This and that for your Thursday reading. – Simon Wren-Lewis discusses how media negligence allowed austerian economics to be treated as credible long after any pretense of academic merit has been debunked. – Kevin Milligan and Tammy Schirle examine the relationship between income and life expectancy in Canada – featuring
Continue readingTag: austerity
Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Vanmala Subramaniam reports on the move by real estate developers to push tenants out of desperately-needed housing in Canada’s largest cities to chase after short-term profits. – David Wallace Wells asks how the rapidly-materializing worst-case climate change scenarios are being met with
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading… – Thomas Torslov, Ludvig Wier and Gabriel Zucman examine the shifting of corporate profits to tax havens – and the false promise that corporate tax cuts will serve any purpose other than to undermine the collection of needed revenue by countries with real economies.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jon Stone reports on Jeremy Corbyn’s message to progressive parties that voters have had enough of being told there is no alternative to austerity and corporatism: On a visit to the Netherlands on Thursday the Labour leader said socialists and social democrats risked
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Richard Partington reports on new OECD data showing that wages are continuing to soar for the lucky few in the developed world while stagnating for everybody else, as well as on the Rowntree Foundation’s observation that single-income families in the UK have fallen
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Andray Domise discusses both the U.S.’ choice to be an intentionally safe destination for refugees, and Canada’s complicity in validating that choice and other policies of dehumanization rather than speaking out against even such obvious abuses as the imprisonment of children. And the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Andrew O’Hehir talks to Yanis Varoufakis about the impossibility of building shared prosperity on a foundation of consumer debt and financialization. And the Institute for Public Policy Research offers a discussion paper on the important equalizing role of organized labour – and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Ed Broadbent examines how Doug Ford’s platform (such as it is) would only further enrich the wealthy, while causing catastrophic results for everybody else: Just imagine waking up on Friday morning and having to hear the phrase “Premier Doug Ford” for the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Peter Goodman discusses how austerity has changed society for the worse in the UK: For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Dru Oja Jay points out the connections between improved public services, decreased inequality and meaningful action to fight climate change. – Adam Corlett challenges spin from the UK Conservatives intended to mislead voters about the relative tax contributions of the wealthy as opposed
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – The Equality Trust highlights the perpetual concentration of wealth among an extremely privileged few in the UK. LOLGOP points out how U.S. Republicans would rather let people die than see them adequately sustained by a fair minimum wage and secure social supports. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Alex Himelfarb warns about the dangers of participating in Donald Trump’s race to the bottom for public revenues – and the importance of highlighting the value of collective funding for social priorities: Sure, our tax revenues as a share of the overall economy
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Quirks & Quarks examines the potentially devastating effects of a dilbit spill on British Columbia’s coast. And David Climenhaga warns that Kinder Morgan is looking at NAFTA to provide it an alternate source of risk-free profits at public expense. – Mia Rabson reports
Continue readingMind Bending Politics: Austerity Looms As Parties Refuse To Come Clean on Autism Services in Ontario
(Current Platforms in Ontario’s 2018 Election Puts Province At Risk of a Credit Downgrade) Late Tuesday afternoon Moody’s downgraded the economic outlook for Ontario from stable to negative. In its press release Moody’s cited the recently tabled Liberal budget, and growing spending pressure from all parties that need to be
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Simon Enoch offers his take on Saskatchewan’s latest budget – including what little the Saskatchewan Party has learned, and how much it’s still getting wrong: (W)hile the 2018 budget is more measured in that it doesn’t replicate a 2017 budget that saw cuts
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on Canada’s failure to live up to our self-image as a generous and compassionate country – and the reality that we have plenty of fiscal capacity to close the gap. For further reading…– The abstract for the JAMA article referenced in the column is here, and has already been
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci, a New Democrat, delivers a traditional Progressive Conservative budget
PHOTOS: Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci, Below: A slimmed-down Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party, and Stephen Mandel, Leader of the Alberta Party, at the Legislature for Mr. Ceci’s Budget Speech yesterday. Despite the predictably apocalyptic tone of Opposition political spokespeople and the unenthusiastic analysis by mainstream media
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Andre Picard notes that contrary to our self-image, Canada actually lags behind international peers in health and social spending. And PressProgress points out the same conclusion in new OECD research. – Andrew Mitrovica writes that Doug Ford’s ascendancy in Ontario politics suggests that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Faiza Shaheen discusses the UK Cons’ attempts to paper over the harmful effects of austerity. And Amir Fleischmann points out that while the human cost of cuts to public services is all too real, the supposed fiscal benefits are usually illusory: Many social
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Noortje Uphoff writes about the long-term effects of growing up in poverty and the resulting stress on a child: Our childhood affects our health across the course of our lives. Stress, it seems, is a major contributor. While a life lived with
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