Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Owen Jones highlights the need for social democratic parties to present a real popular alternative to neoliberal government, and offers his suggestions as to how UK Labour can accomplish that:

Political leadership means saying, here’s what’s wrong with society, here’s what our vision of what society is instead, here’s how we get there. It means hammering at key messages ad infinitum, backed up with policies that are indicative of where the party is coming from. It means speaking in an everyday language that resonates beyond politicos, and having lots to say to the average Briton who is neither poor nor well-off. This has been lacking, and Labour often seems missing from political debate, although some relatively recent appointees (such as Corbyn’s press officer, Matt Zarb-Cousin, and his colleague James Schneider) are determined to change that. Research suggests that voters don’t think Labour is too leftwing, whatever the Labour right argue; they just don’t know what the party stands for. And if you don’t define yourself, you will be defined – mercilessly – by your opponents. Yes, we have a viciously rightwing media, but they are not going to vanish: there just needs to be a sophisticated strategy to deal with them.

In today’s fraught political climate, there are some who respond that this critique is only offered because I’m a careerist, secretly rightwing, motivated by money, or part of a Guardian conspiracy against the Labour leadership. In truth, it’s because I want a genuinely radical Labour leadership to succeed: one that invests, rather than cuts; that forces the rich to pay a fair share of tax; that gives workers rights, security, and dignity; that confronts climate change, and treats it as an opportunity to promote the industries and jobs of the future; that brings our services under the ownership of the people of this country; that stops forcing young people to suffer the brunt of a crisis they had nothing to do with; that makes high-quality, affordable housing a basic right for every citizen.

- Meanwhile, Alan Draper notes that one cause of the rise of the populist right is decreased union influence - not just in the workplace, but also in defining political values. And Christo Aivalis' predictions for Canada's left in 2017 include the hope and expectation that we'll see better-organized social movements.  

- Daniel Bernmar discusses Sweden's successful trial of a six-hour work day - as better working conditions led to improved outcomes for workers and the people they assist alike. 

- The Globe and Mail rightly questions why the Libs are planning to spend half a billion dollars on national self-congratulation - though the choice is especially glaring given that Trudeau and company are simultaneously complaining they don't have a dime to put toward fairness for First Nations children.

- Finally, Tom Graham reminds us that the source of Saskatchewan's budget deficit is the Wall government - not the workers the Saskatchewan Party wants to stick with the bill.

Friday Evening Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Colin Busby and Ramya Muthukumaran offer some suggestions as to how to ensure there's an adequate social safety net to support people stuck with precarious work:

Federal and provincial governments, acting in concert or independently, should reduce the uncertainties of a volatile labour market for newcomers and incumbents.

They could start by:

1) Ensuring appropriate access to Employment Insurance benefits for the most vulnerable workers, including part-time and temporary non-seasonal workers, many of whom don’t qualify because of hours-worked eligibility criteria. Instead, weeks-worked entrance requirements and claimant categories that recognize non-standard workers should be strongly considered;

2) Ensuring obstacles to EI access are not hindering access to other critical social programs under the EI umbrella, such as special benefit programs such as maternity/paternity leave and courses for skills upgrading;

3) Doing a better job filling the gaps in health coverage experienced by workers in precarious jobs for services such as prescription drugs, mental health, vision and dental care. Provinces, such as Ontario, should take direct responsibility for this and improve coverage rather than wait for unlikely federal interventions;

4) Protecting the value of expanded CPP benefits for low-income workers by exempting them from punitive, income-tested guaranteed income supplement clawbacks.

- Jack Peat comments on the UK's "Fat Cat Wednesday" as just one more indicator of unsustainable inequality, while Haley Ryan reports on Gary Burrill's rightful recognition that the gap between the rich and the rest of us is a significant moral problem. And Ashifa Kassam writes about Canada's own equivalent to Fat Cat Wednesday which was celebrated (or lamented) a day earlier.

