Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Brian and Karen Foster question why steadily improving productivity has led to increasing stratification rather than better lives for a large number of people:

(W)ith all the optimism, why hasn't technological progress actually opened up a world where we all work, and we all work less? Why do we still have some people working overtime while others sit idle, wishing for employment? Why are we not seeing the spread of work-sharing schemes, where the duties of one job are divided into two or more jobs?

We have a government program that helps companies do this for a short time instead of laying workers off, but generally the closest we come to work-sharing is splitting a job that was once full-time and salaried into a suite of part-time, short-term contracts with no benefits. Conceivably, we could spread the work around without diminishing job security and drastically cutting wages. We could use work sharing as a long-term employment strategy rather than solely as a crisis response.

Sticking with the idea of long-term strategies, why haven't we seriously considered the success and promise of Basic Income schemes -- like the one tested and then quietly abandoned in Dauphin, Manitoba?

At the very least, why haven't we shortened our work week in recognition of our increased productivity? (Because it is increasing, despite all the fear mongering; the worst that happens, generally, is "poor growth.")

Why, as Bertrand Russell wondered nearly a century ago, have we chosen "to have overwork for some and starvation for the others" when "modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all"?

- And Carol Goar recognizes that paper wealth doesn't do much to help anybody who hasn't managed to siphon off real money from the increased price of houses and other assets:

• Families’ net work may have increased, but their cash buffer is gone. On paper, they’re better off because of a 47-per-cent appreciation in the value of homes since 2005. But that kind of wealth can shrink — or vanish — for reasons beyond their control. All it would take is a run-up in mortgage rates, a tightening of credit conditions or a real estate sell-off by aging baby boomers.
• Younger families didn’t do nearly as well in the survey as their baby-boomer parents. Households with a principal breadwinner between 35 and 44 had a median net worth of $182,500. Those with a primary earner between 55 and 64 had almost triple that amount ($533,600). With baby boomers holding so much of the nation’s wealth, it’s not surprising Trudeau and Mulcair are picking up distress signals from the next generation of voters.
• Household debt rose at a faster pace than assets. “Because assets are far larger than debt, net worth still increased,” explained economist Leslie Preston of Toronto Dominion Bank. But that was little comfort to middle-class families carrying a large mortgage, a car loan, a line of credit and a couple of maxed-out credit cards. If interest rates climb — even one or two percentage points — they’ll be in financial trouble.
• The poorest 20 per cent of the population — some 2.7 million families — lost ground. That quintile now includes many Canadians who considered themselves middle class before the recession. The contraction of the manufacturing sector, corporate downsizing and outsourcing eliminated well-paid jobs, pushing them down a level.

These developments reshaped people’s attitudes and expectations. Working hard was no longer the key to upward mobility. A good education didn’t necessarily lead to employment. A job didn’t mean a pension. Career planning became an oxymoron. Condos were the only homes most young couples could aspire to own.
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What is beyond dispute — no matter whether wages, income or wealth is used — is that inequality is growing. Those at the top are getting richer and those at the bottom are sinking deeper into poverty.

Canadians in the middle see themselves moving down, not up. Even if they hang on, their kids — burdened with debt, struggling for a foothold in the job market, still living at home — will fall back.

That is what Trudeau and Muclair are tapping into. It’s not acute financial distress. It is a gnawing conviction the ladder of opportunity is broken.

- In a similar vein, Robert Reich identifies inequality as the major problem in the distribution of what we produce. And Rhys Kesselmen highlights how the Cons are going out of their way to exacerbate that inequality by setting up and expanding new tax shelters like TFSAs, while Penny Kome interviews Allyson Pollock about P3s as another means of converting social resources into private profits.

- Michael Harris wonders whether the Cons' big bang is coming soon. And Josh Wingrove reports that they're using their majority to stifle any discussion of their own admitted lies to Parliament, while Paul Adams laments their hollow-threat diplomacy on the international stage.

- But Alex Boutillier notes that the NDP is looking to set a more positive example for political consultation, planning to hold its own public hearings into the Cons' election legislation if Harper and company refuse to allow for any to occur through Parliament.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Napping cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- The Economist looks at the relationship between equality and growth, showing that there's at worst little evidence that fairer economies have any trouble matching their more-polarized counterparts - and best some indication that they perform better:

Inequality is more closely correlated with low growth. A high Gini for net income, after redistribution, corresponds to slower growth in income per person. A rise of 5 Gini points (moving from the level in America to that in Gabon, for instance) knocks half a percentage point off average annual growth. And holding redistribution constant, a one-point rise in the Gini raises the risk an expansion ends in a given year by six percentage points. Redistribution that reduces inequality might therefore boost growth.

If redistribution is benign, that could be because it substitutes for shaky borrowing. In their 2011 paper Messrs Berg and Ostry note that more unequal societies do poorly on social indicators such as educational attainment, even after controlling for income levels. This suggests that households with lower incomes struggle to finance investments in education. In a recent paper Barry Cynamon of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis and Steven Fazzari of Washington University in St Louis reckon most Americans borrowed heavily before 2008 to prop up their consumption. That kept the economy growing—until crisis struck. Sensible redistribution could mean the difference between a healthy growth rate and one that is decidedly subprime.

- Meanwhile, PressProgress highlights the glaring gap in income gains between the super-rich and the rest of us:

- Trish Hennessy's latest Index notes that decades of tax slashing have eliminated Canada's capacity to fund important social programs. And Pete Evans reports that so far, posturing about getting tough on corporate tax evaders hasn't led to any substantial results.

- But Megan Leslie points out that a fair corporate tax rate is one of the big ideas on offer from the NDP - even if it's one that may need to be discussed more frequently. 

- Finally, Timothy Taylor compares the employment philosophies of GM and Toyota, and raises the possibility that employers who train workers to perform a range of roles - and listen to their suggestions as to how to improve the workplace - may benefit significantly compared to those who try to limit workers to mindlessly repeating a single task.

On unsound vessels

Shorter Senate Internal Economy Committee:

The real Senate expense scandal is the fact that anybody's found out about Senators' misuse of expense claims. How we spend public money is nobody's business but our own, the PMO's and the Conservative Party's.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- David Atkins emphasizes the need for progressive parties and activists to discuss big ideas rather than settling for the path of least short-term resistance:

Both the poor and the middle class feel threatened and increasingly pessimistic. Opinions of elite institutions across the board are at an all time low. Whether on the right or left, few believe anymore that anyone in government, business, or politics is actually looking out for their interests. In a world like this, the move to ensure that every single individual in society has an equal, infinitesimal chance to become obscenely rich loses its moral force. The rhetoric around "making sure that no one is left behind" in starvation and penury is far less compelling when the entire middle class feels like it's being left behind.
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Tapping into the backlash will require more than just a focus on winning elections, as voters no longer believe politicians can or even want to solve their problems. It will also require much more than the weak vision of progress that the New Left has been peddling for decades.

