Corporate Taxes and Jobs: Myers Discovers the Business Cycle

I have reviewed Jayson Myers’ recent Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters report on corporate tax cuts, which I made public yesterday. Proponents of lower corporate taxes usually argue that these will help Canada compete with other countries in attracting internationally-mobile investment. However, as Myers admits, “over the past decade, reductions in Canada’s effective and average combined statutory corporate tax rates have […]

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Another pipe dream

The Weyburn, Saskatchewan carbon capture and storage (CCS) project has sprung big leaks, and with it the argument that CCS can make dirty fossil fuels clean. The core idea behind CCS is taking CO2 emissions and piping them back underground where they are supposed to stay, forever. In the case of Weyburn, the CO2 comes from a coal plant across […]

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Canada’s Economic Ad/ction Plan

Oh, the cynicism of it all. I was just watching the Evan Solomon Power and Politics show on Newsworld (about 5.40pm ) when an ad came up extolling opportunities for re-training under Canada’s Economic Action Plan and referring viewers to the same web site. That’s strange, I thought. Have those programs not expired? I checked the web site and find […]

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Jay Myers Shills for Corporate Tax Cuts

Jayson Myers from the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (CME) is touting a report supposedly showing that corporate tax cuts will create 99,000 jobs. News stories indicate that it is “set for release” or “being released Wednesday morning.” I could not find the report online, so I phoned the CME. I was initially told that it would be posted around 10am […]

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Can The Economist do basic math?

If anything economists are known for doing too much math. Economics journals are nothing but lengthy tracts of calculus and linear algebra or else econometric regression tables and tests. The Economist, on the other hand, sets itself up as the voice of economics on world policy matters. I’ve never been a huge fan. I appreciate the broad coverage they provide […]

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Poverty – The 1% Solution

Statistics Canada provides free of charge a very rich set of data on income issues, including low income (aka poverty) in 20/20 format. Here you can find data on the incidence of low income by four different measures; by family type; and by quite detailed geography. (You have to play around with the active dimension to get at all of […]

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Drinking Your Own CGE Bath Water

Trade Minister Peter van Loan goes after Maude Barlow with a letter in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, responding to her fine recent op-ed on the Canada-EU free trade talks. Among other cheap shots, van Loan once again cited as “proof” the findings of a computable general equilibrium model that was commissioned by the EU and the Canadian government to support […]

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Union Bashing and Human Rights

How are union bashers able to get away with inflammatory rhetoric which would  be roundly denounced as extremism and worse if directed to other targets? Here is an extract from the transcript of Kevin O’Leary’s interview with Heather Hiscox on CBC News Morning (6.52 am on January 10.)  Emphasis added. “we still have the problems of unions in many sectors, […]

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The Lumpenization of the Global Economy

Gabriella Moldonado looked like someone who was thoroughly whipped by life. This past October I was standing on the front stoop of her sagging home in Laredo, Texas, interviewing the middle-aged, portly woman for a television documentary about Mexico’s drug cartel wars. Laredo is a city of 230,000 that lies on the Rio Grande river just across from Mexico. It […]

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From Wall Street to the White House

Sometimes the crudest forms of Marxist analysis of the relationship between class and politics make the most sense. Read this  scorching commentary by Simon Johnson – the former IMF Chief Economist turned ubercritic of the power of the big banks -  on the appointment of  a senior Wall Street figure, Bill Daley from Morgan Stanley, as President Obama’s new chief […]

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Memo to the new Environment Minister

With a government as centrally controlled as our federal government, one has to wonder why the media make such a fuss covering cabinet shuffles. Peter Kent may be the new Environment Minister, but the message box is still from the Prime Minister’s Office. So it was not much surprise to  see our new Environment Minister touting the same old lines […]

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Correcting Neil Reynolds

Last weekend, I pointed out that Neil Reynolds had misleadingly presented figures on capital-gains realizations as being capital-gains tax revenues. Tuesday’s Report on Business included the following item: Correction – January 4, 2011 U.S. capital gains tax realizations fell to 3 per cent of gross domestic product in 1987, when the rate was hiked. Incorrect information appeared in a Dec. […]

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Today’s Job Numbers

Overall, there was little change in overall labour market conditions in December. The national unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.6% as a modest total of 22,000 new jobs were created. While the total number of persons working has risen above pre recession levels, the national employment rate (the proportion of the working age population with jobs) is still well below […]

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Manufacturing Does Matter

Andrew Sharpe has published an interesting new study on the marked slowdown in Canadian labour productivity growth from the early 200s. He decomposes the decline in productivity growth into changes at the detailed industry level, and finds that the majority (53%) of the slowdown in productivity growth between 1997-2000 and 2000-2007  is attributable to changes in manufacturing, with the lion’s […]

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Ethics and Economics

The New York Times recently reported that the American Economics Association (AEA) will be studying a proposal to adopt a code of ethical standards during its upcoming meetings, set to take place in a few days in Denver. This code of ethical standards could notably address situations where there could be a possible conflict of interest, such as when economists […]

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The Perils of Mathematization

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative has presented a list of its most viewed posts from 2010. The top post is so worthwhile that it warrants further promotion. The President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve had warned that unduly low interest rates would cause deflation. Of course, anyone with a handle on basic macroeconomics knows that the risk of leaving interest rates too […]

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Neil Reynolds’ Free Lunch

Neil Reynolds’ latest Globe column promotes the myth of costless tax cuts by replicating Kurt Hauser’s month-old Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Hauser’s Law” is the notion that American federal tax revenues have consistently been about 19% of GDP since World War II despite significant changes in statutory tax rates. The implication is that higher tax rates simply prompt more tax […]

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