This and that for your Sunday reading. – Haroon Siddiqui comments on the Cons’ tall economic tales. And Steven Chase and Greg Keenan note that workers are rightly fighting back against the Cons’ plan to sell out Canada’s auto parts industry and its 80,000 jobs. – Canadian Doctors for Medicare
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jerry Dias sees the forced passage of an unamended Bill C-377 as a definitive answer in the negative to the question of whether the Senate will ever justify its own existence. And Nora Loreto emphasizes that the bill has no purpose other than
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Gregory Beatty reports on Saskatchewan’s options now that it can’t count on high oil prices to prop up the provincial budget. And Dennis Howlett writes about the need for a far more progressive tax system both as a matter of fairness, and as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Polly Toynbee writes about the unfortunate agreement among the UK’s major parties not to talk about the real effects of gratuitous cuts for fear that the public won’t abide honesty in politics. And George Monbiot discusses how the UK’s tax system favours rents
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Thomas Walkom points out that with oil prices in free fall, we’re now seeing the inevitable consequences of the Cons’ plan to build an economy solely around unstable resource revenues: Sensible countries try to lessen their dependence on volatile commodities. Canada, whose economy
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Jim Stanford points out that the choice to leave drug development to the market resulted in a promising ebola vaccine going unused – and indeed untested – for years until the disease threatened a wealthy enough target population: Canada’s outstanding work to invent
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Verhaege discusses how unchecked capitalism is changing our personality traits for the worse: There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Olga Khazan writes about the connection between lower incomes and obesity in the U.S. And Truthout discusses how poverty and other stressors can directly affect individual and communal genetics for generations: (A) study by researchers at University College London’s Institute of Child
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – Steven Hoffman and Julia Belluz write that the current ebola outbreak – like many health catastrophes in the developing world – is traceable largely to the warped incentives facing medical researchers: (W)e’ve learned a lot about Ebola: that it’s spread through contact
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Paul Krugman calls out the U.S.’ deficit scolds for continuing to invent a crisis to distract from the real problems with middling growth and high unemployment. And Bruce Johnstone singles out a few of the Cons’ talking points which have somehow become conventional
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Krugman offers a response to the assertion that accumulated wealth should be considered as costless capital: (I)f there’s one thing I thought economists were trained to do, it was to be clear about opportunity cost. We should compare accumulation of dynastic wealth
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jared Bernstein takes a look at after-tax inequality, and finds that it fits neatly with Thomas Piketty’s prescription to address the concentration of income and wealth through strong public policy: (W)hile the progressive taxes and transfers that don’t show up in Mr. Piketty’s
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: An Extreme Of Capitalism?
Anyone who reads my blog regularly and has drawn the conclusion that I am anti-capitalism would be completely wrong. I have nothing against business, entrepreneurship, nor corporations, per se. And I do believe that those who take risks should be appropriately rewarded. What I am against, however, is extreme imbalance.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Michael Hiltzik writes about the efforts of the corporate sector – including the tobacco and food industries – to produce mass ignorance in order to preserve profits: Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – Jeremy Nuttall discusses why the Cons’ temporary foreign worker program is ripe for abuse, as it ensures workers have every incentive to avoid reporting employer wrongdoing since the employer can singlehandedly ship the employee out of Canada in retaliation. – But the good
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Diane Coyle offers a preview of Thomas Piketty’s upcoming book on inequality – featuring a prediction that absent some significant public policy intervention, we may see a return to 19th-century levels of concentration of wealth. – Meanwhile, Murray Dobbin calls for 2014 to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Grant Gordon rightly criticizes the “taxpayer” frame in discussing how public policy affects citizens: (T)here’s a difference between being smart with our money and just being cheap. Conservatives are fond of saying they wish government ran more like a business. Well, sometimes
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On false promises
Last week, I linked to this story on the cost of prescription drugs under CETA. But let’s follow up on another aspect of the giveaway to big pharma which might sound fairly familiar: Russell Williams of R&D Canada, which represents the brand-name drug industry, questioned whether it was possible to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Don Braid comments on Alberta’s complete lack of credibility when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental issues. And Andrew Leach nicely sums up the PC/Con position in trying to put a happy face on growing emissions: Suppose you run
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Frances Russell rightly asks whose freedom is supposed to be protected by free trade agreements such as CETA: Once Canada signs CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with Europe, federal, provincial and municipal governments will suddenly find their hands and feet
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