an extreme decline in consumer spending afterward, as households cut back, hoarding money to pay off those scaled-up debts. The normal channels of fiscal and monetary policy have difficulty dealing with highly leveraged household balance sheets. House of Debt correlates these features of recessions, and really targets debt as the core problem, arguing that it needs to be restructured during crises and prevented during better times.

This critique — about the destructive power of debt and the need to forgive it — has in recent years come from far more radical circles, not from two economics professors trained in the classical tradition. “When we pitched the book, one publisher said, this is the intellectual justification for Occupy Wall Street,” said Professor Sufi in an interview. “We didn’t set out with that agenda. But one of the points we make is that the position we’re taking is not that radical if you look at history.”
...
Sufi and Mian detail in the book how credit growth, particularly to low-income, high-risk households, fueled the housing bubble. Thanks to securitization, lenders could extend shaky credit and then pass off the risk to investors around the world, disconnecting themselves from any price drops. That’s before you get into how they ignored underwriting standards in a rush to lend, and fraudulently sold mortgage-backed securities without divulging the poor quality of the underlying loans. “Lenders should be held accountable for their actions,” Sufi said.

- And finally, Don Pittis writes about the need for a strong policy response to tax evasion techniques which are exacerbating inequality.

New column day

Here, on how Justin Trudeau seems to have taken up the cause of unaccountable executive power even from his third-party place in the House of Commons.

For further reading...
- For some of the background on of the Libs' entitlement hangover following the Cons' taking power, see here (insisting that Parliament has no place in approving of military engagement) and here (criticizing the Accountability Act as a response to their actions while in power).
- Josh Wingrove reports on the attempt by privacy experts to challenge the Cons' appointment of Daniel Therrien. And Lisa Austin highlights some of the substantive problems with Therrien's past roles. But James Fitz-Morris reports on Trudeau's full support for the choice.
- Finally, Terry Milewski discusses the Con/Lib tag team effort to shut down the NDP's parliamentary outreach offices, while CBC follows up with on their retroactive and selectively-enforced rewriting of the rules around mailouts. But as I've pointed out before, we should be far more concerned with the yawning gap between government and parliamentary communications, rather than stifling MPs' communications solely for the purpose of attacking a single opponent.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Emmett Macfarlane and Justin Ling both weigh in on the Cons' newly-unveiled prostitution legislation - which seems downright calculated to exacerbate the risks to sex workers' lives and safety that resulted in the previous version being struck down as unconstitutional.

- And on the subject of policy designed entirely out of prejudiced desire to punish and exclude marginalized groups, Christopher Ingraham writes about a study showing that restrictive voter ID laws arise out of discriminatory intent.

- Newsweek takes note of the Harper Cons' gag order against meteorologists informing the public about climate change. And Mike De Souza rounds up the top ten quotes from scientists who have been muzzled.

- The CP reports on a study showing increased mercury levels around the tar sands - which of course wasn't made public after being completed last December. Paul Krugman rightly dismisses the claim that continued (or increased) carbon emissions are necessary for economic growth. And Linda McQuaig identifies the dinosaur in the room when it comes to the oil industry:

Harper now stands poised to ignore massive opposition and stomp on the historic rights of First Nations people by approving the Northern Gateway pipeline, thereby putting in place a key piece of his energy superpower scheme.

What makes all of this so perplexing — almost other-worldly — is that it’s so unnecessary.
Due to the marvels of modern technology, the world now has the technical capacity to move to a post-carbon age. The International Energy Agency is clear about this. In a report last month, the agency — which is the energy equivalent of the OECD or the IMF — pointed out that it is possible for the world to “decarbonise almost all power generation by 2050.”

Sure, but we’d all be back in the Stone Age, right? Employment would be confined to shovel-ready pyramids.

Actually, no. The IEA estimated the global cost of moving to a post-carbon world at $44 trillion — which sounds like a deal-breaker until you read on and discover that this massive cost would be more than offset by $115 trillion in fuel savings, resulting in a net saving of $71 trillion.

