Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Remembrance Day reading.

- Roderick Benns interviews Robin Boadway about the results of past basic income studies which have shown that economic security helps rather than hinders individual participation in the workforce:

Benns: What about a basic income guarantee makes it a social justice issue?

Boadway: To me, freedom from poverty and satisfactions of basic needs are fundamental human right. They are also a prerequisite to participating meaningfully in society. As well, as I have mentioned, those of us who are more affluent than average owe our success in good part to luck rather than merit: where and when we were born, our native abilities, our family backgrounds, the opportunities made available to us, and so on. We owe it to the less fortunate to share our good fortune.

Benns: The most common concern is about implementing a basic income guarantee is that too many of us would choose not to work. Why do you believe this won’t be the case?

Boadway: Evidence from guaranteed basic income experiments indicates that those who receive basic income grants do not squander it. Some use it to provide better outcomes for their children. Others use it to support improving their own skills. Very few simply become idle and live off the grant. This is not surprising. Basic income is not designed to give recipients a luxurious life. There will always be a desire to earn income over and above the basic income guarantee level in order to achieve personal and family fulfilment. Existing welfare programs are not good indicators of behaviour under a basic income. They are rife with stigmatization and impose strong penalties to work and save. To the extent that one worries about disincentive effects, it is possible to design the system so that recipients retain an incentive to undertake productive activity, including work, entrepreneurship and education. Moreover, one cannot underestimate how social norms can be influenced by a well-designed and non-intrusive basic income system.

- Meanwhile,  Ken Battle, Sherri Torjman and Michael Mendelson make the case that Canada's federal government needs to get serious about fighting poverty, including by implementing a basic income. And Nick Hanauer and David Rolf also weigh in on the importance of individual economic security to allow people to make meaningful and positive choices.

- On the bright side, CBC reports that Alberta's NDP government has wasted no time in establishing a new child benefit to reduce poverty for that province's parents.

- But George Monbiot points out that the UK Conservatives represent just one example of a right-wing government with no clue how cuts to social programs affect the communities they're supposed to represent.

- Finally, Samara Canada offers (pdf) a first thorough review of Canada's 2015 election.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Brendan O'Neill writes that the UK Cons are following in Stephen Harper's footsteps by pushing the concept of thought policing. And George Monbiot rightly criticizes the gross inflation of supposed terror threats and simultaneous neglect of far more serious risks:

A global survey published last week by the Pew Research Centre found that while the people of North America, Britain, Australia, Japan, France and Germany see Isis as the greatest threat they face, most of the countries surveyed in poorer parts of the world – Africa, Latin America and Asia – place climate change at the top of the list. Even in Turkey (where, as the bombing on Monday suggests, the terrorist group is a real threat), more people said they were “very concerned” about climate change than they did about Islamic State. The nations least threatened by Isis rank this risk the highest. This is media-driven madness, an epidemic of transcontinental paranoia that governments are happy to foment and exploit.

Men such as Cameron, Tony Abbott in Australia and Stephen Harper in Canada won’t engage in generational struggles with real existential threats – climate breakdown first among them – for fear of alienating their sponsors. They have learned all the wrong lessons from Churchill’s legacy, seeking to invest themselves with belligerent glory while forgetting his ability at crucial moments to place the interests of the nation above the interests of his class.

So, as Hitler is reborn with a thousand faces, a new “struggle of our generation” emerges every six months, and all around us existential crises are ignored.

- Meanwhile, Jennifer Chevalier exposes the Cons' direct orders to the civil service to fabricate terrorism-related news for their political use, while Azeezah Kanji notes that even from the standpoint of addressing terrorism the Cons are deliberately avoiding naming the more plausible threats which come from their base. And the Star lauds the much-needed court challenge to C-51 while lamenting the fact that it's become law in the first place.

- Robyn Benson weighs in on the Cons' use of public money to bribe voters as an election approaches. And Anita Khanna and Sid Frankel write that we should expect all parties to be making clear how they'll fight child poverty, rather than limiting their focus to temporary goodies for swing voters.

- Susan Wright offers her take on the contrast between Rachel Notley and Brad Wall by pointing out what happened to the last premier who matched Wall's condescension.