It will require an acknowledgement of the trends that continue to destroy the middle class and send the working class into abject poverty, and a commitment to not only protect those falling furthest behind but to reverse the broader trend.

It will require a willingness to propose and try ambitious and novel policy ideas, both at the federal level and through the laboratories of the states. Policies like a Wall Street transaction tax, or state-run banks, or incentives designed to decrease rather than increase the cost of housing, or even a universal basic income. Capital mobility can be a problem, but even that is soluble through international trade treaties that serve to protect the interests of workers rather than plutocrats. These sorts of ideas can and should serve as the template for a re-energized left that promises not just vague and increasingly unrealized "opportunity" to people, but that actually delivers tangible results.

- Meanwhile, Darcy Henton reports on the latest example of unchecked privatization and corporatism run amok - as TransAlta is accused of taking a page out of Enron's playbook and causing up deliberate power shortages in order to drive up its own prices. Market efficiency at work!

- And Bruce Johnstone writes that the Cons' obsession with demolishing the Canadian Wheat Board is the most important factor behind the lack of shipping capacity that's leaving a prime grain crop stranded on the prairies.

- Dan Leger and Mark Burgess both note that the Cons' election legislation is aimed purely at rigging the electoral rules in their favour. And Linda Leon writes to her Con MP with an appropriate response to the bill.

- Finally, James Cudmore reports on Doug Drever's attempt to encourage accountability and access to information. But it's well worth noting that the Cons' culture of denial seems sufficiently dominant that even a strong dissenting voice wasn't enough to stop others from happily taking up the job of keeping information secret:

Then DND headquarters changed the plan again. Drever was ordered to advise CBC to ask for the documents through Access to Information rather than release them.

"Actually … No, I won't,” he said in one email.

"Gotta stand for something once in a while,” he added in another.

Drever told the army team to get someone else to refuse the request.

Eighteen minutes later, a subordinate, Capt. Denny Brown, reported, "Mission accomplished."

Pavlov's lapdog

Shorter Barrie McKenna:

We must respond to all tax policy developments anywhere in the world by slashing corporate tax rates. And I've just lowered the bar on what constitutes a "tax policy development" to include the idle posturing of a U.S. party which can't pass anything.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- Nick Kristof writes that the growing gap in income reflects a similarly growing gap in social perception - and that there's plenty of need to reduce both:

There is an income gap in America, but just as important is a compassion gap. Plenty of successful people see a picture of a needy child and their first impulse is not to help but to reproach.

...

There may be neurological biases at work. A professor at Princeton found that our brains sometimes process images of people who are poor or homeless as if they were not humans but things.

Likewise, psychology experiments suggest that affluence may erode compassion. When research subjects are asked to imagine great wealth, or just look at a computer screen saver with money, they become less inclined to share or help others. That may be why the poorest 20 percent of Americans give away a larger share of their incomes than the wealthiest 20 percent.

...

It’s true, of course, that the poor are sometimes lazy and irresponsible. So are the rich, with less consequence.

Critics note that if a person manages to get through high school and avoid drugs, crime and parenting outside of marriage, it’s often possible to escape poverty. Fair enough. But if you’re one of the one-fifth of children in West Virginia born with drugs or alcohol in your system, if you ingest lead from peeling paint as a toddler, if your hearing or vision impairments aren’t detected, if you live in a home with no books in a gang-ridden neighborhood with terrible schools — in all these cases, you’re programmed for failure as surely as children of professionals are programed for success.

So when kids in poverty stumble, it’s not quite right to say that they “failed.” Often, they never had a chance.

...

Johnny shouldn’t be written off at the age of 3 because of the straw he drew in the lottery of birth. To spread opportunity, let’s start by pointing fewer fingers and offering more helping hands.

- And in a similar vein, Ryan Meili highlights the absurdity of the Libs' trial balloon about barring anybody deemed insufficiently virtuous from Nova Scotia's health care system.

- Meanwhile, Suzanne Mettler discusses how a university system increasingly tied to connections and wealth is serving to reinforce class barriers in the U.S.

- Stephen Maher comments on the creeping and creepy authoritarism of the Cons' selective ethnic preferences. And Scott Stelmaschuk similarly points out their scorched-earth campaign in Quebec.

- Finally, Jennifer Ditchburn reports on the efforts of independent oversight bodies to avoid being sliced to ribbons by Mark Adler's private member's bill. But if their millions in budget cuts to many of the same offices offer any indication, the Cons seem to figure that euthanizing public watchdogs is a feature rather than a bug.

On inspiring action

The NDP's first National Day of Action last weekend looks to have received virtually no media attention despite involving numbers of participants comfortably within the range of similarly-timed conventions and conferences which routinely dominate national headlines for weeks at a time. And there's reason for optimism that the NDP's plan to hold several more may hint at a new stage in Canadian grassroots democracy.

But I'll echo Murray Dobbin's concern that while it's well worth building a strong participatory structure, there's reason to question the issue chosen for the first day of action:

On February 22, in the aftermath of a "boring" budget, Thomas Mulcair's NDP undertook a National Day of Action -- a welcome idea that's been long in coming and has the potential over time to be a political game changer. If developed more and replicated at the riding level it could be the beginning of moving the NDP away from being simply a campaign machine to actually becoming, like its CCF predecessor, a movement party engaged in communities year-round.

And yet the potential in this first experiment of engaging Canadians between elections seems to have been squandered by the focus of the day of action. How is it possible that the NDP would finally understand the importance of this kind of citizen engagement and at the same time completely abandon any substantive ideas with which to start a conversation? The whole day of action is one huge political contradiction -- engaging citizens but only after you have redefined them as consumers.
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Every study ever done shows that the best bang for your buck is the taxes you pay. Put your money together with everyone else and you get stuff you could never possibly afford by yourself -- medicare being only the most powerful example among dozens: education, police and fire protection, parks, clean water, mass transit.

Imagine if the NDP, instead of talking about relatively minor consumer issues, had instead decided to have a National Day of Action engaging Canadians on the budget and taxes. While the way budgets are presented and discussed makes them dry and frustratingly incomprehensible, wherever participatory budgeting has been tried there has been a tremendous public response. Give people a real opportunity to engage, with accessible information, and they always respond.