- The Star's editorial board calls for CEOs to pay their fair share through an end in the stock option loophole. But PressProgress exposes why it didn't happen - as the Libs were happy to let Bay Street lobby them to break their promise of a fairer tax system. 

- Julien Gignac discusses the lack of comprehensive information to even document the state of homelessness in Canada.

- Finally, Wayne Young points out how the Libs have made a mess out of straightforward commitments to electoral reform both in Prince Edward Island and on the federal level.

Musical interlude

Rodg - High On Life

New column day

Here, starting from the justified criticism of corporate-friendly "privatize the gains, socialize the losses" economic policy by noting that some genuinely socialized risks would represent a substantial improvement in equity.

For further reading...
- Again, Jared Bernstein discusses the shift in overall risks toward the people who can least handle them here.
- And Timothy Martin wrote here about the shift from generally-available pensions toward individual retirement accounts - which has been matched in Canada not only in the area of retirement planning, but also in education, disability supports, and anything else somebody with thousands of dollars to spare can think to fund.

Thursday Evening Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Anis Chowdhury refutes the theory that top-heavy tax cuts have anything to do with economic development:

Cross-country research has found no relationship between changes in top marginal tax rates and growth between 1960 and 2010. For example, during this period, the US cut its top rate by over 40 percentage points and grew just over 2 percent annually. Germany and Denmark, which barely changed their top rates at all, experienced about the same growth rate.

Thus, tax cuts will not magically improve economic growth. Instead, the government should focus on building economic capacity with new investments in infrastructure, research and development (R&D), education, and anti-poverty programs. As the IMF has recently observed, the impacts of public investment are greatest during periods of low growth. This view has also been endorsed by recently outgoing Reserve Bank Governor, Glenn Stevens.

Investments in education produce a more skilled workforce, raising earnings and spurring innovation. A worker with only a high school education is twice as likely be unemployed as one with at least a bachelor's degree. An extra year of school is correlated with a significant increase in per capita income.

There are also gains associated with investments in early childhood education. The earlier the intervention, the more cost-effective, which is why policymakers have focused on preschool. Children who attend early high-quality care and education programs are less likely to engage in criminal behaviour later in life and more likely to graduate from high school and university. Reducing the cost of preschool also effectively increases a mother's net wage, making it more likely she will return to the labour market.

Spending on effective social programs provides immediate benefits to low-income families and can enhance long-term economic growth. The increased income security contributes to better health and increased university enrolment, leading to higher productivity and earnings. Similarly, nutrition assistance programs improve beneficiaries' health and cognitive capacity. Research shows similar positive impacts of housing assistance programs.

- Meanwhile, Jessica Deahl comments on the impact of insufficient child care options on working families. And the Star calls for a long-overdue end to federal policy which leaves indigenous women to give birth without maternal health supports. 

- Mark Hume argues that British Columbia's economy has focused far too long on unsustainably exploiting the natural environment. And Jessica Shankleman and Christopher Martin highlight the futility of relying on fossil fuels when solar power stands to be the cheapest and most environmentally-friendly energy source around the globe within a decade.

- Nicola Davis reports on new research showing that it's possible to identify a disadvantaged cohort based on brain health (and intervene to produce far better long-term outcomes) in children as young as 3 years old.

- Finally, Charles Hamilton discusses Saskatchewan's undue focus on breach offences, along with the costs it imposes on the public and on offenders alike. 

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Jared Bernstein highlights how a generation of public policy has systematically transferred risk from the wealthy who claim to bear it, to the general public which can't afford to do so:

Back in the late 2000s, two authors — the economics journalist Peter Gosselin and the political scientist Jacob Hacker — wrote books documenting what they both called “the risk shift.” The idea was that policy and social norms had changed in ways that shifted economic risk — invoked by retirement, illness, job stability and loss of income — from government and firms to individuals and families. The result was greater inequality and worse: greater insecurity among the many people on the wrong side of the risk shift.
...
The Affordable Care Act is an anti-risk-shifter, a policy designed to shift the locus of the insecurity of no or inadequate health coverage back onto the government sector, which, due to its power to pool and regulate, is the far better sector to place that risk (which is why I’d lower, not raise, the Medicare eligibility age).

