Usually when expectations are lowered it is so that they can subsequently be exceeded. So budget watchers were all wondering in the past few days what the surprise in this budget would be. Alas, the surprise is that there is no surprise. As expected we got a do-nothing budget, albeit one with a glossy cover of a child waving a […]
Read morePatrick Brethour in the Globe and Mail writes: Consumers will pay about one-third of the new carbon tax, but will receive close to two-thirds of tax rebates, totalling $338-million in the 2008-09 budget year. B.C. businesses, which will pay two-thirds of the new tax, will receive only about half of that money back from reduced corporate and small-business income taxes. […]
Read moreSince the provincial Liberals came to power in 2001 I have seen a lot of BC Budgets and not been too happy with any of them. Until now. Today’s 2008 model is a very interesting budget, and while I have a number of quibbles, I support the overall direction. And as in the recent past on climate change I find […]
Read moreWith recession on everyone’s lips south of the border, how much longer can Canada hold out before we begin to feel the nasty effects in the Great White North? I am guessing that the Tories want to go to the polls now because they know the economy is slipping and they do not want to have to wear the downturn […]
Read moreThe latest from the Fraser Institute concludes that BC’s 2001 tax cuts spurred economic growth, investment and all other good things. To their credit, this is a far more sophisticated analysis than one usually sees from the Fraser. Rather than relying on the in-house talent, they farmed the work out to University of Alberta economist Bev Dahlby, known for advocating […]
Read moreThe Tyee ran a piece by yours truly that is an edited-down version of my UCC Blues blog posts from last fall. David Beers did an amazing editing job on my reworked article: My Rich Kids Reunion UCC circa 1915. A tax-the-rich economist goes home to Upper Canada College. By Marc Lee Published: February 13, 2008 I don’t talk it […]
Read moreThe Finance Minister denies my charges that a slowdown could lead to a deficit, as reported on CBC: Flaherty rejects think-tank’s deficit warning Last Updated: Monday, January 14, 2008 | 2:50 PM ET Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Monday that there’s no substance to worries that the country will head back into a deficit situation if the economy slows. Flaherty was responding to a […]
Read moreWith a weakening US economy that may well spill over into Canada, it is time to start thinking about fiscal policy responses should recession rear its ugly head. To date much of the focus has been on monetary policy, with calls for central banks to lower interest rates. This is providing some relief, but as many economists have pointed out, […]
Read moreIn my holiday reading were two manifestos – how often can you say that? The first arrived by mail just before the break, the Manifesto on Global Economic Transitions, published in September 2007 by the International Forum on Globalization, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Global Project on Economic Transitions (I will dub this the IFG Manifesto). The second […]
Read moreSome of the knee-jerk commentary in response to my paper has been about what an ideal, or fair, tax system should really look like. These people question progressive taxation. To them, I quote Adam Smith from The Wealth of Nations (from Wikipedia): The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, […]
Read moreThe CCPA today released my paper, Eroding Tax Fairness: Tax Incidence in Canada, 1990-2005. The Toronto Star ran a front-page story on it that is quite good. This paper was a long time in the making – while it might seem fairly straightforward to calculate the share of taxes in income for different groups, there are many tricky data and […]
Read moreThe surprise Economic and Fiscal Update delivered today demonstrates how politically clever the Harper government is, and at the same time, how out of touch they are. At a time when there are major challenges facing the country, this update, as predicted, squanders the opportunity. Tax cuts will not build any affordable housing, they will not reduce poverty, they will […]
Read moreA group of BC-based academic economists have joined together to call for a carbon tax in a letter to BC Finance Minister Carole Taylor. BC is taking suggestions towards a climate change action budget this February. I’m not holding my breath that a carbon tax is likely; from what I’m hearing out of Victoria this stage of the game is […]
Read moreGeorge Monbiot’s book about climate change, Heat, recommends a scheme of global emission reductions based on the principle of equity. That is, every person on the planet should have an equal right to emit a certain amount of CO2 per year, with some long-term total emissions cap that keeps the planet from getting too hot. I have seen a number […]
Read morePerhaps the strangest thing about my reunion was coming to grips with my own status as an Old Boy, albeit disconnected from the Old Boys network. Those connections were quite apparent during the reunion but the clique-iness I remember from my school days was not really present at all – as Old Boys at a reunion we were cast in […]
