Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Michael Spence discusses how a wealth tax can work, while noting that the worst possible response to growing inequality is to refuse to do anything. And the Centre for Labour and Social Studies summarizes the current class disparity in the UK, as well
Continue readingTag: austerity
Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Vrishti Beniwal writes about Abhijit Banerjee’s call to put concentrated wealth to better social use by taxing it. – Yutaka Dirks interviews Linda McQuaig about the corporate takeover of far more public wealth than is normally recognized. And Matt Coughlin discusses how
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee discuss the utter failure of corporate-driven “market” incentives to produce fair outcomes: If it is not financial incentives, what else might people care about? The answer is something we know in our guts: status, dignity, social connections. Chief
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Andrew Jackson calls out the Cons for their platform of taking from the many to further enrich the most privileged few. David Macdonald studies what the unspecified cuts promised by the Cons could mean in terms of losses to public services. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Steven Strauss examines the catastrophic results of the U.S. Republicans’ obsession with handouts to the rich and austerity for everybody else. And Scott Schmidt points out that Jason Kenney has exactly the same plan in mind for Alberta. – Luke Darby writes
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Martin Regg Cohn writes that Doug Ford’s brutal austerity against the people who most need social support has been based on entirely made-up numbers. And David Climenhaga points out that Alberta’s civil service has been shrinking over the past decade, showing that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett and Wanda Wyporska neatly summarize the insidious social effects of inequality: (I)nequality is socially divisive, making status more important and strengthening the view that some people are worth more than others. As we judge each other more by status,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Richard Partington discusses the rise of inequality and some of the options to combat it. And PressProgress points out the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s conclusion that the NDP’s plan for a wealth tax can turn money currently being hoarded by the ultra-rich into tens
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kate Aronoff asks how much destruction is needed before we’ll start taking climate change seriously – though the answer at this point looks to be that no amount of damage will be enough to move a substantial number of politicians off their insistence
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Never mind sparse facts in Alberta’s first-quarter financial update, its subtext is deep cuts are coming soon
The United Conservative Party Government led by Jason Kenney wants deep cuts, and, by God, it’s going to have them. That includes tax cuts, which will drive the province’s books deeper into the red, and cuts to services to help pay for the tax breaks. If the facts, such as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Tom Parkin talks to Toby Sanger about the utter failure of corporate tax cuts to produce anything other than concentrated wealth and increased inequality. – Steven Greenhouse offers suggestions both as to how governments can level the playing field between workers and employers
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Nicholas Kristof writes about Donald Trump’s choice to put the most virulent anti-worker cronies imaginable in charge of U.S. labour policy. David Climenhaga weighs in on the UPC’s laughably biased committee charged with the task of driving down wages for service workers. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Ernest Canning writes about the importance of treating corporatism as a specific and extreme position, rather than allowing it to define the political centre. And Norm McKee rightly argues that Canada’s federal election campaign needs to include a focus on ensuring the rich
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Derrick O’Keefe writes that our federal election should be focusing on the growing climate crisis, not being sidetracked by such trivialities as chocolate milk. (Though I’ll argue that the two issues may sometimes point to the same key structural problems.) Cam Fenton
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – PressProgress examines Statistics Canada’s latest research on the tens of billions of dollars in taxes being dodged by multinational corporations. And George Monbiot offers an inside look into the crushing power of billionaires once they sense a threat to their sources of wealth
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Mark Rice-Oxley points out the observations of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Health as to the stress and mental illness caused by austerity. Robert Booth reports on the recognition that yet another round of giveaways to the rich and clawbacks from everybody
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood offers an electoral primer for voters who want to avert a climate breakdown in this fall’s federal election. And Paul Wells takes a look at the Cons’ undercooked nothingburger of a climate plan, while Hilary Beaumont notes that it’s actually
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Luke Savage writes that the most compelling case for socialist policies is the importance of expanding on the unduly narrow definition of freedom offered by the right: Socialists, on the other hand, have long understood that class stratification, poverty, and economic deprivation are
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Nick Hanauer discusses the futility of “educationism” which treats schools as the only factor in social outcomes without recognizing the importance of inequality and precarity in restricting opportunities for far too many children. And PressProgress points out that Brian Pallister’s Manitoba PCs –
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – In his Arnold Amber Memorial Lecture, Alex Himelfarb offers his take on the dangers of austerity and the loss of collective action: 1. Austerity is toxic.2. It is built on a lie, and on a withered idea of freedom and a hollowed
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