The Progressive Economics Forum

This is a true story.
I made porridge for my children this morning, as I usually do.   When my son first tried it, it was too hot.  When I finally got around to eating, it after making the kid’s lunches, it was too cold.  But when my daughter tried it, it was just right (and no, [...]

The latest issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I produce has just been posted on CUPE’s website.
In this issue I have pieces about:

the new spectre that is haunting Europe, this time of a public debt crisis
impact analysis of Ontario’s HST tax reform by income group, already discussed below
some analysis of recent employment, inflation [...]

Today the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published analysis and data on the incidence of different US federal taxes by income group. 
They are a model of summary data and accessibility, with easily downloadable spreadsheet files, that Canada’s federal agencies (whether Revenue Canada, Statscan or the Parliamentary Budget Office) would do well to emulate.  The data show the [...]

There have been clouds and clouds of smoke generated about the impact of Ontario’s impending introduction of its Harmonized Sales Tax.  Fortunately there is finally now some substance out there in terms of a detailed analysis conducted by Statistics Canada that was recently released by the Ontario NDP.  And what is shows is quite surprising.
Much of [...]

The National Institute on Retirement Security in the U.S. produces some really excellent reports which should be more widely read, and not just on pensions or retirement income. 
Last week they published a good report, Out of Balance?  comparing public and private sector compensation over the past 20 years, written by two professors at the University [...]

The real world economic review is still accepting votes from the public for the “Revere Award for Economics”.  This is to be awarded to the three economists “who first and most clearly anticipated and gave public warning of the Global Financial Collapse and whose work is most likely to prevent another GFC in the future”.
This is [...]

This morning Oxfam launched their “Robin Hood”  (financial transactions) tax campaign in Canada with a press conference in Ottawa and the launch of their website.  
Together with Oxfam officials, I spoke in favour of the tax from an economics perspective and Dale Marshall from the David Suzuki Foundation talked about how revenue raised from it should [...]

Earlier this month the Economist ran a leader (editorial) and longer article asking and then largely answering who should for the costs of the economic crisis (public services and workers of course!).
That’s when I wrote the piece that leads the March 2010 issue of the Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I produce quarterly.  (I was [...]

I’ve been remiss in not posting information about and links to the federal budget analysis that we did at CUPE, as Paul Tulloch had urged on this blog.  
In addition to the press release we issued, there’s an overview and summary that I prepared on budget day, and a dozen really good detailed issue sheets that different [...]

I was pleasantly surprised to see a report published yesterday by Don Drummond and Francis Fong at the TD Bank on the Changing Canadian Workplace.  
It provides a short but decent summary of some different issues affecting labour: macro trends, educational requirements, changing composition, women, immigrants, aboriginal Canadians, older workers, widening income gaps, income security, etc.  
These are [...]

Analysis of the 2010 Federal Budget by David MacDonald, coordinator of the CCPA’s Alternative Federal Budget:
If there was any policy recalibration due to prorogation, it was on their photocopier as 94% of this budget’s spending has already been announced.  The problem when you photocopy your work is that you don’t learn anything from the process.  [...]

As if there weren’t already enough reasons to eliminate the egregious stock option tax loophole, a column by Eric Reguly in this month’s Report on Business magazine highlights yet another.  This reason helps to explain why we had such a booming stock market up to 2008, but little growth in real investment and productivity.
First of [...]

Two weeks ago I wrote a critique of a very poorly done Conference Board of Canada report on P3s (public-private partnerships).    This conference board study ignored recent major criticisms by provincial auditors general and interviewed almost exclusively P3 proponents.
I’m happy to say that two business professors from B.C., Aidan Vining of SFU and Anthony Boardman of UBC, [...]

We’ve been told for years that corporate tax cuts would work like viagra to boost private sector investment and productivity, and no doubt we’ll hear much more about it in next week’s budget. 
But it just ain’t working. 
Today’s release by Statscan of private and public investment intentions shows just how limp private sector investment is expected to be [...]