- And finally, Henry Farrell sets out a useful general theory of Very Serious People.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Will Hutton rightly slams David Cameron for his antisocial view of taxes and public institutions - which should of course sound all too familiar in Canada:

Believe the prime minister and it is morality, rather than economics, which requires him to cut taxes. In an important article in the Times last week that was factually incorrect, philosophically incoherent and economically bonkers, David Cameron set out the Tory credo. He was wrong on all counts. Trying to argue why every reader should vote Conservative, he instead revealed the darkness of the blind alley into which modern Conservatism has stumbled.
...
The economy needs public agency. The long commutes that Mr Cameron so celebrated in his article are done in publicly provided railways with fat public grants for the private companies that operate them. The innovations that make offices and factory floors competitive come from publicly funded science and public grants that allow companies and entrepreneurs to lay off some of the enormous risk of being technological pioneers. No significant innovation or invention has ever happened anywhere without public initiative at some stage in the process.

Economies and societies grow out of an interdependence between public and private: they need each other and taxation is the financial connecting rod. To echo the IFS, there is no sense in which “every pound of public money is private earning”: private earning becomes as high as it is only because of public investment. Taxes are the means by which we furnish public agencies the wherewithal to provide us with the universities, research, roads, railways, networks and all the rest that allow private companies to flourish. It is why the IMF, considering the best way to get public finances back on track after a credit crunch, recommends that governments try to preserve as much of that enterprise-enhancing public spending as possible, increasing rather than lowering taxes as part of the programme. Mr Cameron’s boast is economically illiterate.

Taxes are socially indispensable as well. “Public services and safety nets” are not inconvenient social burdens that require immoral taxes. They are created as a collectively owned means of guarding against the hazards and risks that every human might confront – of a crippling illness or disability – and problems associated with ageing.

We do not deserve what will or could happen to us, but we pay our taxes to fund systems that protect not just ourselves but each other. Taxation, in this sense, is the most complete expression of our morality. Of course the Treasury should husband our resources, not because taxation is immoral but because it has a duty to make sure this social money does as much work as possible, giving us the biggest return for our moral taxes.

- And David Doorey both reminds us that more social countries tend to be far happier than those which adopt the Cameron/Harper beggar-thy-neighbour ethos, and offers an interesting explanation as to why:

Today, the United Nation’s released its second annual “World Happiness Index”. One thing that is striking about these studies is that the ‘most happy countries’ are always countries with the a long tradition of strong government social welfare programs, high overall tax levels, and of interest to a blog on work law, high levels of collective bargaining coverage. That is, in happy countries, unions and collective bargaining play a substantial role in the setting of conditions of work, which creates a strong middle class. Not surprisingly, therefore, the ‘happiest’ countries also tend to be the least unequal societies: they score well on measures of income inequality.
...
Given what we know about the effects of collective bargaining, the relationship should not be surprising. Empirically, we know that collective bargaining raises incomes, contributes to a stronger middle class, results in better health benefits and pensions, and produces safer jobs and better job security than the alternative system, in which employers usually fix working conditions unilaterally, subject to certain regulatory minimum standards. We know that countries with high collective bargaining coverage have a broader distribution of wealth throughout society than countries with low collective bargaining coverage. My colleague Professor Michael Lynk has nicely summarized these outcomes in this paper.

We might also expect that countries that respect collective bargaining rights are also more likely to provide a strong bundle of social benefits that tend to make like more enjoyable, and easier, for its citizens. These countries operate under a different type of capitalism than prevails in countries, like the USA, where a belief in ‘market forces’ and ‘individual responsibility” borders on religious doctrine. In these ‘happy’ countries, the role of ‘social partners’, like unions, has long been accepted as a necessary counterbalance to capitalist forces. Critics of strong government and unions like to deride these systems as ‘socialist’. But whatever you want to call it, these systems consistently produce the happiest citizens in the world.
...
The Happiness Index provides another insight into why collective bargaining coverage might be associated with happiness. In a very interesting segment of the report (pages 62-64), the authors explain that a significant factor affecting happiness is individual perceptions of ‘relative income’. People become less happy when they believe their income is lower relative to a comparator, such as coworkers or friends. This is something I’ve discussed before on this blog (see Why Do Workers Support Policies to Weaken Labour Rights?) A theory might be that where large segments of the population have their wage and benefits fixed by collective agreements, rather than at the whim of human resources policies, there will be fewer gaps in compensation that seem arbitrary or unfair to people. They can more easily understand differences in pay, because those differences are more likely to be transparent and explained in the collective agreements.

