Chrystia Freeland, The Globe and Mail’s candidate in Toronto Centre, recently wrote a book about inequality (which I have not yet read) and is supposed to “bring fresh thinking to the Liberal Party’s economic team.†She has already attracted a few jabs from right-wingers Terence Corcoran and William Watson. But is she progressive? The Globe gave Freeland more than 900 […]
Read moreLast week, Travis noted Terry Corcoran’s strained argument that over-regulation of banks is what ails the global economy. Terry’s next column went even further off the deep end, endorsing the hard-money libertarianism of gold bugs like Eric Sprott. Today’s column is a full-blown defence of the US Tea Party. I have the following response to the gold-bug column in today’s […]
Read moreStatistics Canada figures indicate that private non-financial corporations held $471 billion of cash in the first quarter of 2011 ($322 billion of Canadian currency plus $149 billion worth of foreign currency). Including short-term paper would bring this total to half a trillion dollars, enough to pay off the national debt (i.e. accumulated deficit). Cash hoarding is a critical point in […]
Read moreSome progressives worry that the new Conservative majority will dismantle the Canadian state. Hard-nosed economic conservatives like Andrew Coyne and Terry Corcoran worry that the Conservatives will not actually cut government spending. I have suggested that the Harper Conservatives will cut, but not as much as the Chretien Liberals. This debate would benefit from some numbers. Chretien slashed federal program […]
Read moreThe Fraser Institute is winning 6-0, at least in terms of The National Post’s coverage of its flawed study on stimulus. On March 24, The National Post reported this study on its front page while its business section, The Financial Post, ran an op-ed by the study’s authors. A couple of days later, The National Post published a column by […]
Read moreLast night, I went to sleep early before watching any coverage of the Liberal Policy Conference. This morning, a well-rested Erin Weir marched into the office with such purpose that I did not even look below the fold on The Globe and Mail’s front page. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I got an e-mail about Michael Ignatieff proposing to cancel […]
Read moreHere is some of what Terry Corcoran wrote in today’s Financial Post about Bank of Canada Governor Mark “Carney’s suggestion that Canadian business has so far ‘disappointed’ because it has failed to revive Canada’s lagging productivityâ€: Central bankers appear to know many things, and have big fancy computer systems and economic models to tell them what’s happening in an economy […]
Read moreLast Saturday, The Financial Post completed its Chopping Block, a series profiling federal programs that could be eliminated to balance the budget. A couple of weeks ago, the C. D. Howe Institute unveiled its Shadow Federal Budget, which advocated essentially the same approach. (Terry Corcoran deserves some credit for trying to identify quite specific cuts, as opposed to the Howe’s proposal […]
Read moreI 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 excess of consumption and […]
Read moreLast week, the Minister of Finance announced his aspiration to unilaterally eliminate Canada’s few remaining tariffs on imported machinery and equipment. Saturday’s Globe and Mail quoted me doubting this proposal given the severity of Canada’s offshore trade deficit in that area. I elaborate my case in the following op-ed, which is printed in today’s Financial Post with Terry Corcoran making […]
Read moreTo my surprise, the Harper Conservatives seem to again be breaking new ground in enforcing the Investment Canada Act. This afternoon, the Industry Minister announced that he is taking US Steel to court for violating its commitments. Back in May, my union argued that the federal government must be prepared to take US Steel to court. Terence Corcoran mocked this […]
Read moreWith the Conservatives’ “Born in the USA” Copyright Act now tabled, the fur is flying. A year after leaping to the defence of the oil and gas industry, Terrance Corcoran has got Big US Media’s back (does Terry ever stand up for anyone but the wealthy and powerful?). As always, Michael Giest, who knows way more about copyright than yours […]
Read moreIn contrast to last week’s Census release highlighting stagnant individual earnings, today’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) release trumpets rising family income. The political right critiqued coverage of last week’s release for emphasizing individual rather than family income and for not capturing the tax-and-transfer system’s equalizing effects. In particular, the Prime Minister indicated that his government had cut […]
Read moreMarc recently trumpeted this blog for being ahead of the public debate on several economic issues. However, we have perhaps been slightly behind the curve in commenting on yesterday’s release of income statistics from the 2006 Census. It indicated that, from 1980 through 2005, the median income among full-time Canadian workers remained flat. The median income of the top fifth rose by […]
Read moreNational Post Dinosaur-in-Chief Terence Corcoran has nothing but bile to spew at the David Suzuki Foundation and its recent report on carbon pricing. With characteristic bombast, he still seems to think that global warming is a vast left-wing conspiracy to overthrow capitalism. But Terry is right about one thing. All of the modeling for greenhouse gas reduction scenarios comes from […]
Read moreOne of my colleagues likes to say, “if you throw a rock in a barn and hear a squeal, you know you’ve hit a pig.” So it goes with a National Post column attacking my tax incidence paper. I guess my study caught their attention, though I feel like I really deserved a rebuttal from a first-line player like His […]
Read moreAlthough I generally disagree with Andrew Coyne’s take on economic issues, I enjoy his commentary because it is almost always articulate and well-informed. Last Saturday’s column, which may be his second-last at the National Post before moving to Maclean’s, was a glaring exception. In particular, it contradicted Coyne’s own previous contentions. When the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador took an equity […]
Read moreStephen Gordon’s presentation from our PEF “taxation and social democracy” session at the CEA meetings is now online at his blog, here. The other presenters on the panel were Andrew Jackson, Erin Weir and Marion Steele. I was the discussant for the session, so I will take Stephen’s cue and jot down some of the things I thought most noteworthy […]
Read moreHugh Mackenzie’s piece on gas price gouging set off a chain reaction in the mass media. The oil execs were scrambling to come up with any and all excuses to justify their outrageous abuse of market power, and their even more outrageous profits. The lame response essentially boils down to this: it’s just market forces. Indeed, it is just “the […]
Read moreRecently, CLC President Ken Georgetti sent the following letter to Jim Flaherty: May 8, 2007 Honourable Jim Flaherty, P.C., M.P. Minister of Finance House of Commons Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6 Dear Minister: On behalf of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), I write to express our support for your promise, in Budget 2007, to end the corporate-tax deduction for interest on […]
Read moreBudget 2007 made interest on funds borrowed in Canada to finance foreign business operations nondeductible from Canadian corporate taxes. Finance Canada suggested that this arcane reform would raise relatively little revenue and, initially, business barely seemed to notice. More than a week after the budget, a Globe editorial and a Financial Post op-ed criticized the change as a huge ‘tax […]
Read moreUBC’s David Boyd takes on dinosaur-in-chief Terence Corcoran on the nexus between environment and economy, and Canada’s lagging rankings: Old ideas produce heat, not light … The myth that nations must choose between economic prosperity and a healthy environment has been conclusively debunked.Countries including Sweden, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are similar to Canada with respect to per capita incomes, […]
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