The Progressive Economics Forum

Whenever the stock market falls, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow reliably blames the Obama administration’s allegedly anti-business policies. But when the market was rising on Obama’s watch, Kudlow generally did not talk about it.
On tonight’s show, he took a different tack. He repeatedly asserted that the market has recently rallied not only on strong corporate profits, but also because [...]

On a weekend getaway to Washington state, I was alarmed at how much cheaper gas prices are south of the border. Typically, we paid $3 per gallon, whereas the price in Vancouver upon our return was $1.16 per litre, which is $4.39 per gallon (with the exchange rate roughly parity over the weekend).
This is an [...]

Today’s Toronto Star features an op-ed by John Cartwright, President of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council. (I once had the chance to hear John speak at a press conference in Toronto and found him to be an oustanding public speaker.  But I digress…)
In the piece, he argues that “we” (I think he means both the Harper [...]

As BC and Ontario have now started paying the HST at the till, many people may be wondering when exactly can we expect to see those jobs postings opening up.
This is a good question. According to analysis commissioned by the BC government from economist Jack Mintz, titled British Columbia’s Harmonized Sales Tax: A Giant Leap [...]

With all of the attention focused on the HST implementation on July 1, most people seemed to miss the next increment of that other much-hated tax, BC’s carbon tax. As of July 1, the carbon tax is now $20 per tonne of CO2, or about 4.6 cents on a litre of gasoline. And like any [...]

That the HST will take a bite out of family budgets is clear to everyone. The main question right now is just how big of a bite.
Two studies released in BC earlier this week asked this exact question but came to very different conclusions.
On Monday, the Fraser Institute released a paper arguing that lower and [...]

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 [...]

Arthur Laffer had a boldly titled op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse.” This piece has been invoked at least once every ten minutes on each subsequent episode of The Kudlow Report.
US tax rates will rise in 2011, when the Bush tax cuts expire. Laffer argues that, to avoid [...]

A guest post from PEF Steering Committee Marc Lavoie of the University of Ottawa:
Tax the very rich and solve the PBO problem
Among the dozen or so sessions I attended at the meeting of the Canadian Economics Association last week-end in Quebec City, one was devoted to the forthcoming fiscal crisis and another [...]

For years we have been asking Stephen Gordon to provide the evidence for lower corporate taxes. Like Stephen I like the Nordic model and take away from it that tax mix matters, so funding a large public sector may require more than taxes on “people we do not know” (ie corporations and the rich), so [...]

I’m afraid I can’t find the report on the IMF website but this news story indicates IMF support for the new Australian tax on windfall mining profits.
The obvious thought, if it’s good there, why not here?
The Advertiser (Australia)
May 17, 2010 Monday
IMF backs super tax on nation’s big miners
BYLINE: BEN BUTLER
THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund has backed [...]

You know that you are doing something right when the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) starts making up new pejorative terms. Last Friday’s Toronto Sun included the following op-ed on the Taxers (with a capital “T”):
Calls for new and higher taxes are coming from the usual tax-hike proponents (AKA Taxers); public sector unions, lobby groups like [...]

As promised, here’s my fourth post inspired by the recent Fraser Institute report on taxes paid by Canadian families.
I can’t stand seeing people fall simple numbers tricks. And while I realize that I don’t have the time to argue with everyone who is wrong on the Internet, I try to make it a point to [...]

When confronted with a document as muddled as yesterday’s Canadian Consumer Tax Index, a major challenge is figuring out where to begin in critiquing it. Indeed, this one Fraser Institute report supplied enough fodder for three separate posts today by Iglika (and she is promising a fourth!)
I think that the report’s worst flaws are overstating [...]

A recently released Fraser Institute report claims that the tax bill of the average Canadian family grew by a whopping 1,624% since 1961. This is an enormous number, designed to appeal to our sensationalism-hungry media, but it does not provide a meaningful comparison of today’s average tax bill and the tax bill our parents’ and [...]

The Fraser Institute and the CCPA do not typically see eye to eye, but they seem to agree that personal income taxes take up a relatively small fraction of the average tax bill — about 13 - 14%.
According to the Fraser Institute’s recent report on the average Canadian family’s tax bill, the average family earned [...]

It’s tax season and people are looking more closely at their incomes and the amount of taxes they pay.
The Fraser Institute released their annual Consumer Tax Index report yesterday, claiming that the total tax bill of the average Canadian family now takes up 41.7% of their income. This seems like a big number, which they [...]

This blog’s readers will not be surprised at me questioning Neil Reynolds (although my last post on him was somewhat complimentary.) However, his latest Globe and Mail column was organized around an especially odd claim:
The average Canadian household, for example, spends $14,800 (Canadian) a year on personal income taxes, the most expensive purchase - 20 [...]

The comments on my post about Ignatieff and corporate tax cuts have turned into a debate about Quebec’s recent budget. In particular, Stephen Gordon has thrown down the gauntlet:
The Quebec budget includes measures to increase incomes of low-income households. Why would self-described progressives dismiss that? . . . Just what is the goal of the [...]

Yesterday, the C. D. Howe Institute released a brief estimating how much Canadians at various income levels would need to save, through pension plans or individually, to provide various levels of retirement income.
Since the Canada Pension Plan tops out around the average industrial wage and Old Age Security is clawed back from higher [...]

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has taken a shine to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). Over the past month, he and other Liberals have repeatedly cited it.
Indeed, McGuinty invoked the CCPA’s name four times in the provincial legislature on February 17. However, he first did so the day before that:
Ms. Andrea Horwath: Can the [...]

In the last couple of years, Relentlessly Progressive Economics delivered detailed analysis the evening after the budget by bloggers who had been in the lock-up. Last week, those of us who were in Ottawa dropped the ball. However, Marc picked it up by assessing the budget remotely from Vancouver.
My main excuse is that, after drafting [...]

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 [...]

Thanks to Stephen Gordon, who made a link to a new unpublished study (fourth draft, 2009), The effect of corporate taxes on investment and entrepreneurship, by Djankov, Ganser, McLiesh, Ramalho and Shleifer. Stephen claims this study settles the matter that Canada should not reverse corporate tax cuts made in recent years. That discussion was happening [...]

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 [...]

As the budget yak-fest approaches, the focus is on how we’re going to balance the books. People pointing out we have bigger fish to fry – like making a dent in the nation’s $125 billion infrastructure deficit, addressing growing poverty, or preparing for a massive wave of retirements – are viewed as off-topic. But simply [...]

I was out of town and away from the blogosphere during the recent controversy about TD Bank CEO Ed Clark’s “raise my taxes” comment.
As Terry Corcoran pointed out, CEOs are not actually proposing higher taxes on executive incomes or corporate profits. They are instead proposing to hike the GST, a tax that exempts all income in [...]

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 [...]

Advocates of the Harmonized Sales Tax often suggest that it will support Ontario’s beleaguered manufacturing sector. They emphasize that the current Provincial Sales Tax applies not only to finished products purchased by consumers, but also to some inputs purchased by businesses. As one business sells components to another, sales tax could be paid repeatedly along [...]

The case for a Financial Transactions Tax or FTT has crept in from the margins remarkably quickly. One year ago, the proposal for an internationally co-ordinated “Tobin Tax” on foreign exchange transactions was a dim memory from the early part of the decade. Today, the idea of broadening such a tax to include a far [...]