- Finally, David Pugliese breaks the news that the Cons' increasingly unaccountable and intrusive surveillance apparatus now has literally every public demonstration in Canada in its sights.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Neil Irwin highlights the reality that top-heavy economic growth has done nothing to reduce poverty in the U.S. over the past 40 years:

In Kennedy’s era, [the "rising tide lifts all boats" theory] had the benefit of being true. From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent.

But over the last generation in the United States, that simply hasn’t happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced around in the 12 to 15 percent range — higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why — and how to change that — is one of the most fundamental challenges in the nation’s fight against poverty.

...
The 1959 to 1973 period might be an unfair benchmark. The Great Society social safety net programs were being put in place, and they may have had a poverty-lowering effect separate from that of the overall economic trends. In other words, it may be simply that during that time, strong growth and a falling poverty rate happened to take place simultaneously for unrelated reasons. And there presumably is some level of poverty below which the official poverty rate will never fall, driven by people whose problems run much deeper than economics.

But the facts still cast doubt on the notion that growth alone will solve America’s poverty problem.

...

The reality is that low-income workers are putting in more hours on the job than they did a generation ago — and the financial rewards for doing so just haven’t increased.

That’s the real lesson of the data: If you want to address poverty in the United States, it’s not enough to say that you need to create better incentives for lower-income people to work. You also have to devise strategies that make the benefits of a stronger economy show up in the wages of the people on the edge of poverty, who need it most desperately.

- Kate Allen reports that 300 scientists have teamed up to call attention to the flawed assessment process applied to the Gateway pipeline, while Kai Nagata theorizes that the Cons might well scrap the project themselves. But I have my doubts about that theory in light of the Harper Cons' continued devotion to Keystone XL even as it produces a constant flow of shutdowns, leaks and spills.

- Meanwhile, the Montreal Gazette laments the Cons' continued climate change obstruction.

- PressProgress offers ten reasons to be worried about the Cons' disregard for privacy. Colin Horgan recognizes that while the Cons' arguments against an effective census were nonsensical in that context, they would represent a strong case against the accountability-free sharing of personal information which the Cons now want to ram into law. And Michael Harris discusses how fits into Harper's Genghis Khan-like view of power.

- Frances Russell writes about Canada's descent from being internationally admired for its model democratic system, to serving as a cautionary tale.

- Finally, Seth Klein points out how modest tax increases on the wealthy could fully fund needed improvements to B.C.'s education system. But naturally, the Clark Libs are fully focused on attacking the province's teachers instead.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Kidding cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Gary Engler explores Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century from the perspective of a reader who's far more skeptical than Piketty about the prospect of tinkering around the edges of our current corporatist economic system. And Seth Ackerman writes that Piketty's observations look like compelling evidence challenging the doctrine of marginal productivity theory which is taken as an article of faith by laissez-faire fundamentalists.

- Meanwhile, Bill Moyers interviews Joseph Stiglitz about corporate tax evasion. And Michael Madowitz points out what we should have learned about austerity economics by now:

There are three major lessons for policymakers from this research:

1. Direct government intervention during recessions, either through deficit-financed tax cuts or deficit-financed increases in government spending, is a more powerful tool for fighting recessions than we realized before the Great Recession.
2. In a slack economy, or one that is operating below its potential, austerity—taking money out of the economy to balance government budgets—is especially bad policy. Whether via tax hikes or cuts in government spending, contracting the government’s budget during a recession reduces gross domestic product, or GDP, by more than the size of the cuts—possibly as much as three times more.
3. The costs of doing nothing can be permanent and much higher than we previously thought: U.S. GDP is currently 10 percent below its prerecession 2014 projection, and many economists believe that we have reached a new normal. If this is true, austerity could cost the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion in economic activity every year, even after we have fully recovered from the Great Recession.

The most important development in economic research during this recession has been a better understanding of how short-term labor markets affect the long-run size of the economy. It is simply not the case that recessions have only transitory effects on an economy. This is a profound, if counterintuitive, lesson for policymakers: The prudent approach during a recession may be much more aggressive fiscal and monetary activism than we are used to.