Same with retirement risk. As I read the WSJ article, my inner wonk was screaming: We already have a great, efficient, much-loved, fully vested, progressive, guaranteed pension plan. It’s called Social Security. If we want to relegate retirement insecurity to the past, we don’t need new saving schemes and tax incentives. We need to strengthen and expand Social Security.

Trump and the Republicans are anxious to repeal Dodd-Frank financial reform and cut the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau off at the knees. They’re preparing to pass a huge, regressive tax cut that I believe is ultimately designed to generate lasting deficits that will then be cited to justify the cutting of Medicaid, food stamps, Medicare, and Social Security.

With that, the risk shift will be complete.

What’s remarkable is that this is all happening at a time when even conventional wisdom recognizes that structural economic changes — globalization, technology, inequality, immobility, persistent underemployment, “secular stagnation” (persistently weak demand) — have made economic life tougher for many in the workforce. Such changes would seem to demand a politics that would drive the risk shift in the opposite direction, off the shoulders of households that are increasingly exposed to growing structural risks of displacement and loss, and back onto firms and governments.

- [Edited to add: Timothy Martin writes about the development of personal retirement accounts - which were supposed to supplement more stable defined-benefit pensions, but instead came to be used as an excuse to dispense with them.] And Peter Orzagh connects the stress of a more precarious life to the declining health (including shortened life spans) for lower-income Americans.

- Matt Bruenig notes that exactly the same incentives used as arguments against a basic income apply to the accumulation of passive income through capital ownership. And that reality (combined with the privileged treatment given to capital) makes it obvious how it's possible to pay for a system which provides meaningful supports to everybody.

- Dean Baker points out the futility of trying to pretend that the unpopularity of corporate-driven trade deals is merely an issue of messaging rather than substance.

- Finally, Richard Trumka discusses the dangers of allowing the likes of Donald Trump to pretend to speak for workers even as he uses his power to undermine them. And Ted Hesson reports on the real effects of Republican government - as raises and benefits promised under the Obama administration are being retracted by employers who have concluded they can get away with continuing to exploit their workers. 

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Hibernating cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Joachim Hubmer, Per Krusell and Anthony A. Smith, Jr. study the causes of wealth inequality in the U.S. and find one clear explanation for the stratification between the rich and the rest:

There is one main finding: by far the most important driver is the significant drop in tax progressivity that started in the late 1970s, intensified during the Reagan years, and then subsequently flattened out, with only a minor bounce back. The sharp observed increases in earnings inequality, the falling labor share over the recent decades, and potential mechanisms underlying changes in the gap between the interest rate and the growth rate (Piketty's r-g story) all fall far short of accounting for the data.

- Meanwhile, Jared Bernstein charts the lack of any correlation between tax giveaways to the rich and economic development (as measured by GDP and employment).

- Alan Pyke reports on Bloomberg's estimate that the world's richest 500 people increased their personal wealth by a combined $237 billion this past year alone. And Hugh MacKenzie reminds us that Canada's CEOs rake in more money in a single morning than most workers will earn all year.

- Ben Judah highlights how London's real estate market (like that of other cities) has been inflated by kleptocrats from around the globe.

- Thomas Homer-Dixon discusses the need for Canada to step up the fight against climate change. And Chris Mooney offers another reminder that actual data shows that we're doing even more damage to our planet than has long been feared - which may explain why the Wall government is going out of its way to undermine even basic scientific knowledge and education in Saskatchewan.

- And finally, the Council of Canadians shares Maude Barlow's laudable national vision for 2017.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Paul Krugman offers a warning about Donald Trump's immediate moves to normalize corruption and cronyism as the foundation of his administration. And the New York Times' editorial board points out that corporations are enabling Trump's false claims with the expectation that they'll be rewarded with public giveaways, while Jeff Spross highlights how Trump stands to bolster a cult of personality by making workers dependent on his favour. 

