Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Bryce Covert weighs in on the IMF’s latest study showing a connection between stronger trade unions and greater income equality: While it can be hard to say for sure whether the decline in unionization is a direct cause of growing income inequality, they
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Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on the work done by the Broadbent Institute and Mariana Mazzucato to highlight the importance of publicly-funded innovation: According to a 2014 report by the International Monetary Fund, Canadian companies have been accumulating “dead money” at a faster rate than
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Both Richard Bilton and Matthew Yglesias discuss Le Monde’s reporting on HSBC’s active participation in widespread tax evasion. And James Bloodworth rightly argues that we should see tax avoidance as socially unacceptable even if governments fail to do their job in ensuring
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Scott Santens links the themes of health and equality by suggesting that we treat a basic income as a needed vaccine against poverty and all its ill effects. – Erika Eichelberger and Dave Gilson highlight how U.S. corporations are siphoning money offshore
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Doug Saunders observes that Syriza’s strong election victory may signal a sea change as to whether austerity is inevitable, while Adnan Al-Daini notes that the financial sector can no longer take for granted that its profits will be placed above the interests
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On blissful ignorance
Shorter Lawrence Herman: Just because Newfoundland and Labrador learned the hard way that Stephen Harper can’t be trusted doesn’t mean it has any right to warn anybody else that Stephen Harper can’t be trusted. (For a more reasonable take on how we should expect countries to react to the Cons’
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Scott Sinclair studies the effect of NAFTA on government policies, and finds that it’s been used primarily (and all too frequently) to attack Canadian policy choices: A study released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) finds over 70% of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Alex Himelfarb and Jordan Himelfarb write about the growing appetite for stronger public services and the taxes needed to fund them in 2014 – even if we’re a long way from having that translated into real policy changes: Certainly tax phobia has framed
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On limited victories
Truly, I wish Andrew Coyne’s latest actually described policy-making in Canada, and not merely the state of theoretical political debate. But in fact, we live in a country where “let’s consider whether a trade agreement actually has benefits, rather than signing whatever gets shoved in front of us” has been
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Scott Clark and Peter DeVries remind us that any fiscal problems Canada has faced under the Cons have been entirely of Stephen Harper’s making: Harper needed a deficit problem; the fact that the previous government neglected to leave him one was just a
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: Jim Stanford on Canada’s economy
https://politicalehconomy.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/podcast-1411212-jim-stanford.mp3 Today’s episode is the last of 2014 as I’ll be away spending the holidays with family. For a bit of a year-end summary of Canada’s economy, my one guest is Jim Stanford who joins me for an extended conversation. Jim is the chief economist at Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Walden Bello discusses the need for our political system to include constant citizen engagement, not merely periodic elections to determine who will be responsible to implement the wishes of the elite: Even more than dictatorships, Western-style democracies are, we are forced to conclude,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Manuel Perez-Rocha writes about the corrosive effect of allowing businesses to dictate public policy through trade agreements: (C)orporations are increasingly using investment and trade agreements — specifically, the investor-state dispute settlement provisions in them — to bring opportunistic cases in arbitral courts, circumventing
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood discusses the close connection between the energy sector and inequality in Canada – with the obvious implication that policies dedicated to unduly favouring the former will inevitably produce the latter: (T)he real story from last week’s Stats Can report isn’t that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Paul Krugman discusses the U.S.’ multi-decade pattern of income stagnation. David MacDonald and Kayle Hatt study the price we’ve paid to suit the Cons’ political purposes, while Kristin Rushowy reports on two new calls for a genuine child care system. And Andrew
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Krugman writes that the ultra-wealthy’s contempt for anybody short of their own class is becoming more and more explicit around the globe – even when it comes to basic rights like the ability to vote: It’s always good when leaders tell the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Deep thought
It’s always a relief to know our governments are constantly negotiating free trade deals to make sure no possible bidders are unfairly shut out of public procurement processes. That is, unless they’re Canadian.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Paul Kershaw examines political parties’ child care plans past and present, and finds the NDP’s new proposal to achieve better results at a lower cost. The Star’s editorial board weighs in on the desperate need for an improved child care system, while PressProgress
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – Frances Russell notes that the corporate sector is laughing all the way to the bank (and often an offshore one at that) after fifteen years of constant tax slashing, while Canadian citizens haven’t benefited at all from the trickle-down theory. And Jordan Weissmann
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Linda McQuaig reminds us that while growing inequality may have different impacts on older workers as compared to younger ones, it arises based on fault lines which have nothing to do with age: (T)he suggestion that seniors as a group receive too
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