- PressProgress reminds us of the Cons' obstructionism on climate change - which of course looks all the more silly now that the U.S. is taking far stronger action than Canada ever has. And Aaron Wherry suggests that we'd be better off moving past the Cons' vocabulary barrier to discuss the costs and risks involved in climate change policy.

- But Joyce Nelson discusses the connection between fossil fuel lobbyists and right-wing politics which largely explains the Harper Cons' continued determination to stand in the way of any action on climate change.

- Finally, Robyn Benson sounds the alarm about the Cons' plans to attack pensions for current and future retirees alike:

“Target benefit plan,” eh? What’s next—a target wage plan?

“We’ll try to pay you $22 an hour like the contract says. But if things get tight at budget time, we might have to drop that to $14 or so. OK by you?”

No. Not OK.

Workplace pensions are, in fact, deferred wages. They’re a forced savings plan that permits, or should permit, retired Canadians to live decently. A defined benefits plan (DBP)—what our members presently have—is a contract: in return for making regular contributions, a set retirement income, with indexing for inflation, is guaranteed.

Enter Kevin Sorenson, minister of state for finance. He has a brand-new scheme in hand, and he wants to sell it to employers in federally-regulated industries and Crown Corporations. He calls it a “shared risk plan,” but it’s no such thing. It’s just shifting risk onto employees and pensioners.
...
Eroding pension plans by shifting risk onto vulnerable employees and retirees with limited ability to absorb income cuts is quite in keeping with the Harper government’s determination to lower the boom on public sector workers and improve the profitability of their corporate friends in the private sector. Instead of showing leadership by improving retirement income security for all Canadians, it wants to “level down,” threatening young workers and seniors across the country. 

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- David Graeber writes that unfettered capitalism will never tame itself, but will instead need to be countered by a sufficiently strong counter-movement to seriously question its underpinnings. And Thomas Frank follows up with Graeber about the warped incentives facing workers as matters stand now:

I think the spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded and for what. There was this pall of mystification cast over everything pertaining to that sector—we were told, this is all so very complicated, you couldn’t possibly understand, it’s really very advanced science, you know, they are coming up with trading programs so complicated only astro-physicists can understand them, that sort of thing. We just had to take their word that, somehow, this was creating value in ways our simple little heads couldn’t possibly get around. Then after the crash we realized a lot of this stuff was not just scams, but pretty simple-minded scams, like taking bets you couldn’t possibly pay if you lost and just figuring the government would bail you out if you did. These guys weren’t creating value of any kind. They were making the world worse and getting paid insane amounts of money for it.

Suddenly it became possible to see that if there’s a rule, it’s that the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you’re paid for it. CEOs and financial consultants that are actually making other people’s lives worse were paid millions, useless paper-pushers got handsomely compensated, people fulfilling  obviously useful functions like taking care of the sick or teaching children or repairing broken heating systems or picking vegetables were the least rewarded.

- Meanwhile, Jared Bernstein writes about the damage done to our public policy by an undue willingness to accept simplistic (but false) assumptions:

(I)t’s widely argued that government actions that set wages or regulate commerce create “inefficiencies.” Regulate an industry and capital will flee; raise the national wage floor and employers will leave the market (or, in Piketty’s world, handily substitute machines for workers). Increase a marginal tax rate and workers will supply less labor; investors, less capital. Form a union and the unionized firm will face competitive disadvantages that will put it out of business. Provide a safety net benefit to someone and they’ll work less. Tax a polluter and you’ll crash GDP. Tax a financial “innovator” and credit markets will dry up.

Conversely, cut back on a tax rate, a safety net program, the minimum wage, the unionization rate, financial oversight, and growth, jobs, and liquidity will flourish.