- Philip Inman examines the Resolution Foundation's research showing that workers without guaranteed hours suffer a "precarious pay penalty" that leaves them far worse off than people doing the same jobs on permanent contracts. And John Have and Robert Brown note that older employees represent another group which may face adverse treatment, particularly when benefit plans terminate at age 65 even when an employee keeps working.

- Libby Brooks notes that Scotland is joining the list of jurisdictions examining the social benefits of a universal basic income. And Noah Smith comments on the relative merits of basic income and job guarantee policies - while rightly recognizing that the job market may be headed in a direction which makes the latter impossible.
 
- Peter Goffin highlights how the cost of medication affects the effectiveness of mental health treatment - particularly when it forces patients to choose between prescription drugs and basic needs such as food. And Eva Ferguson discusses the rise of food insecurity in Alberta.

- Finally, Tara Kiran reports on the millions of Ontarians - disproportionately including vulnerable populations - who have been left behind as a new primary care model has been implemented through most of the health care system.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that to start your 2017.

- Ideas examines how the assumptions underlying far too much economic theory have produced disastrous real-world results. And Harold Meyerson writes that research is proving that skeptics of corporate-driven free trade have been right all along.

- Gary Younge writes that the rise of populist right-wing politicians can be traced largely to the failure of opponents to put forward a strong and substantive alternative. And John Harris traces the Brexit vote and U.S. election results in part to the sense that society has grown too complex to either benefit or be understood by wide swaths of people.

- Owen Jones looks to Austria as an example of how a focus on values over people helped to stop an authoritarian leader. And Michael Sandel discusses the need to provide progressive responses to citizens' real anger:

The populism ascendant today is a rebellion against establishment parties generally, but centre-left parties have suffered the greatest casualties. This is mainly their own fault. In the US, the Democratic party has embraced a technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base. A similar predicament faces the Labour party.

Before they can hope to win back public support, progressive parties must rethink their mission and purpose. To do so, they should learn from the populist protest that has displaced them, not by emulating its xenophobia and strident nationalism, but by taking seriously the legitimate grievances with which these sentiments are entangled. And that means recognising that the grievances are about social esteem, not just wages and jobs.
...
Progressives should reconsider the assumption that social mobility is the answer to inequality. They should reckon directly with inequalities of wealth and power, rather than rest content with efforts to help people ascend a ladder whose rungs are growing further and further apart.
...
The problem runs deeper. The relentless emphasis on seeking a fair meritocracy, in which social positions reflect effort and talent, has a morally corrosive effect on the way we interpret our success (or lack thereof). The belief that the system rewards talent and hard work encourages the winners to regard their success as their own doing, a measure of their virtue – and to look down upon the less fortunate.

Those who lose out may complain that the system is rigged or be demoralised by the belief that they alone are responsible for their failure. When combined, these sentiments yield a volatile brew of anger and resentment, which Trump, though a billionaire, understands and exploits. Where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton speak constantly of opportunity, Trump offers blunt talk of winners and losers. Democrats such as Obama and Clinton have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate and the harsh judgment it renders on those without a college degree. This is why one of the deepest divides in American politics today is between those with and without post-secondary education.

- Paul Krugman rightly notes that institutions and norms aren't of much value in fending off tyranny. And Alana Semuels offers some ideas to stop the trend of short-term corporate thinking.

- Finally, Adnan Al-Daini argues that empathy is the most important value to cultivate in the new year - and offers some suggestions as to how to do so at the individual level.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your year.

- Michelle Chen writes that wealth inequality and social stratification are only getting worse in the U.S. And Edwin Rios and Dave Gilson chart the diverging fates of the top .01% which is seeing massive gains, and the rest of the U.S.' population facing continued income and wealth stagnation.