At best, the "affordability" theme might be justified as a first step in a process of developing an ongoing structure for volunteer action. It's understandable for a party to minimize its risks in developing new forms of political activity, and the NDP followed that pattern - choosing a subject which left little room for disagreement, which in turn made it easy for new volunteers and newly-reached voters to talk about politics without creating avoidable controversy.

But with that first show of activist muscle out of the way (and being proclaimed a success), I'll hope to see future Days of Action go much further - both in offering the prospect of far greater responsiveness to the people being reached, and in pursuing Thomas Mulcair's oft-repeated promise of moving the political centre toward progressive values. And it's only by achieving those goals that the NDP can harness the power of the citizenry to overcome a corporate media environment where it's being written off yet again.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- The New York Times editorial board points out that a higher minimum wage can produce clear economic benefits for businesses as well as for workers:

One 2013 study by three economists — Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester and Michael Reich — compared the experiences of businesses in neighboring counties in different states and found less turnover in states that had raised the minimum wage. Workers were less likely to leave on their own, and managers were more likely to keep the workers they had on staff to avoid the cost of recruiting and training replacements.

Other studies on the effect of local minimum wage increases in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles have found similar results, according to a recent overview published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
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There is another way in which a higher minimum wage helps businesses: by increasing consumer spending. When poor families earn more, they spend more. A group of more than 600 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, recently told President Obama and congressional leaders that an increase in the minimum wage would stimulate today’s weak economy. Even Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, has previously called on policy makers to increase the federal minimum wage. A spokesman for the company recently told Bloomberg News that it was “looking at” supporting the current Democratic proposal.

The argument that a higher minimum wage would hurt business is old and tired. There is clear and compelling evidence that the economy and companies enjoy real benefits when workers are paid more.

- And Tim Stacey suggests that in light of the connections between poor wages, insecure work and poor health as obstacles to future opportunities, governments should be looking for ways to foster jobs which offer some prospect of security - rather than pointing to temporary and precarious jobs as a sign of success.

- Don Cayo reminds us why the Cons seemed to have it right in temporarily nixing income splitting - making Stephen Harper's more recent declaration that he's fully committed to channeling wealth upward all the more inexplicable. And Kevin Milligan notes there's less than meets the eye in Statistics Canada's latest wealth survey, while Andrew Jackson recognizes that younger workers are facing a nasty combination of high debts, high entry barriers to homeownership and low asset levels.

- Carol Goar comments on the false economy the Cons are trying to claim by cutting health services to refugees.

- Finally, Susan Delacourt writes about the systemic damage done to Canada's democracy by the Cons' well-established pattern of using public office solely for their own ends:

The cumulative, long-term effects are emerging though. The ever-growing list of “enemies’ of the government — Liberals, New Democrats, public-service watchdogs, journalists, environmentalists, election officials, charities — expect to find themselves on Harper’s bad side.

But this newest poll shows that a large number of non-political citizens, armed only with their voting rights, may expect to find themselves on the wrong side too.

Our democratic life can go on, whether or not the public likes, respects or even pays attention to the people in power.

But when two-thirds of the public expresses doubts about the fairness of future elections, that’s a problem — not just for Conservatives, but to the institution of government altogether.

Musical interlude

Audien - Wayfarer

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Jonathan Freedland discusses how the UK's Conservative government is forcing its poor citizens to choose between food and dignity:

Cameron's statement rests on the repeatedly implied assumption that the only people going hungry are those who have opted for idleness as a lifestyle choice, who could work but don't fancy it. This assumption is false. The majority of poor households include at least one person who works. As Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, put it this week: "People who are using food banks are not scroungers who are cynically trying to work the system. They are drawn from the 6 million working poor in this country, people who are struggling to make ends meet in low paid or bitty employment." Sure enough, the very first thing the "clients" I speak to at the Hackney food bank tell me – unprompted – is how desperate they are to work. One is an immigrant legally barred from working. The other is a former removal man now aged 60 who can't afford to buy the van he needs to get started again.

Yet the driving rhetoric behind the government's welfare policy focuses narrowly on those dishonestly claiming benefits, even though such fraud accounts for less than 1% of the money paid out. To punish that tiny, parasitical minority, hundreds of thousands of people – poor not because they're lazy but because of low wages, patchy, zero-hours jobs or rising food costs – are going hungry.

As for welfare dependency, on that logic any and all support is part of the problem: the minute you help someone, you risk making them dependent. The bishop of Bradford is surely right to argue that the government might as well be honest and "say ... we are prepared for people to starve and become destitute in order to achieve that longer-term goal" of ending welfare dependency. Like refusing to put out fires lest you encourage fire brigade dependency, it would at least have the merit of consistency.
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(T)here is less shame in claiming a nationally mandated benefit than in going to a church hall, being handed a food parcel and having to nod your head and say thank you.

Still, the shame is bearable if the alternative is you or your family going hungry. What has become of us, when that is the choice we offer our fellow citizens: dignity or food? And this in our wealthy, wealthy country.

- But in case anybody was under the illusion that nobody gets a free lunch, Duncan Hood reports on several major Canadian corporations which are paying little or no tax (with the assistance of government policy choices).

- Bruce Campbell calls for an independent inquiry into the Lac-Mégantic oil-by-rail explosion. But then, the same anti-regulatory dogma which did so much to cause the disaster in the first place figures to explain the Cons' refusal to allow for a full investigation. Which means that we may have to hope rail operators pay more attention to the U.S. regulators who are rightly studying the dangers of oil by rail - rather than the Cons who value safety far below oil-sector profits.

- Finally, Simon asks how either the NDP or the Libs could possibly justify refusing to work together in a coalition if the 2015 federal election results in an opportunity to replace the Harper Cons. And Paul Wells likewise notes that there's every reason to keep all options open in order to pursue good government - even if the fundamental rightness of that position will get buried in favour of a substance-free "flip-flop" narrative in some corners. (Though I do maintain my doubts about Wells' confidence that the Cons would step down willingly - rather than pulling out all the stops to prevent mere voters and Parliamentary majorities from bringing about a change in government.)

New column day

Here, on the importance of letting voters decide among a full range of potential political candidates - rather than imposing rules or conventions which prohibit senior military leaders, public servants or others from participating in politics.