In contrast, in countries where union representation is lower, like the USA, unionized workers earn considerably more money and have better benefits and pensions. Nonunion workers become resentful (unhappy) of this privilege, because they are relatively worse off than their perceived comparators in the unionized workplaces. High collective agreement coverage reduces the potential for wage and benefit envy, which breeds unhappiness.

- But David Sirota notes that we're still a long way from giving effect to the principle of using collective power for the public good - and indeed the U.S. is seeing a new batch of candidates who seem nearly certain to turn hard-earned public pensions over to their financial-sector cronies at the expense of the workers who rely on them.

- Amanda Marcotte writes about the split between the progressive preference for real news and the conservative inclination to live in a fact-free echo chamber.

- And there are few issues where the divide is more stark than climate change and resource extraction. On the fact-based side, the BBC reports on the IPCC's eminently reasonable conclusion that we need to transition away from the fossil fuels which power much of the right-wing propaganda machine, while Tim McDonnell discusses the continued environmental damage done by BP's Gulf of Mexico blowout. But Eric Lipton exposes how oil barons are eager to play dirty in trying to silence anybody who questions their destruction of the planet.

- Finally, Amira Elghawaby interviews Glenn Greenwald about the Cons' plans for a more pervasive and intrusive surveillance state.

New column day

Here, on how the recent Munk Debate has helped to highlight Canadians' preference for a fairer, more progressive tax system - and on a couple of the most important steps we can take toward that end goal.

For further reading...
- Ipsos Reid's polling on public views toward taxing the rich is here.
- Stephen Gordon's response to the Munk Debate (referenced in the column) is here. And I'll note that there seems to be some difference in determining the tax rate applicable to high-end income: while KPMG's numbers roughly match Gordon's, the CRA's figures actually show Ontario as one of the provinces with an opportunity to increase revenue.
- Finally, the Guardian discusses David Cameron's efforts both to address tax avoidance within the G8, and to push UK territories to stop serving as cover for offshoring. And while I share some skepticism about Cameron's intentions, it's well worth pointing out the example of a right-wing leader at least recognize the unfairness of tax avoidance, rather than treating it as something to be expected and encouraged in the interest of enriching our betters.

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.

- Daniel Boffey catches one of David Cameron's top aides saying what most Cons leave as an unstated assumption: that recession and depressed wages are good for business (as long as "business" is defined only to mean short-term profits based on exploitation):

The prime minister's adviser on enterprise has told the cabinet that the economic downturn is an excellent time for new businesses to boost profits and grow because labour is cheap, the Observer can reveal.

Lord Young, a cabinet minister under the late Baroness Thatcher, who is the only aide with his own office in Downing Street, told ministers that the low wage levels in a recession made larger financial returns easier to achieve. His comments are contained in a report to be published this week, on which the cabinet was briefed last Tuesday.

- And in case there was any doubt that the Cons and their provincial counterparts are working feverishly to apply the same concept in Canada, plenty of reports have pointed out that the majority of new jobs bragged about in the Cons' advertising and provincial messaging are actually being created for temporary foreign workers. The Canadian Labour Congress finds that a stunning 75% of net new Canadian jobs in 2010-2011 were filled by TFWs (despite the fact that the starting point for those years was obvious room to expand employment in the wake of the recession), while CBC looks in more detail at the 65% figure for Saskatchewan.

- Mark Janson offers 10 reasons why we should be looking to expand and strengthen the Canada Pension Plan. But Thomas Walkom notes that the Cons are instead trying to eliminate access to secure, public retirement options. And Carol Goar writes that the Cons' plans for privatized social services look doomed to fail from the start.