The Conference Board of Canada published a report late last month, Dispelling the Myths, which purports to show that public-private partnerships (P3s) have delivered major efficiency gains for the public sector, a high degree of cost certainty, and greater transparency than conventional procurement.
While the report maintains it provides an impartial assessment of the benefits and drawbacks [...]

This morning federal finance minister Flaherty announced a number of measures ostensibly aimed at reining in speculation in the housing market. 
His announcement was typically well-timed to coincide with the Vanier Institute’s annual report on the state of Canadian family finances, which reports record high levels of household debt, growing inequality and housing prices increasingly out of [...]

I was surprised to see the IMF highlighting the potential virtues of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the front page of its website.  The Bloomberg news service earlier had a good story about on the background of this idea, tracing it back to Keynes.   This is a proposal that progressive economists and unions have advocated for [...]

Last week the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published an update for the G20 Summit on its call from earlier this year for a Global Green New Deal.  This update showed that Canada is close to the bottom in the stimulus funds it is committing to green economic areas.
According to the UNEP, only 8% of [...]

My two kids are still far too young to be farmed out to earn their keep in the labour market, but when they are (in about a decade), I really hope that the value of minimum wages in Canada improves. 
If not, not only are they going to have to work harder and harder to get by along with [...]

Some newspapers have paid some well-deserved attention to the multi-million dollar bonuses recently handed to the executives of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) after they lost $24 billion of Canadian workers’ pension savings with their investments last year.
What has received less attention are the low long-term rates of return that the CPPIB has [...]

Last week economists at the TD Bank called for uniform entrance requirements for the Employment Insurance program (although not as low as we’d like).   This week in an article in the Globe and Mail, TD Bank’s chief economist Don Drummond has called into question the effectiveness of the RRSP system and suggested that we need stronger public pensions, such [...]

Last week, the British Columbia government announced that its $2.5 billion public-private partnership (P3) deal for the Port Mann bridge expansion had failed and that it would now finance the project directly instead.   Despite the failure of the P3 financier, Macquarie, to put together a deal the Province is still going to pay them [...]

The Canadian media didn’t pay much attention to this economic crisis before the stock markets plunged last fall, and that has continued to be a major focus. But this focus on the stockmarket and the mistaken perception that this crisis is all the fault of the U.S., is leading to the overly optimistic forecasts of [...]

CUPE has a set of eleven a dozen really good issue sheets on-line with analysis on different topics about what was in the 2009 Federal Budget, what wasn’t in it, what it means, and what would have been better choices.
The topics include: Employment Insurance, Municipal Infrastructure, Privatization, Pensions, the Environment, Aboriginal Issues, Post-secondary Education, Health Care, [...]

Harper “stimulus” budget falls far short
 
Faced with the prospect of losing their grip on power, the Harper government has made a big show of taking action to address the economic and financial crisis, but it still falls far short of what is needed to revive the economy, create jobs and protect the vulnerable.  In particular, [...]

Its amazing how much a budget can contain while avoiding addressing the most critical questions of an economic crisis: How are we helping the most vulnerable, particularly those who have lost their jobs?
 
With over $2.6 billion in spending on additional EI and retraining programs in 2009, the government has managed to not allow one additional [...]

What a difference a year makes.
A year ago anybody who proposed nationalizing the banks in Canada, the United States or the U.K. would probably have been dismissed as a looney lefty.  Now widescale nationalization of major banks is being raised as a serious alternative in leading articles in the Economist and the New York Times.  [...]

I don’t usually read (or cite) Sherry Cooper, chief economist for BMO Capital Markets, but in a recent article she was on the money:
Layoffs and reductions in hours worked have been accelerating in recent months and cover firms in virtually every sector of the U.S. economy. The same has been true in Canada, but to [...]

So Industry Minister Tony Clement is now insisting that cuts to workers wages will be a condition of any bail-out package for the auto industry.  This comes after an economic statement that was going to remove the right to strike and legislate public sector wages, and before a budget that could also include wage cuts or constraints for [...]

I wasn’t originally planning to write a longer analysis and critique of Flaherty’s fiscal and economic statement beyond our immediate response because, like most people, I expected it would at least show some reasonable recognition of the problem and at least the framework for a stimulus program (besides, I had young children to pick up [...]