For further reading...
- The column is largely a response to Andrew Coyne (who argues that personal decisions of military and civilian leaders should be evaluated differently based on their potential interest in politics) and Adam Chapnick (who argues for a five-year moratorium against political involvement which would exclude recently-retired military professionals from participation in the democracy they've fought to defend).
- And I'll also point readers back to my earlier column on the Cons' Bill C-520 - which strikes me as similar in theme in its attempt to dictate that public service is incompatible with past or future political involvement.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- David Macdonald comments on Statistics Canada's latest wealth survey, with particular emphasis on the continued gap between a privileged few and the vast majority of Canadians:

(T)he top 20% of families have twice as much wealth as the bottom 80% of families combined. Even if the bottom 80% of families doubled their net worth tomorrow, they still wouldn’t have as much as the top 20% presently do.

Inequality is not only about the wealthy, it’s also about the middle class. Looking at the middle 20% of families, while they represent 20% of the population, they only receive 15% of all income. However, the middle 20% of families only have 8% of all net wealth and this has remained fairly constant since 1999.

All the above examines the share of net worth, not its dollar value change over time. In fact, net wealth has increased for all quintiles since 1999.  For instance, middle class net wealth has increased by almost 80% since 1999 in inflation-adjusted terms. The upper class has increased their net worth by a little over 80% since 1999. That seems fairly equal until you realize that the wealth they were starting from in 1999 was already incredibly unequal: 80% of $760,000 is a lot more than 80% of $137,000 (the 1999 median wealth values for the upper and middle classes, respectively).

In fact, of every new dollar of Canadian wealth created since 1999, $0.66 went to the richest, $0.23 went to the upper middle class and the bottom 60% fought it out for the remaining dime.

The reasons why wealth increased for the middle class in contrast to the rich are also quite different. If we look at the distribution of debt instead of net wealth, we find that the middle class actually holds the most debt of any quintile, certainly more than the poor, but interestingly also more than the rich.  The middle class has managed to increase their net wealth in large part due to increased leveraging, not asset price appreciation. The richest families have less debt and substantially more assets. Their increased wealth is largely due to asset accumulation, not leveraging.

- Meanwhile, Phillip Inman reports on a new IMF study which shows that redistribution of wealth correlates to slightly more economic development - meaning that policies aimed at giveaways to the wealthy in the name of growth tend to fail even on their own terms (while succeeding only at exacerbating inequality).

- Ian Welsh explains how our political and financial systems are set up to funnel free money to the banking sector - while pointing out the inevitable result that an already-coddled industry is accumulating ever more wealth and power.

- Karl Nerenberg offers seven suggestions to make the Cons' elections legislation less damaging. But it's particularly worth noting that exactly one point on the list reflects a change from the status quo - meaning that the main effects of the Fair Elections Act are to make matters worse than they'd be if nothing were to be passed at all.

- And Rick Mercer rants about the Cons' plans to change Canada's electoral rules solely for their own benefit:


- Finally, David Climenhaga looks at the dwindling membership of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation - showing that even astroturf has an expiry date.

On top priorities

If there's anything to question in the latest reporting about possible post-election cooperation between the NDP and the Libs, it's the impression that Thomas Mulcair's willingness to pursue a coalition to replace the Harper Cons with a better government somehow comes entirely out of the blue. But while the story may not be entirely new, it's certainly well worth pointing out:

The leader of the New Democrats said on Tuesday he is willing to form a coalition in order to take power after the next election, even as the other opposition party leader, Liberal Justin Trudeau, played down the idea.
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“We’ve always said we’re ready to work with other parties. We’re a progressive party. We want to get results,” NDP leader Thomas Mulcair told reporters when asked if he would be willing to form a coalition with Mr. Trudeau after the election.
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Minutes later, Mr. Trudeau told reporters he opposed any formal arrangement with the NDP. He has battled hard for voters to the left of the Conservatives but has viewed some of the NDP economic ideas as too interventionist.

“I made very clear during my leadership [campaign] that I was not interested in any of those options, and the fact is I got a very strong mandate from Liberals to pursue a winning Liberal strategy … for 2015,” he said.

Yes, that's the Leader of the Official Opposition confirming that his top priority is the public interest and that he's willing to work with other parties in the effort - nicely appealing to the strong majority of voters who want to see the Cons gone. And that's the leader of the third party proudly proclaiming that he doesn't think that good government for Canadians rates even the slightest consideration compared to his focus on absolute power for the Liberal Party.

Needless to say, the contrast remains a huge plus for the NDP - no matter how determined some critics are to ignore all evidence in demanding that leaders eradicate any trace of cooperation from federal politics or be branded insufficiently macho to earn the good ol' boys' support.

The bad news is that Mulcair hasn't yet done much to build on the Layton legacy of productive cooperation. But particularly if Trudeau keeps so firmly focused on himself, there should still be plenty of time to confirm the NDP's place as the party of cooperation and progressive principles.

Update: Dr. Dawg has more. 

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Heat-seeking cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Alison and PressProgress both discuss how Brad Butt's attempt to defend voter suppression is based on what even he had to concede was nothing short of legislative fraud. And Stephen Maher notes that the Cons' unilateral rewrite of election rules figures to force Elections Canada to cover up the Cons' pattern of illegal activity.

- Meanwhile, Jason Fekete reports on the Cons' deliberate ignorance of deputy ministers' advice that the government can't keep stonewalling against action on climate change - and follows up by pointing out the NDP's work to challenge the Cons on the issue in Parliament.

- And CBC reports that it took a since-fired whistleblower to force TransCanada to live up to its regulatory obligations - as neither the company nor the government had any apparent interest in enforcing the rules otherwise.

- Duncan Cameron observes that the Libs' federal convention featured discussion of a few eminently worthy policies - most notably a basic income guarantee. But Dr. Dawg notes that there's a massive difference between talk, commitment and action:

A policy document like the one just produced is really little more than a statement of faith, although I’d argue that this is the case for any party in Canada’s present political culture. The process of creating policy builds an illusory feel-good solidarity, affiliation and loyalty, while not committing adherents to anything at all except to get their party into power—which is what the “Hope and Hard Work” slogan at the convention was all about. Nor does it commit that party, once in power, to anything either. As a piece of mass audience-participation theatre it serves its purpose, creating bonds of loyalty and galvanizing activists. But let’s not imagine it’s a mirror of the future under Justin Trudeau.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s great to get this stuff on the record. It sets a general political tone and direction, and, more importantly, from a progressive point of view, it provides a little leverage for holding politicians to account. I’ve been hungrily awaiting policy ever since the remarkably policy-free Trudeau assumed the leadership of his party. Well, now the Liberals have some. It remains to be seen, however, just how seriously it will be defended by the Leader and his inner circle.