- And if the Cons' antipathy toward any spirit of giving weren't obvious enough, the inclusion of Santa Claus on their media monitoring watch list should eliminate any doubt.

- Which to say that there's good reason why Canadians have reached the impressions of the Harper Cons described by Andrew Coyne:

If today both Mr. Harper and the party he leads are actively disliked by more than seven voters in 10, it may be because they have gone out of their way to alienate them in every conceivable way — not by their policies, or even their record, but simply by their style of governing, as over-bearing as it is under-handed, and that on a good day.

When they are not refusing to disclose what they are doing, they are giving out false information; when they allow dissenting opinions to be voiced, they smear them as unpatriotic or worse; when they open their own mouths to speak, it is to read the same moronic talking points over and over, however these may conflict with the facts, common courtesy, or their own most solemn promises.

Secretive, controlling, manipulative, crude, autocratic, vicious, unprincipled, untrustworthy, paranoid…Even by the standards of Canadian politics, it’s quite the performance. We’ve had some thuggish or dishonest governments in the past, even some corrupt ones, but never one quite so determined to arouse the public’s hostility, to so little apparent purpose. Their policy legacy may prove short-lived, but it will be hard to erase the stamp of the Nasty Party.

Perhaps, in their self-delusion, the Tories imagine this is all the fault of the Ottawa media, or the unavoidable cost of governing as Conservatives in a Liberal country. I can assure them it is not. The odium in which they are now held is well-earned, and entirely self-inflicted.

New column day

Here, updating the respective effects of smart investment and needless austerity in the economic laboratory provided by the 2008 financial meltdown - and noting we have all the more reason to be suspicious of our own austerity buffs at home.

For further background, see...
- Jason Kirby's 2011 proposal to compare the U.S. and U.K. as test cases.
- Philip Aldrick on the disastrous effects of austerity in the U.K.
- The U.S. Treasury's comparison (PDF) of growth among different countries up to early 2012.
- Reuters on Japan's sudden surge since its stimulus program was announced just a month ago.
- Bloomberg on Iceland's remarkable recovery - driven by a determination to prioritize citizens' interests over the lobbying of the financial sector.
- And finally, Paul Krugman passim - but especially his commentary on the IMF's recognition that governments thoroughly underestimated the value of stimulus.

Juxtaposition

Ah, the memories of Stephen Harper and his bestest international buddy deciding what to do about the economic pain they've inflicted on the world:

Mr. Cameron, hailing Canada as a model of fiscal probity and pointing to his own deep spending cuts, argued that debt cutting is the only way to fix a disturbing pattern, with economic growth in Europe and the United States stalled. He said the problem is high debts of governments and individuals, and that the fear that they won’t be repaid will spark a loss of confidence and a rise in interest rates.
...
Mr. Harper said markets’ fears are at “dangerous” levels, and this situation is far worse than austerity measures would be. “This is the most immediate and pressing problem facing the globe, and it is at a perilous point, and it does have to be dealt with.”

So how's that joint commitment to making a bad situation worse through austerity measures working out?

The UK has fallen deeper into recession than previously thought, confirming that the country has officially entered a double-dip. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed that the economy shrank faster than previously estimated between October and December last year, with a decline of 0.4%.

The economy also contracted for a second quarter between January and March this year, with the unchanged -0.3% estimate confirming that we are in recession for the second time in four years.

 (h/t to Atrios.)

On exclusion

Apparently last week's post on the value of making public services and programs universal was rather well timed, as the Globe and Mail is pushing David Cameron's plans to hack away at some of the UK's universal benefits as a model for Canada.

So let's make clear that the converse of my point is true as well. Just as anybody concerned with making a program sustainable should want to make sure that it's designed to eliminate avoidable resentments, so too can a concerted effort to carve out groups from a universal benefit be seen as consistent with a desire to undermine the program as a whole in the longer term. And particularly when a business-friendly source is talking about the need for shared pain as the basis to limit the availability of a social benefit, it's worth asking immediately what kinds of sacrifices are being demanded from the corporate sector to go with the desire to slash citizens' benefits.