This and that for your Thursday reading. – John Greenwood and CBC News both report on the offshore tax avoidance being revealed through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. And Susan Lunn observes that Canada’s federal parties are all at least paying lip service to the issue – though of
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Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Stephen Hume rightly mocks the Fraser Institute for using its tax-exempt status to whine about individuals who don’t earn enough to pay income taxes. But I’ll take the opportunity to reiterate a point I’ve made before: progressive governments in particular will do far
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jason Fekete reports on the growing recognition that tax evasion and avoidance are serious global problems – and the Cons’ attempt to be seen nodding at the issues. Needless to say, that posturing would be far more plausible if the same Cons weren’t
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Public Interest Alberta takes a closer look at that province’s rhetoric about taxes, and finds that in fact most Albertans pay more income tax than they would under the more fair and progressive systems applied in other province: “Albertans who believe the myth
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This and that for your Thursday reading. – Lawrence Martin discusses how the B.C. Libs, Harper Cons and other governments have responded to transparency requirements by deliberately refusing to record what they’re doing and why: News from the government of British Columbia. Sorry citizens, we have no files. There is
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Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Paul Adams highlights how the Cons and their anti-social allies have spent decades trying to convince Canadians that it’s not worth trying to pursue the goals we value – and how the main challenge for progressives is to make the case that a
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 readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
This and that to end your Saturday. – Bill Curry breaks the news of the Cons’ next round of public service slashing – with Canada Revenue Agency employees whose work far more than pays for itself once more looming as one of the main targets of a government determined to
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Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Chrystia Freeland points out why productivity doesn’t provide an accurate picture of economic development if it merely results in increased inequality rather than shared benefits: Productivity and innovation, the focus of policy makers and business leaders, no longer guarantee widely shared prosperity. “Digital
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Assorted content to end your Family Day. – Gerald Caplan comments that it’s long past time to put the Senate out of its misery: Who knew that when well-known Canadians in 2011 begged old acquaintances now turned Conservative Senators to back a bill for cheap generic AIDS drugs for Africa,
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. – Carol Goar discusses Canada’s broken fiscal stabilizers – as unemployment insurance and social programs intended to assure citizens of at least a reasonable standard of living have been cut to well below that level: Canada’s economic shock absorbers are badly worn. Employment insurance,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Yves Engler discusses the importance of a “social wage” – and how the minimum standard of living we’re prepared to tolerate affects the well-being of all kinds of workers: These attacks against the poor and unemployed should be opposed by anyone who
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – The Guardian discusses how the all-too-familiar trend of growing inequality and ever more precarious lives for all but the fabulously wealthy is unsustainable: While the debate in the UK is mostly focused on growth and how best to engender it, Reich explains in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Saturday reading. – Hamida Ghafour writes about the effect of tax avoidance by the world’s wealthy on the lives of the rest of the population – particularly when coupled with austerity pushed based on a lack of revenue: The OECD is a fierce defender of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material to end your week. – Lawrence Martin questions the media’s obsession with fabricating stories out of imagined motivations and insignificant shifts in poll numbers: In the year before an election, the media’s heavy focus on tiny political twists and turns is understandable. Here in Canada, a federal campaign
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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
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the general irrationality of the right-wing obsession with chaining public services and tax rates to population growth – and the particularly egregious application of that theory by the Regina Chamber of Commerce when it’s put added pressure on city services by insisting on generous tax abatements for some
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Friday reading. – Paul Dechene interviews Marc Spooner about Saskatchewan residents left behind in the province’s boom: One way that our growing income gap can be hand-waved away is by pointing to the fact that every other province that goes through an economic boom faces this.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Martin Kirk discusses the role governments play in allowing and facilitating the extraction of a substantial portion of the world’s wealth to tax havens (h/t to thwap): Tax theft is endemic all over the world. It is organised through an intricate system of
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