- Finally, Global POV highlights the importance of public support for citizens across all classes - while noting that the corporate class benefits more than anybody from the strategic use of welfare benefits:

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Stephen Hume writes about the importance of tax revenue in building a functional and compassionate Canada:

My taxes provide our mostly peaceful, prosperous and safe society; a health care system that for all its flaws and glitches is pretty darn good compared to the alternatives; a policing and justice system that despite occasional hiccups is fair, merciful and trustworthy; a brave and honourable military.

My taxes provide income support for the unemployed, the indigent, the impaired and the unlucky.

My taxes helped create educational facilities of exceptional quality and performance; public infrastructure that makes doing business in Canada stable, predictable and profitable compared to many other parts of the world.

My taxes keep cities clean and safe and full of life. They provide generally good government by mostly decent, hard-working public servants and politicians.

My taxes helped send Chris Hadfield into space; Carey Price, Hayley Wickenheiser and all our other wonderful athletes to the Olympics. They helped writer Alice Munro and scientist Gerhard Herzberg to win the Nobel Prize. They also paved B.C.’s roads, brought electricity to remote First Nations communities and built bridges across the Fraser River that enable Vancouver’s prosperity.

Canada is far from perfect. Many social injustices remain to address. But life is better than it might be for most of us, even for the aggrieved.

Thank my taxes — and yours — for that.

- Meanwhile, John McDermott offers a worthwhile read on how the UK Cons' attacks on social benefits are making life more difficult for low-income individuals both inside and outside the workforce. And Kathleen Geier highlights how more progressive tax policy could go a long way toward reducing inequality on both local and national levels.

- Huffington Post reports that the Cons' priorities run in exactly the opposite direction - as they continue to encourage the use of temporary foreign workers to suppress wages and channel resource wealth to those who need it least. And CP reports on an internal government study showing that any attempt to sell 20 years of corporatist policies as a benefit to middle-class families is based on myth rather than fact. (Which likely explains why the defenders of the status quo are making up fictitious symbols rather than talking to or about real people.)

- But we're at least seeing much-needed pushback against the Cons' assumption that health, safety and equity all need to be sacrificed on the altar of burning more oil - including from Suncor employee and Unifor member Lori McDaniel, who's earned the NDP's nomination in Fort McMurray-Athabasca.
 
- Finally, Huffington Post also reports on one of the many nasty surprises in Stephen Harper's latest omnibus budget bill, as the Cons are planning to take direct political control over CBC labour relations and personnel decisions.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- Lana Payne highlights the Harper Cons' culture of hate with just a few recent examples:

Veterans. Informed-debate. People’s right to a union and free collective bargaining. Voting rights. These are all under threat in Harper’s Canada.

This really is a government that hates; hates anyone that disagrees with them. Hates unions and the ability of people to work collectively to get a fair share of the economic pie. Hates democracy. Hates people who vote for other parties. Just plain hates.

This is not healthy for our country, our society. This is no way to govern. This is no way to build an inclusive nation where fairness prevails. This is just simply nastiness and hate. And we should call it out for what it really is.

- And kirbycairo comments on the Cons' distaste for basic principles of governance (h/t to Boris):

Good governance requires certain basic elements - commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy, the desire to foster dialogue, a basic commitment to an effective civil-service and the good programs that they need to deliver, a commitment to giving a voice to the voiceless and providing care and protection for society's most vulnerable, a strong commitment to the constitution, a respect for fairness and the democratic traditions of the House of Commons, a respect for the judicial arm of government and the necessary (role) it plays, and a commitment to protecting the environment for future generations. Our government has no commitment to any of these. In fact, it actively undermines all of them. There is not a single element of good governance to which this government is committed.
...
It is difficult to live in a society which is inching gradually toward autocracy as many of the citizens seem to blithely ignore the coming danger. There is a certain nonchalant attitude taken by many to the dangerous and insidious actions of a government that is falling into fascism. They have trouble believing that it "can happen here" or that our traditions can be subverted and perverted by a bunch of men dressed in suits. But not every coup is a violent one and sometimes what is best in a society is lost in a (quiet) war of attrition.

- Meanwhile, Karl Nerenberg looks at the particularly glaring gap between the Cons' eletion-rigging legislation and the principles they agreed to just last year when their election fraud scandal was in the front pages. And the CP reports on the NDP's efforts to give the public some voice in the rules governing elections - even as the Cons insist that nobody but themselves should have any say in determining what constitutes a fair electoral process.

- The CP also reports on a new study showing the link between tar sands tailings ponds and groundwater contamination. But the most noteworthy part of the story is the joint industry/government position that new development must be allowed to barge ahead without environmental reviews, while any regulation (or even tracing of projects' contributions to groundwater damage) should be put off until we're absolutely sure the development is causing irreversible damage.

- Finally, Paul Wells notes that Justin Trudeau has taken sole and full ownership of the Libs' historic self-image, while J.J. McCullough sees Trudeau as prioritizing high status over any connection with the public. Needless to say, these theses seem fully compatible.

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Michael McBane highlights one of the less-discussed changes in the Cons' 2014 budget - as it officially eliminates the federal distribution of health care funding based on provincial need in favour of handing extra money to Alberta:

The Harper government is eliminating the equalization portion of the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) and replacing it with an equal per capita transfer. This means that less populous provinces with relatively larger and more isolated populations will have more and more difficulty delivering more expensive universal health services.

Likewise, provinces with relatively larger proportion of older residents will also be hampered in delivering universal quality care. The move to an equal per capita cash transfer will widen the gap between the have and the have-not provinces and make it next to impossible to maintain national standards in health care.

It is estimated by the Premiers that this one budgetary move will create a funding gap for the have-not provinces of $16.5 billion over the next 5 years. The only province to benefit from this change is Alberta, with its growing, younger population.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Nikiforuk points out one likely result of diverting yet more money into the hands of resource-obsessed provincial governments - as Canada's western provinces are subsidizing fracking compared even to U.S. states (with Saskatchewan the worst offender).

- PressProgress recognizes that we shouldn't trust Tim Hudak's temporary disavowal of part of his anti-worker agenda. And Blacklocks reports that the Harper Cons' cabinet is taking control and ownership of private members' bills aimed to destroy the capacity of unions to organize at the federal level.

- Finally, Chris Selley comments on the Cons' selective interest in protecting human life - including their determination to push drug users toward death rather than treatment.

Musical interlude

London Grammar - Hey Now (Arty Remix)

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rick Smith hopes that the Cons' backtracking on income splitting means that they won't go quite as far out of their way to exacerbate income inequality in the future:

(T)he unfortunate reality is that we are still becoming ever more unequal, a trend due in large measure to political choices. Many countries have found ways to mitigate the growth of income inequality, while in Canada the policy response has tended to reinforce rather than offset the trend.

