Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Rebecca Vallas, Melissa Boteach and Shawn Fremstad write about the need for a new social contract. And Drew Nelles takes a look at the role of a guaranteed basic income in ensuring a fair standard of living for everybody: Although implementing basic income
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Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Amanda Connelly reports on the Alberta Federation of Labour’s latest revelations as to how the temporary foreign worker program has been used to suppress wages. And Jim Stanford reminds us that the employment picture for Canadians remains bleak even after Statistics Canada’s job
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert write that an effective solution to wealth inequality shouldn’t be limited to redistributing individual income or assets, but should also include the development of a commonwealth which benefits everybody: Instead of just giving people more purchasing power,
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: TFWP: How Racist is Canada?
Here’s one way to tell how racist a person/nation is. Have them read this excerpt and see if they fly into a rage about “those” people, or just come up with economic arguments to keep “them” out. Hopefully, everyone you know will nod and say, “obviously!” Since this is a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Anne Manne discusses how extreme wealth leads to narcissism and a lack of empathy, while pointing out that to merely recognizing the problem goes some way toward solving it: Outside the lab, Piff found that the rich donated a smaller percentage of their
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Mark Taliano highlights the distinction between corporate and public interests (while pointing out that both military and economic policy are all too often based on the former). And Jamie Doward discusses how the perception that government is either unwilling or unable to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer respond to Joseph Stiglitz by pointing out that some of the inequality arising out of capitalism has nothing to do with rules further rigged in favour of the wealthy: Although there is certainly significant substance to Stiglitz’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Joseph Stiglitz wraps up the New York Times’ series on inequality by summarizing how the gap between the rich and the rest of us developed, as well as how it can be reduced: The American political system is overrun by money. Economic
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Harry Stein discusses how government policy is currently designed to exacerbate inequality by subsidizing the concentration of wealth: This issue brief puts aside the question of whether new policies, such as a global wealth tax, should be enacted to reduce economic inequality.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Gar Alperovitz suggests in the wake of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that it’s long past time to reconsider who controls capital – and make a concerted effort to democratize that control: The name of the game — Piketty’s book fairly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Bryce Covert rightly challenges the claim that poverty bears any relationship to an unwillingness to work – along with other attempts to blame the poor for their condition: In fact, the majority of able-bodied, adult, non-elderly poor people worked in 2012, according
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kathleen Geier discusses the U.S.’ culture of overwork and its human toll: There is abundant evidence that long working hours is incredibly dangerous from a public health perspective. Fatigued or sleep-deprived workers who drive or operate heavy machinery are an obvious menace to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Katie Allen discusses the Equality Trust’s research into tax rates in the UK – which shows that the poor actually pay the highest share of their income in taxes, even as the public has been led to believe the opposite: The poorest 10%
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Neera Tanden points out that a wide range of citizens rely on a strong safety net at one time or another – and suggests that it’s long past time to start discussing how important social programs have been in our own lives: I
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: An All Out Assault
The last couple of weeks of legislative activity in Ottawa have been distressing to say the least. To call it an all out assault on Canada and Canadians is an understatement. The Harper Government has been ramming through a series of legislation that comprise the single most overt attack on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – PressProgress digs into the PBO’s report on tax giveaways to look at what Canada has lost from the Cons’ cuts to federal fiscal capacity – and how little has been gained as a trade-off: (T)he Harper government, by starving the public coffers, is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Jim Stanford looks into the fine print of the Hudak PCs’ assumptions about corporate tax slashing and finds that even their own numbers show that most of the money gifted to corporations would be thrown away (emphasis added): On second reading there are
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Jason Kenney, TFWs, and Canada’s Services Trade
When he announced the sudden moratorium on new Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) in the restaurant industry, Employment and Social Development Minister Jason Kenney tried to reconcile this dramatic about-face with his government’s long-standing support for the whole idea of migrant guest-workers. So while strongly criticizing a few particular restaurants for their
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: TFWP: Yet Another Reason To Shut It Down
The consequences of the Harper Government’s widening of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program over the last several years keeps going from bad to worse. At first it was employers choosing to hire TFWs over Canadians. Then we started finding out that not only were the companies forcing them to living
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – The Globe and Mail joins the chorus calling for Canada to welcome more citizens, rather than exploiting cheap and disposable workers. But Bill Curry reports on yet another corporate lobby group demanding that the Cons actually expand the flow of temporary labour
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