- Noah Smith offers his theory as to why low interest rates haven't resulted in promised corporate investment, noting that capital has effectively been rationed by entry barriers rather than going to new development where it might have served some useful purpose.

- Markham Hislop's wish for the new year is for Canada's fossil fuel industry to respect people enough to engage with political and environmental reality, rather than insulting the public by glossing over our changing energy options. Derek Leahy discusses how a modernized transportation system could make substantial progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

- Joan Bryden reports on the federal government's underfunding of First Nations mental health services which is forcing some families to give up their children in order to allow for access to needed treatment. And Monika Dutt comments on the dangers of federal health care funding being a matter of province-by-province fragmentation rather than national standards.

- Finally, Ben Kentish reports on the UK's increase in homelessness caused by a combination of austerian housing policy and soaring rental rates. And Leilani Farha discusses why housing should be treated as a matter of needs and rights rather than profit opportunities:

What animates those in the business of housing is the idea that housing is a matter for the financial elite: a place to park surplus capital to maximise wealth, with little concern or return for people struggling to live in dignity with a decent, affordable roof over their head. This engenders inequality and exclusion and takes out the social function of housing from the equation.

The virtual silence about this type of opportunism and its implications reflects the world in which we live. The more housing is dominated by corporate and financial elites who interact with it as an asset from which to reap a profit, with scant regulations, the more people who most need human rights protections are denied access: pushed to the peripheries because they cannot afford to live in cities, or removed from their homes and rendered homeless to make way for those with economic clout.

For those pushed out, housing is not about financial securitisation. It’s about securing the right to life. They describe their experiences in terms of their struggle for dignity; they articulate their circumstances as a denial of their humanity and their human rights.
...
In so many ways housing is about human life, dignity and humanity. Fundamental human rights. How do we reconcile that with the dominant idea of housing as a commodity owned by faceless, nameless corporate elites who are left unaccountable to human rights obligations?

As we say goodbye to 2016 and look forward to a new year, we need to re-embrace housing for its fundamental dimensions – its social value as a place necessary for human wellbeing, where people raise families, build communities and participate in civic life. And we need to sell that notion of housing back to our governments to derail the collision course between human rights and investor interests.

Musical interlude

Delerium feat. JES - Stay

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Sam Gindin discusses the future of labour organizing in the course of reviewing Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Guilded Age:

(W)e have been struggling with how to combine building the union with raising larger, more political questions. One modest element of this, especially but not only in the public sector, is to confront the apparent constraint of fiscal budgets on what is possible and run educationals for workers on how to read budgets technically and how to understand them politically.

But the larger point is that even the best and most community-rooted unions cannot change the world by themselves and so are confined to the limits of operating under capitalism. Unions can educate about elite and local power but focusing their education on capitalism as a system rarely occurs. They can create organic leaders but not necessarily lead them to the next step of becoming organic socialist leaders. They can support political parties but do not ask what role workers and unions might have in transforming capital states to socialist states. Such things — all vital to dealing with working-class power — can only be tackled within or alongside an institution with a broader and longer-term perspective: a coherent socialist tendency or party.

- Andrew Mitrovica laments the spread of right-wing populism over the past year. And Keman Dervis warns about the dangers of corporate short-term thinking, while Frank Clemente points out the futility of relying on corporate handouts as a basis for economic development.

- But on the brighter side, Harry Leslie Smith offers a hopeful perspective that collective decency will win out over anti-social impulses in the end.

- Peter Goffin reports on the urgent need to make mental health supports available to Canadians without a price tag. And Trevor Young sets out a few suggestions from doctors to improve our current health care system.

- Finally, Idealistic Pragmatist makes a welcome (if brief) return to highlight the need to take people's public contributions seriously regardless of whether they need to use a pseudonym in offering them.

New column day

Here, on the need for progressive leaders and activists alike to build connections beyond borders and party lines to combat a reactionary movement which spans the globe.