We know that since the mid-1990s, the social role of government has been dramatically cut back and its redistributive impact has faded. According to the OECD, government taxes and transfers lowered the gap between rich and poor most in Canada, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. By the early 2000s, we joined Switzerland and the U.S. as the countries with the smallest redistributive impact.

That’s why I take caution not to overstate things here. But I do believe Mr. Flaherty’s remarks signal some hope that there is growing public support and political will to address income inequality. At the very least, important public policy will now be tested against a simple and compelling principle: Does this make income inequality better or worse?

- Meanwhile, Trish Hennessy asks people to consider what they'd want to see done if they were finance minister - rather than accepting that we're stuck with the Cons' warped priorities. And Michael Laxer has some suggestions for Andrea Horwath as to how to genuinely make life more affordable for most Ontarians.

- Darcy Henton reports that Alberta's P3 school construction fiasco is only getting worse - as a government-commissioned study makes clear that the schools intended to be turned into corporate profit centres might never get built at all since they might not quite be lucrative enough.

- Finally, Karen Foster offers some important advice for young workers:

(N)early every public voice is telling you that you need to change. As Trish Hennessy put it on the CBC’s Bottom Line panel, we’ve individualized the problems of underemployment and skills mismatches and student debt. Our societal problem has become your personal problem. That’s why everyone’s turning themselves into knots to offer you advice.

My advice to you? Get angry.

Channel your anxiety about getting a job into frustration that we’re back here, again, talking about a “lost generation”, just like we were in the 1980s and 1990s.

Be indignant. When someone tells you it’s your fault for doing sociology instead of welding, tell them to stuff it.

When someone assures you it’ll get better in 10-15 years when the boomers retire, try repeating it back to them so they can hear how ludicrous it is.
...
The real injustice is not that you are overqualified for or mismatched to the jobs available to you, but that the career you’re shooting for is probably being dismantled into a set of lower-wage, no-benefits, no-security jobs. This is the trend in government, where temporary contracts are the new junior position; it’s also the trend in universities, where contract instructors are taking on more and more of the teaching once performed by tenured faculty. It’s even happening in other unionized workplaces, where collective agreements are being amended to allow for two-tier wage and benefit systems (you can guess who’s in the bottom tier). The situation, in other words, is grim.
...
Everyone is pressing you to adapt to the present. But you can not adapt. You can not re-train for a job that might just disappear like the first one you trained for. You can not work for minimum wage when you graduate. You can not mold yourself into the perfect worker so that corporations can escape the cost of training you.

This is all a bit rich, coming from me. Barring catastrophe, there’s a full-time, permanent job awaiting me after my current short-term post is up. But I count myself among those whose duty is to push back on contractualization, precarious work, devalued labour, and market fundamentalism. If you get a good job, good for you. But it will be your duty to ally yourself with the growing legions of young workers who are exploited—and underemployment is exploitation—just because they can be.

Whatever you do, don’t simply figure things out for yourself. If we keep on figuring things out individually, we will never figure things out collectively.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Mark Taliano discusses how corporatocracy is replacing democracy in Canada, while Jaisal Noor talks to John Weeks about the similar trend in the U.S. And DownWithTyranny reminds us how corporations came to be - and how radical a difference there is between entities which were granted limited liability only in exchange for their pursuit of public goods, and the present model in which liability shields instead serve as cover for antisocial behaviour.

- Meanwhile, Frank Graves confirms that the Cons' goals of public austerity and enrichment of the wealthy couldn't be more out of step with the values of Canadians:

The simple fact is that the agenda of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is no longer about an incremental, gradual shift away from a progressive state to a model of minimal government embodied by neo-conservative Reaganism or Thatcherism. The public may now see trickle-down economics as a cruel hoax — but it still seems to be the theory informing the current government’s approach to the economy.
...
In Europe and the United Kingdom, commentators have noted that while the younger generation is the most socially progressive, it is less collectivist and statist. It would appear this is not the case here, where younger citizens are much more likely to rate minimal government as a value lower today than they did in 1998 (those the under the age of 25 give “minimal government intrusions” a mean rating of 42, compared to 62 in 1998). At 42 on a scale to 100, this means that minimal government as a political value has virtually no relevance for younger Canadians. The only place it continues to resonate is in older, conservative Canada and the Langevin building.

We’ve updated our tracking on whether Canadians would prefer a larger government with higher taxes and more services or a smaller government with lower taxes and fewer services. The chart below shows an important trendline. Many have claimed that the recent political success of the right points to a ‘blueing’ of Canadian attitudes. The time series data, however, continue to show that Canadians are now less likely to prefer smaller government than they were in the past.

- And as a prime example of an area where greater public economic involvement could serve multiple positive purposes, Ethan Cox makes the case for postal banking:

By offering banking services through its existing network of 6,519 postal outlets Canada Post would overnight become the most accessible bank in the country. In addition to generating revenue which could cross-subsidize postal services well into the future, with profits estimated at an average of 20.5 per cent annually, a public postal bank would provide competition to the big banks and drive down rates for consumers. (Love paying five bucks to withdraw a twenty of your own money? Me neither.)

In addition to its effect on postal services, bank fees and accessibility for all Canadians, a postal bank would have a particularly positive impact on the working poor, the unbanked and Indigenous communities.

Money Mart, the largest Canadian payday lender, had revenues of more than $1 billion in 2012. Little wonder, considering that the average nominal interest such payday lenders charge in Canada is 839.5 per cent (APR). It is estimated that up to 15 per cent of Canadians do not have a bank account, and these “unbanked” are easy prey for the usurious practices of payday lenders, who are often their only option to cash cheques.

A public postal bank would offer cheque-cashing services to all Canadians and allow the unbanked easy access to their money without recourse to these type of institutions.
...
In summary, a public postal bank would increase access and reduce bank fees for all Canadians, ensure the long-term sustainability of Canada Post and door-to-door delivery and radically improve service to the unbanked and Indigenous communities.

If you own a lot of stock in the big banks then I can see why you would oppose postal banking. But for the rest of us, it’s a no-brainer.

- Finally, Global News looks in detail at Alberta's track record of oil and oil-related spills - finding roughly 60,000 documented incidents over the past few decades.

New column day

Here, starting from Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald's study to discuss on how people have trouble telling the difference between luck and merit (particularly when they're enjoying the benefit of the former) - and how we should take that gap into account both personally and politically.