I’ve been arguing against these positions for decades, backed by considerable empirical evidence showing that moderate changes to tax rates, minimum wages, union density, the safety net, regulatory oversight and so on trigger nothing like the disasters their opponents claim and can yield important benefits (which is not to say there are no “negative impacts” at all). Yet the bar to win the anti-interventionist argument is set remarkably low. You don’t need evidence; you can just cite “basic economics.”
...
As another Thomas—Pynchon—said: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” Progressives have all kinds of ideas to shape a more equitable primary distribution. But those ideas will never get much oxygen if we remain voluntary trapped in the cramped debate of a short-sighted economics.

- And Murray Dobbin comments on how the concurrent slashing of government revenues and public services is leading to dystopian outcomes.

- Stephen Maher reports on Stephen Harper's latest abuse of appointment processes, as the Cons ignored the advice of their own selection committee in order to appoint the least experienced and most deferential possible candidate to act as the federal Privacy Commissioner. Dean Beeby notes that the Cons are still illegally collecting background information on access-to-information requesters long after promising to stop. And Scott Harris discusses how the Cons' compulsive secrecy includes refusing to clarify even points which have long been public - such as their nine-figure payoff to Newfoundland and Labrador in an effort to push CETA.

- All of which leads into Chantal Hebert's sudden insight into the Cons' wanton destruction - even if that may be something less than news to many of us.

- Finally, Rod Sweet writes about the oil industry's attitude toward the risks of new and untested operations - and why we shouldn't be surprised when BP-style disasters result:

The rapid expansion of deep water drilling worried him. “I had ongoing concerns with the risk of deep water drilling operations, concerns that started back when I was at Chevron,” he writes.

“They stemmed from just too many things going on simultaneously within the industry. The deep water rig fleet expanded by close to 300% over several years along with much turnover between drilling contractors and so I worried about the erosion of the level of competency that we were accustomed to, particularly at the driller and tool pusher levels.

“These deepwater wells are very complicated. There are downhole conditions that even very intelligent people struggle accurately to asses. The time when you had a drilling foreman who has seen everything and knows what to do in every situation is long gone.”

In his article Lacy insists that when it comes to disasters like Macondo the assumption that ‘this won’t happen’ still pervades the industry...

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that to end your weekend.

- Lana Payne challenges the Big Lie that right-wing politics are anything but antithetical to broad economic growth. Dennis Howlett weighs in on the Cons' choice to make the rich even richer through their tax policy. And Daniel Tencer juxtaposes the boom in Canadian corporate profits against the continued economic difficulties facing most people.

- Meanwhile, Paul Krugman notes that the most prominent attempt to challenge Thomas Piketty's work represents nothing but inequality denialism. And Auriandra compares the policy views of the 1% with those of the American public - making for a particularly important contrast given the propensity of the U.S.' political system to ignore the latter in favour of the former.

- But political capitulation to the wealthy few comes at a significant price. And Ian Welsh discusses the connection between the lack of parties offering a meaningful response to neoliberalism, and the rise of the fascist right in Europe:

Neo-liberalism is an effective ideology and set of policy prescriptions: not because it produces good outcomes for the majority of people (that’s not its purpose), but because it creates a constituency (oligarchs and their supporters/retainers) who are able to maintain it in power.

All ideologies eventually come to an end, however.  The oligarchs hate real left-wingism far more than they do fascism.  They have crushed the left.  Because no new coherent ideology can arise due to oligarchical control over the mechanisms of dissemination, all that remain are old ideologies.

Given no real and viable left-wing parties to vote for; given the failure of what they are told are left-wing policies (as with Obama being called a left-winger when his economic policy has been to give trillions to oligarchs); people will vote for the only other option: the hard right—the neo-fascists.

They are, at least, against the status quo.  The UK-IP wants to leave the EU.  They want less “free” trade.  And so on.  Given no other option for actual change, people opt for the parties actually offering it, even if those parties are noxious.

- Finally, George Monbiot highlights the cost of giving in to the doctrine of perpetual material growth:

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world's diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in 10 years. The trade body Forest Industries tells us that "global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow". If, in the digital age, we won't reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don't need. Perhaps it's unsurprising that fantasies about colonising space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced.
...
The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth's living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century's great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn't worthy of mention. That's how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.