For further reading...
- Sam Kriss discusses how the systematic stifling of the left has given rise to the toxic politics of the right.
- Demi Lee points out why the environmental movement has every reason to fear the new pipeline alliance of Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump.
- Rowena Mason and Peter Walker report on Barack Obama's potshots at Jeremy Corbyn, together with Corbyn's response.
- Andrew Prokop examines the contest between Keith Ellison and Tom Perez for chair of the Democratic National Committee - and notes that it largely stands to exacerbate the divide between primary supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
- Julia Rampen highlights some of the connections between Trump, Nigel Farage and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber spanning both sides of the Atlantic.
- Finally, in pointing out the importance of working collectively toward common goals, I'll also note the danger of letting outside voices create splits where none exist - and Gillian Steward's attempt to paint disagreement on a single policy as an irreparable faultline within the NDP fits into that category. 

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Jonathan Chait sees Larry Kudlow's claim that "Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption!" as an all-too-accurate statement of the belief system underlying Donald Trump's presidency:

What has been exposed is not only the lie at the heart of Trump’s campaign, but a delusion embedded in conservatism itself. Conservatives like to imagine that their policy represents a challenge to the power structure, which they see as “crony capitalism,” a form of corruption threatened by their free-market ideas. The failures of the Bush administration (which, in fact, followed the tax-cutting, deregulatory agenda that conservatives had promised would usher in prosperity) were dismissed as the byproduct of the administration’s departures from market purism. Bush and the Washington Republicans allowed power and wealth to corrupt them, the argument went. As Bush’s popularity plunged, conservatives lacerated their party with polemics like Matthew Continetti’s “The K Street Gang,” which depicted the GOP as a self-enriching elite.

The conceptual distinction between the good kind of wealth, earned through the free market, and the bad kind, earned through political favoritism, is an absolutely vital one for right-wing intellectuals. And yet Trump is showing how easily it collapses in practice. Conservatives have treated a first family using the powers of office to enrich itself — not theoretically or in the future but right now, on an ongoing basis — as, at worst, a distraction or a problem of optics. In practice, conservatives share Kudlow’s belief that a government of and by the rich is necessarily virtuous.

- And Alana Semuels notes that Trump's victory may represent an end to the theory that the economy largely dictates electoral results, as partisanship seems to have far outweighed economic realities in influencing a decisive number of votes.

- Nick Falvo discusses the importance of taking social factors into account in developing housing policy. And Jay Walljasper highlights the importance of place as a determinant of health, while recognizing that some fairly simple steps can make a substantial difference improving how one's location influences one's well-being

- Erik Loomis highlights how garment workers in Bangladesh are trying to push for some of the minimal gains promised to be the result of globalized supply chains - and being met with state violence and firings as a result. And Deirdre Fernandes writes about the link between unemployment rates and suicide levels.

- Finally, Jerry Dias offers his take on what we can try to accomplish in 2017 after a year all too often marked by disappointments and worse.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Elephantine cats.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David Brin examines the crucial role the public sector plays in driving economic development - as well as the disturbingly large movement seeking to end any further progress.

- Anna Gorman reports on California's ambitious plans to improve the health and social welfare of its most vulnerable residents. And Kate Porter reports on a citizen-driven effort to bring Ontario's basic income pilot to Smiths Falls - though it's sad that the effort is needed as a response to a dismissive town council vote.

- Mike De Souza, Robert Cribb and Marco Oved point out that in addition to allowing a bank which systematically broke the law to remain anonymous, FINTRAC gave the lobbying arm of Canada's financial industry a heads-up to prepare for the public fallout.

- Steven Chase reports on Daniel Turp's much-needed court challenge to the Libs' claim to the power to approve arms sales (such as the export of tanks to Saudi Arabia) with no regard for the human rights consequences. And it's telling that the government response is not just to claim to have considered the abuses expected to follow from the Saudi sale, but to argue that Stephane Dion is fully entitled to ignore them.