I'll add here one point omitted from the article. I'm skeptical in general of the all-too-common trend of public institutions like hospitals, libraries and schools being forced to rely on fund-raising lotteries rather than being funded directly. But the study hints at a hidden side effect - as a "successful" lottery which provides a large number of wins to a large number of people may itself serve to undermine popular support for sustained public funding.

For further reading...
- The study is summarized here, and accessible in full here (PDF).
- And for more on the "lottery winners going bankrupt" phenomenon, see here and here.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Lynn Stuart Parramore offers five convincing pieces of evidence to suggest that the U.S.' plutocrats are losing their minds in their effort to set themselves apart from the rabble. Kevin Roose tells a story about some awful, awful (and disturbingly wealthy and powerful) people. And Patrick Wintour discusses how the UK Cons are dedicating significant public resources to placing impossible demands on the unemployed - then cutting off the livelihood of anybody not acrobatic enough to jump through their newly-created hoops.

- So there's plenty of reason to think Ana Marie Cox is right to call for the middle and lower classes to start putting up a fight against the perpetual top-down class war:

People are angry – and maybe people should be angry. Both Perkins and Mankiw seem to think that the poor (or just the not-rich!) resent the wealthy simply because they have so much. They think we resent the number of zeros in their paychecks. Of course not. We resent that those zeros come out of ours.

Mankiw asks the simplistic question: Are CEOs so valuable as to be worth their exorbitant paychecks? He answers it perhaps even more simply, by cherry-picking famous people. But the question on most people’s minds is simpler still, and yet somehow too difficult for the CEOs and their enablers to comprehend: Am I so expendable as to be worth such a small paycheck ... or no paycheck at all?

To the extent that income inequality is a threat to the rich, it’s not because they are so wealthy – at some point, the wealth of the most wealthy just becomes absurdly unimaginable anyway. No, it’s because the wealth of the super-rich is just so damn far away, without any rungs in the ladder between, no assistance for that leap of faith that allows those who struggle to hope their struggles can cease.

- And Davide Furceri and Prakash Lounganin note that two of the leading causes of growing inequality are public-sector austerity and greater privileges being accorded to private capital. (Not concidentally, those are of course two of the Cons' top political priorities.)

- The Star argues that the Cons shouldn't force a jobs grant program onto Canada's provinces (or workers). But as Thomas Walkom writes, questions of what's fair or appropriate seem rather distant in the face of a government which has nothing but contempt for the law.

- Finally, Paul Adams recognizes what's missing from Canada's federal political scene as a three-party race develops:

The fact that cooperation between the parties and their leaders is not imminent seems to have obscured the possibility — the likelihood, even — that there will be a minority government after 2015, as there was after three of the last four elections.

In that situation, the parties will have to choose with whom they cooperate and on what terms.
...
(P)arties will probably have to cooperate after the 2015 election — unless they want to see Canadian politics descend into the dysfunctional mess we’ve see south of the border and, at times, here at home in the first decade of this century.

Voters and the media should be pressing the parties hard to explain their approach to cooperation — including who their preferred partners might be in the event we return to minority government in 2015.

Tuesday Night Cat Blogging

Ill-fitting cats.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Ian Welsh writes about the concentration of wealth and economic control:

Money is permission: you can’t do squat in a market economy without it.  Those who can create it, or who have excessive profits, control what other people can do.

It is for this reason that Jefferson said that banks were more dangerous to democracy than even standing armies.

Money making and differential profits lead to differential power. Over time, if your rate of return is higher than everyone else’s you will gain so much more money than them that you can buy them out, or out-bid them.  The first thing you will do, if you have any sense, is take control of government, because government, which controls the rules of the game (legislation) and violence, is the only other power which can destroy you.  Once they are under control (and the bailouts proved Western governments are under the control of financial institutions), the only remaining threats are your own ability to drive yourself off a cliff, and the very small chance of revolution, which is likely to happen only after you’ve destroyed yourself in any case.

- Emily Atkin reports on another environmental disaster caused by fracking - this time a blowout and spill in North Dakota. Rachel Maddow looks at the West Virginia chemical spill as an example of how the corporate sector will happily use its privileged access to set up inexplicable loopholes even in the wake of a highly visible public safety disaster. And George Monbiot likewise observes that massive flooding in the UK can be traced back to the Conservative government's choice to let industry write its own rules:

Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers' Union. Who could have guessed that he would recommend "an entirely new approach to and culture of regulation … Government must trust industry"? The task force's demands, embraced by Paterson, now look as stupid as Gordon Brown's speech to an audience of bankers in 2004: "In budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers."

Six weeks before the floods arrived, a scientific journal called Soil Use and Management published a paper warning that disaster was brewing. Surface water run-off in south-west England, where the Somerset Levels are situated, was reaching a critical point. Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.
...
The previous government also saw it coming. In 2005 it published a devastating catalogue of the impacts of these changes in land use. As well as the loss of fertility from the land and the poisoning of watercourses, it warned, "increased run-off and sediment deposition can also increase flood hazard in rivers". Maize, it warned, is a particular problem because the soil stays bare before and after the crop is harvested, without the stubble or weeds required to bind it. "Wherever possible," it urged, "avoid growing forage maize on high and very high erosion risk areas."

The Labour government turned this advice into conditions attached to farm subsidies. Ground cover crops should be sown under the maize and the land should be ploughed, then resown with winter cover plants within 10 days of harvesting, to prevent water from sheeting off. So why isn't this happening in Somerset?

Because the current government dropped the conditions. Sorry, not just dropped them. It issued – wait for it – a specific exemption for maize cultivation from all soil conservation measures.

It's hard to get your head round this. The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.

- Meanwhile, Jeff Rubin discusses how the unexplained and apparently unstoppable seepage of bitumen from should raise serious questions for the oil industry and public policy alike. And sadly, there's an obvious parallel to the UK's flooding story - as in situ production is precisely the type of oil extraction which the Cons have declared to be immune from federal environmental assessment.

- Alison points out a few of the obvious abuses the Cons are setting up in their selective elections legislation. And Robyn Benson highlights the unfairness of the Cons' plans.

- Finally, Blacklocks reports that a review of Canada Post showed that it could be far more useful and more profitable if it pursued postal banking. But naturally, the Cons preferred a lose-lose service cut plan than a win-win plan to do more and make money in the process.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Robert Reich writes about the basic economic lessons the U.S. has forgotten since its postwar boom:

First, America’s real job creators are consumers, whose rising wages generate jobs and growth. If average people don’t have decent wages there can be no real recovery and no sustained growth.

In those years, business boomed because American workers were getting raises, and had enough purchasing power to buy what expanding businesses had to offer. Strong labor unions ensured American workers got a fair share of the economy’s gains. It was a virtuous cycle.

