Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Linda Tirado writes about life in poverty – and the real prospect that anybody short of the extremely wealthy can wind up there: I haven’t had it worse than anyone else, and actually, that’s kind of the point. This is just what life
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Robert Reich discusses how a reasonable balance of economic and political power is necessary to any protection of meaningful personal freedom: In reality, corporate free speech drowns out the free speech of ordinary people who can’t flood the halls of Congress with campaign
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Gary Engler explores Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century from the perspective of a reader who’s far more skeptical than Piketty about the prospect of tinkering around the edges of our current corporatist economic system. And Seth Ackerman writes that Piketty’s
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Debbie Chachra discusses why an effective government is a necessary element of civilization – and why charity can’t fill in the gap: Taxes aren’t the only way to pay for civilization, of course: community groups, charities, and churches also contribute. But I
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Alex Himelfarb and Jordan Himelfarb comment on Canada’s dangerously distorted conversation about public revenue and the purposes it can serve: As we argue in our new book, Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word, the Canadian tax conversation has become dangerously distorted. Any reasonable
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Christopher Ragan writes about the lessons we should be drawing from the 2008 financial meltdown – as well as so many similar bubbles before it: Contrary to what many people seem to believe, financial crises like the one that began five years
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This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Tavia Grant reports on the most recent world happiness report from the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And David Doorey points out a rather striking similarity among the countries at the top of the list, while Dan Gardner highlights Stephen Harper’s longstanding
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Jenny Carson asks what governments are doing to lift poor workers out of poverty. (Spoiler alert: the Cons’ answer is “why would we want to do that?”). – Meanwhile, Kemal Dervis and Uri Dadush discuss the desperate need to rein in inequality
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David Cay Johnston and Miles Corak both discuss the results of a study which compares economic outcomes in technologically advanced countries, and shows that tax giveaways to the wealthy exacerbate inequality without doing anything at all to contribute to economic development. – And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Not surprisingly, plenty of commentators have weighed in on the latest set of Senate scandals engulfing Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, Nigel Wright and Stephen Harper among others. Diane Francis takes the opportunity to point out that the Senate is an institutional anachronism (a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On contradictions
Aaron Wherry nicely points out some of the jaw-dropping contradictions in the Cons’ climate change messaging. But let’s not forget a few more worth adding into the mix. Having refused to implement any meaningful regulations or carbon pricing at the federal level, the Cons have tried to take credit for
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Marc Lee and Iglika Ivanova offer up a framework for a more progressive and fairer tax system. – Andrew Hanon looks behind the Fraser Institute’s labour-bashing and finds that what it’s really criticizing is fair pay for women in the public sector.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Tim Harper writes about Scott Vaughan’s final report as the federal environmental commissioner: Scott Vaughan doesn’t have the profile of some of his contemporaries but as the environmental commissioner bowed out with a final report Tuesday, he reminded official Ottawa how much he
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – James Galbraith compares the mindless drones carrying an increasing share of the U.S.’ military load, and those serving to try to attack social programs in the name of illusory deficit reduction. But sadly, Galbraith misses one of the most important similarities: in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Raz Godelnik challenges the all-too-conventional wisdom that corporations (and indeed individuals) should see tax avoidance and evasion as virtues: One of the most common arguments is that the tax-avoidance techniques used by corporations like Starbucks or Google are legal and therefore they’re not
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – Murray Dobbin writes about the significance of Idle No More as a shift away from the presumption that First Nations’ interests are represented solely by elected officials: There are some fascinating similarities between the Idle No More phenomenon and the Occupy movement.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that to start the new year. – Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the dangers of needless means-testing for basic social benefits: When I spoke to Joseph Stiglitz, he discussed the idea that “means-testing is mean.” Programs like Medicare and Social Security, he explained, are matters of political economy. They
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading. – Susan Delacourt writes that laughable conspiracy theories look to be the Cons’ stock in trade as they fight against any accountability for electoral fraud: (I)t may be true that Ford has left-wing opponents on council and that the Council of Canadians, which has
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week.- Susan Delacourt comments on what’s often lacking from Canadian political coverage – and the challenge facing journalists looking to stop relying excessively on horse-race numbers which may miss what ultimately moti…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Peter Kent’s Doomed Lemonade Stand
Aaron Wherry generously debunks Peter Kent’s latest farcical spin only within the climate change debate, rather than fitting it into a general governance framework. But while I’ll stick with my previous take on what the Cons really hope to accomplish in spinning about climate change, it’s worth noting just what
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