- Finally, Bal Brach reports on the sudden cut in privately-sponsored Syrian refugees being allowed to enter Canada in 2017 - signalling that the Libs' interest in the well-being of people fleeing a war zone was limited to their post-election PR campaign.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Jared Bernstein argues that the limited stimulus provided by tax cuts for the rich is far from worth the overall costs of exacerbating inequality and damaging public revenues:

I’m encountering progressives who are compelled to be at least somewhat supportive of wasteful, regressive tax cuts, like those proposed by Trump, or the ones I just wrote about in Kansas, that happen to spin off some positive fiscal impulse. While we’re closing in on full employment, there’s still slack in the job market, such FI could help absorb remaining slack.

That’s true, but there are two relevant questions: bang for the buck (multipliers), and the impacts of the cost of the tax cuts.

The Kansas cuts–particularly the zeroing out of the pass-through income–are instructive as these cuts have very low bang-for-buck in terms of jobs or incomes for middle and lower income folks. They just lower taxes for those who are already “highly liquid,” i.e., they’ve got a bunch of money already and giving them more shouldn’t be expected to boost spending (C) or investment (I) much. And since states must balance their budgets, they constrain G as well.

In terms of poor targeting, Trump-style cuts are similarly lame in terms of growth effects, as I discussed recently re the GW Bush tax cuts in the early 2000s. However, because they involve deficit spending–as I’m sure you’ve seen, the federal gov’t can run deficits–they will generate some positive FI, which we could use.

But at what cost? The opportunity costs are twofold. First, there’s the cost of tapping small versus larger multipliers: were team Trump to spend the money on infrastructure or target those with high consumption propensities, the FI would be stronger (btw, it should be noted that multipliers are smaller when the Fed’s raising rates, albeit slowly and by small increments, than when they’re lowering them).

Second, “permanent” tax cuts will mean a worsening of the revenue shortfall I’ve long worried about (the scare quotes are there because the R’s may build some BS cliff into their tax plan to accommodate arcane budget rules, but the intention is permanence). That will provide an excuse for whacking Medicaid, Medicare, Social Sec, and much other spending that’s important to the poor and middle-class. And yes, those folks are income constrained, so that part of ‘G’ gets spent and feeds back into growth.

- Danielle Ivory, Ben Protess and Griff Palmer point out how the public interest suffers when necessary infrastructure is turned into a corporate profit centre.

- Judith Lavoie discusses how the secrecy around the tar sands has made it nearly impossible for communities to plan for effective spill responses. And Genesee Keevil explores the truly unmitigated disaster that is the Yukon's Faro mine site as an example of what's left behind when a poorly-regulated resource extraction industry leaves the public with the bill to clean up behind it.

- Craig Offman and Nathan Vanderklippe report that the Libs' cash-for-access schemes look to include massive profits for the bundlers involved, as the asking price for face time with Justin Trudeau far exceeds the individual donation limit. And Dermod Travis discusses the big-money politics which the Clark Libs want to continue in British Columbia.

- Finally, Lana Payne writes about the need to push back against bullying politics in order to change them.

[Edit: fixed typo.]

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Anatole Kaletsky discusses the gross failures of market fundamentalism. And William Easterly points out that the risks to democratic governance which now seem to be materializing can be traced to the lack of a values-based defence of empowering people to decide their own future at the societal level.

- Julien Gignac reports on the glaring lack of comprehensive information about the state of homelessness in Canada, while also noting that what we do know shows the consequences of homelessness to be as much a problem in smaller communities as in big cities.

- Gary Mason discusses British Columbia's epidemic of drug overdose deaths, including the appalling lack of public interest to date.

- CBC notes that the introduction of private pay-for-plasma operators has cut into the volunteer donor base of Canadian Blood Services. 

- Finally, Andrew Jackson examines the possible effects of Donald Trump's trade policy - and notes in particular that a focus on protecting some established U.S. industries such as autos and steel might have significant spinoff benefits for Canada (even if that type of smart protection may be well beyond what we can expect from Trump himself).

Musical interlude

Radical Face - Always Gold