Second, the rich do better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than they do with a large share of an economy that’s barely growing at all.

Between 1946 and 1974, the economy grew faster than it’s grown since, on average, because the nation was creating the largest middle class in history. The overall size of the economy doubled, as did the earnings of almost everyone. CEOs rarely took home more than forty times the average worker’s wage, yet were riding high.

Third, higher taxes on the wealthy to finance public investments — better roads, bridges, public transportation, basic research, world-class K-12 education, and affordable higher education — improve the future productivity of America. All of us gain from these investments, including the wealthy.

In those years, the top marginal tax rate on America’s highest earners never fell below 70 percent. Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower the tax rate was 91 percent. Combined with tax revenues from a growing middle class, these were enough to build the Interstate Highway system, dramatically expand public higher education, and make American public education the envy of the world.

We learned, in other words, that broadly-shared prosperity isn’t just compatible with a healthy economy that benefits everyone — it’s essential to it.

- Meanwhile, Marilyn Reid offers a reminder that free trade agreements have more to do with entrenching existing privilege than any interest in trade. Gaius Publius notes that any recovery since the 2008 economic meltdown has been enjoyed solely by a wealthy few. And Tom Tomorrow nicely summarizes where the combination of economic and political forces being marshalled solely for the benefit of those with the most wealth and power ultimately leads:

- Karl Nerenberg and Witold Walczak (via Alexander Panetta) both discuss the anti-democratic direction taken in the Cons' election legislation. Tonda MacCharles analyzes how the torquing of elections rules fits into the Cons' broader strategy for 2015 - while still offering no guarantee of success. And Pierre Poilievre's claim that we shouldn't worry about unlimited election spending because the party manipulating the system for its own advantage won't admit that its legislation means anything hardly offers comfort to voters looking for a free and fair election.

- Meanwhile, if the Cons indeed face an uphill battle in trying to cling to power, the combination of disastrous policy choices and a profound distaste for reality offers an important part of the explanation.

- Finally, John MacInnes and Jeroen Spijker discuss what an aging population really means:

[An increase in Remaining Life Expectancy (RLE)] is crucial because many behaviours and attitudes are more strongly linked to that than to age. Most acute health care (hospital treatment) costs are incurred at the very end of a person’s life, irrespective of their age. Population ageing has no direct impact. The pattern for social and long term care costs turns on what is happening to morbidity. Improvements in public health (especially the increase in levels of education and decline of smoking) are driving down age specific disability and morbidity rates: people are staying healthier longer. We do not know clearly (because consistent longitudinal data are scarce) whether the rise in life expectancy is pulling up the absolute average time older people spend in care or with chronic health conditions. However we can say one thing with certainty: as life expectancies increase it is systematically misleading to assume that tomorrow’s 65 or 80 years olds will have the same health profile as today’s. As RLE increases, people of the same age get ‘younger’: people with the same years lived as their counterparts in earlier cohorts, have more years left. Paradoxically popular jargon understands this very well: ‘50 is the new 40’.

The standard indicator of population ageing is the Old Age Dependency Ratio (OADR). It takes those aged 65+ and divides by the number of working age (16/20-64 years). It is not fit for purpose. Most people aged 65+ are not ‘dependent’. A million are employed (three times the number in care or nursing homes). Grandparents are the most important source of childcare after parents themselves. Many do voluntary work. Their consumer power is large and growing. It makes little sense to count everyone of working age when we can count those actually working. In fact, there are more ‘working age’ dependents - people not at work - (9.5 million) than there are people of state pension age in Britain.

We therefore recently proposed an alternative measure, the Real Elderly Dependency Ratio (REDR), which counts men and women with a RLE of ≤15 years divided by the number employment, irrespective of their age. In contrast to the inexorable rise of the OADR, we find that the REDR has fallen over recent decades in affluent countries, has stabilized now and is likely to increase only slowly over the next couple of decades.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Robert Reich comments on the concerted effort by the U.S.' rich to exacerbate inequality - and points out how it's warped their worldview. And Dean Baker criticizes the spread of inequality by design:

And then there is the financial sector where Mankiw tells us that the extraordinary pay is compensation for the volatility of paychecks. That's interesting, except the vast majority of comparably talented and hardworking people would be happy to get the pay the finance folks get in the bad years. Much of the big money on Wall Street stems from highly leveraged bets that beat the market by seconds or even milliseconds. This provides as much value to the economy as insider trading, which it in fact it resembles closely.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to the big fortunes in the financial sector if it had to pay a small transaction fee, effectively subjecting it to the same sort of sales tax that is paid in almost every other sector of the economy. It would also be interesting to see what would happen to the private equity folks if they lost the opportunity for the tax gaming that is their bread and butter.

I could go on (read my non-copyright protected book on the topic), but the point should be clear. If the 1 percent are able to extract vast sums from the economy it is because we have structured the economy for this purpose. It could easily be structured differently, but the 1 percent and its defenders aren't interested in changing things. And the 1 percent and its defenders have a great deal of influence on the direction of economic policy.

- And Kathleen Raven discusses how children in particular suffer from the spread and entrenchment of poverty and inequality:

Researchers looked at data on 3,142 U.S. counties between 2005 and 2009. They found that rates of child maltreatment ranged widely, from 0.2 percent to 3.1 percent of children.

Using statistical methods to gauge income inequality, they found a steep rise in the rate of child maltreatment with rising inequality. The relationship held after researchers adjusted for poverty itself, and other factors such as the racial and ethnic makeup of regions, education levels and the number of people receiving public assistance income.

Where inequalities are most extreme, communities may become more polarized, with the affluent group influencing where public aid money goes, or what programs are made available in the community, said Dr. Ruth Gilbert, a clinical epidemiologist at University College London in the UK.

"Where the state or federal government is a key provider of services, such as day care and education," Gilbert said, "then you may have situations where poorer children mingle with middle-class kids and this helps create a better understanding between the two classes."

- Unfortunately, the needed end to the Cons' income-splitting scheme seems to have given rise to plenty of talk about how to develop the next-most-destructive option to destroy the federal government's fiscal capacity. Maria Babbage surveys a range of policies from the reasonable (child care and targeted benefits to lower-income parents) to the thoroughly top-weighted (general income tax cuts), while Barrie McKenna has little apparent interest in anything but the latter. And Dennis Howlett notes that there's precious little evidence to suggest a fair tax system is on the Cons' radar.

- Finally, Simon Enoch takes a look at the track record of prison food privatization in the U.S.