In a couple of recent posts, I threw down the gauntlet for PotashCorp to disclose how much corporate income tax and Crown royalties it paid to the Government of Saskatchewan. As Bruce Johnstone reports, it has finally done so: While PotashCorp paid $77 million in resource surcharges in 2010, it also paid $82 million in corporate income taxes and $70 […]
Read moreI attended an interesting forum on the economic outlook yesterday afternoon. Organized by Canada 2020, the speakers were noted US economist Brad DeLong (UCal Berkley, former senior Treasury official under Clinton, and Paul Krugman soul mate on macro issues at least), and our own David Dodge (who needs no intro.). De Long’s main focus was on the US, and his […]
Read moreI have no informed view on the merits or downsides of this proposed takeover of the Toronto exchange, but find it interesting the degree to which the Canadian corporate and political elites have again  fractured on the issue of foreign ownership of “strategic” assets. This is an interesting piece from the Financial Times of London. Most of the banks led […]
Read moreMichael Lewis has a great article in today’s Toronto Star about the windfall that banks are reaping from corporate tax cuts. He quotes three of our favourite bloggers: Toby Sanger, Armine Yalnizyan and Jim Stanford. He also cites a BMO Capital Markets report that I shared with him. Since BMO appears to have removed this document from its website, I […]
Read moreTen days ago, Jack Mintz released yet another paper claiming that international competitiveness requires continued corporate tax cuts. In addition to the usual questionable interpretations, it featured at least one straight factual error. Mintz inaccurately reports Iceland’s 2010 statutory corporate tax rate as 15% (Table 2 on page 7 and Table 3 on page 9 in the PDF). In reality, […]
Read moreToday’s Saskatoon StarPhoenix and Regina Leader-Post cover my recent analysis of PotashCorp’s annual report. I suggested that the company may be paying less corporate income tax to Saskatchewan than to Trinidad. PotashCorp could clear things up anytime by simply disclosing the amount of corporate tax it paid to the Saskatchewan government. Rather than doing so, its spokesman argues that the […]
Read moreGrowing up in Saskatchewan, I never imagined myself blogging in praise of Rick Swenson. First, blogs did not exist then. Second, I generally disagreed with Swenson, a former cabinet minister in Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservative government. Swenson is back as leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party, whose caucus quit to join with right-wing Liberals and federal Reformers to create the […]
Read moreThe “science†of economics has for most of its history relied on theory more than experimentation, which is quite literally the testing grounds of all “real†science. The birth of behavioural economics in the 1970s permitted economists to start testing theory rigorously, by borrowing empirical methods from psychology and other social sciences to lift the veil behind what makes us, […]
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