Read moreI took the bus to Association Day, Upper Canada College’s annual “open house”, where the school teems with students, parents, Old Boys like me, and an striking number of blond teenage girls. Heading up Avenue Road, the clock tower looms up the hill (officially it is the Rogers clock tower, a donation from long ago by the Rogers family that […]
Read moreTomorrow I jet to Toronto for my 20th anniversary high school reunion. Like any such reunion, it will be interesting to see just how far the hairlines have receded and bellies expanded. But I cannot help feeling that my reunion will be different. See, I went to Upper Canada College, our country’s most elite private school. I was an outsider […]
Read moreA centrepiece of Canada’s industrial policy is attracting foreign investment. This seems to me a lack of imagination on the part of our elites; rather than develop genuine industrial stategies, so much the better to just let foreign capital come and create the jobs for us. And in the resource sector, the flipside of investment is that we lose control […]
Read moreThe New York Times has an interesting piece on the New Gilded Age, with many a multi-millionaire interviewed. Below is a rather unbalanced clipping of some of the more interesting (and progressive) parts of the article: “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,†Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve […]
Read moreAsks Paul Krugman: [S]hould we even be giving preferential tax treatment to true capital gains? I’d say no, because there’s very little evidence that taxing capital gains as ordinary income would actually hurt the economy. Meanwhile, the low tax rate on capital gains is one main reason the truly rich often pay lower tax rates than the middle class. A […]
Read moreBack in the 2001 BC election, the Liberals repeatedly made the voodoo economics claim that “tax cuts pay for themselves” as a means of heading off concerns that their tax cuts would inevitably lead to spending cuts. The Liberals won in a landslide, implemented a 25% across-the-board personal income tax cut and dramatically cut corporate income taxes – about $2.3 […]
Read moreThe spirit of Paul Martin’s budgeting practices lives on at the BC Ministry of Finance. Today, Finance Minister Carole Taylor published the audited public accounts for 2006/07, with a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion surplus, the largest in provincial history. To put this in context, BC’s estimated GDP in 2006 was $179 billion, so the surplus amounts to 2.2% of GDP. Back […]
Read moreDespite our protests on this blog, and Erin Weir chaining himself to the central staircase of the Bank of Canada, our hawks at the Bank raised interest rates today. That is, it raised the overnight rate by a quarter point to 4.5%. The Bank’s press release is a bit unusual in that there is no obvious reason why this move […]
Read moreIn a number of areas of health care, the rapid advance of technology may pose challenges to public systems, as technology tends to increase to costs associated with care by expanding both the realm of the possible and the number of people who can avail themselves of it (I review some cases of this in a CCPA paper). I argue […]
Read moreVancouver political scientist Peter Pronzos emailed this review of Michael Byers’ new book, Intent for a Nation: “…so close to the United States†By Peter Pronzos Book review of Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For? By Michael Byers Douglas & McIntyre, 248 pages, $32.95 When former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien bowed to public opinion and refused to send […]
Read moreAn interesting story in The Tyee that picks up on evidence from the Conrad Black Trial (from a story in the Globe as blogged here), and runs with it. It is a telling insider story, one that nicely clears up the difference between the notion of competitive markets and the real world of capitalism and Big Media conglomerates: How Black […]
Read moreThe Wellesley Institute blog compares and contrasts a recent CCPA publication with the World Wealth Report: Two days, two reports, two very different worlds The World Wealth Report 2007 released on Wednesday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini reports that the very rich (so-called high net worth individuals – HNWI) are getting even richer. And the forecast is the extremely […]
Read moreWriting an intervention in the NY Times, as NYC contemplates a congestion charge of its own, London Mayor Ken Livingstone makes the case based on London’s experience. A key success factor is the channeling of revenues from the tax into enhancing public transit, another example of offsetting regressive tax impacts on the spending side: … In 2003, London put in […]
Read moreA dispatch by email from McMaster’s (and PEF member) Roy Adams on last month’s ruling: In a dramatic and entirely unexpected decision, the Supreme Court of Canada on June 8th “constitutionalized” collective bargaining in Canada. From its inception, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has had a freedom of association clause but in a series of decisions in the 1980s […]
Read moreThe WTO talks have collapsed. Wait, did I not report that last year? Alas, talks are never really over, the Doha Round never really “dead” as reported in the papers. Just stalled. But as Cameron points out in his rabble.ca column (thanks to Duncan and rabble for sharing columns with RPE), this recent impasse has a lot to do with […]
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