Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Josh Eidelson and John Schmitt take a look at the guaranteed annual income which will be voted on in Switzerland – and the sole barrier to a similar discussion in the U.S. (and likely in Canada): What is a universal basic income, and
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Accidental 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
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mission accomplished (iv)
Four professors involved in researching income inequality in Canada took a close look at the National Household Survey and what it appeared to tell us, and then put it into context. According to the NHS, many of the census tracts where low-income people live have seen their average incomes rise,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Andrew Jackson discusses why attacks on Old Age Security – including the Fraser Institute’s calls for increased clawbacks – serve no useful purpose: The principled argument for not clawing back OAS benefits is that all seniors should be entitled to a bare-bones public
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mission accomplished (iii): Collateral damage
I’m prepared to believe that when Tony Clement eliminated the manadatory long census form prior to the 2011 census, he didn’t actually intend to make rural communities in the western provinces disappear. After all, rural communities in the west would be a big part of the CPC’s base of support.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Benjamin Radcliff discusses the proven connection between progressive policies and a higher quality of life across all levels of income: Happier people live in countries with a generous social safety net, or, more generally, countries whose governments “tax and spend” at higher rates,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Carol Goar points out why Canada’s EI system is running surpluses (contrary to all parties’ intentions) – and notes that the result has nothing to do with the best interests of the workers who pay into the system: Flaherty’s explanation was true
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mission accomplished (ii)
Hamilton neighbourhoods vanishing from new ‘census’ The death of the long-form census has left Hamilton full of “black holes” of neighbourhood data, leaving out many of its poorest areas. According to a new report from the Social Planning and Research Council, that could lead to bad policy choices and inappropriate
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Alex Pareene muses that Lawrence Summers would be an entirely worthy nominee to oversee U.S. monetary policy – for a very specific set of criteria: Laws and policies he championed directly led to the financial crisis, and the same laws and policies caused
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – There was never much doubt that the Cons’ demolition of Canada’s long-form census was intended to ensure that we lack data needed to develop evidence-based policies – and that the effects would be most significant among the most marginalized (or exclusive) groups. And
Continue readingPeace, order and good government, eh?: Mission accomplished
Toby Sanger has a post up at The Progressive Economics Forum discussing the effects of changes the Harper government made to the census. Specifically, the Conservatives eliminated the mandatory census long form and substituted a voluntary National Household Survey despite the warnings of, well, pretty much everyone who knows anything
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jacob Goldstein discusses how one-time, no-strings-attached funding for the poor in developing countries can produce lasting improvements in their standard of living – while also highlighting the need for longer-term development: A charity that gives away money, as opposed to, say, offering
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – John Myles discusses the Cons’ war on evidence: The mandatory Census was the lifeblood of almost all social and business planning. It provided key data for studying things like income inequality and poverty since both low- and high-income households were required to report.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Michael Harris tears into the Cons for their latest set of Senate abuses: It is time once more to throw up on your shoes over the Senate. We all did that when Liberal Senator Andrew Thompson went missing in action for a decade
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – George Monbiot writes about the absurdity of the right-wing choice to promote inequality in the name of competition among the wealthy when the ultimate results are worse for everybody: The capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – As would-be frackers show us exactly why it’s dangerous to give the corporate sector a veto over government action, Steven Shrybman suggests that corporations are mostly doing only what we’d expect in exploiting agreements designed to prioritize profits over people: Canadian businesses are
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Slightly Aged Column Day
Here, on how Brad Wall’s willingness to see the long form census scrapped suggests that his government’s push toward mandatory annual standardized tests for all students can’t be explained by any real interest in evidence-based policy – and how the move looks to damage students’ education in substance rather than
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Cory Doctorow duly blasts the Harper Cons for meekly complying with an onerous copyright treaty which isn’t even in force. Which raises the question: if the Cons were really interested in demonstrating some independence as a response to the U.S. declining to rubber-stamp
Continue readingAutonomy For All: The Census is not 100% Accurate
Judging by reading the #tcot twitter stream (“top conservatives on twitter”) and sites like this one (claiming 50,000 hits in less than 2 days online), it appears rather than learning that reality > ideological fantasy, conservatives are intstead opting to double-down on ideological fantasy and are busy constructing an even
Continue readingPop The Stack: The Long Form Census Debacle Starts to Show Its Impact
As predicted the dropping of the mandatory long form census last year is starting to be felt in the statistical results being collected. First problem: Language Data. New language data may be skewed as a result of shift to voluntary census survey – The Globe and Mail. Filed under: Politics
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