The story below was the banner headline piece on page one of today’s Vancouver Sun, and is a perfect choice for the “we told you so” file. Three years ago, after being awarded the 2010 Olympics, our BC Solutions Budget (and in subsequent editions) made many of the same points as the Olympics Housing Roundtable’s soon-to-be-released report. This report, and […]
Read moreThere is an astonishingly large underclass in the world’s richest nation: Gov’t estimates 754,000 homeless people By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press The nation has three-quarters of a million homeless people, filling emergency shelters through the year and spilling into special seasonal shelters in the coldest months, the government said Wednesday. The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated there were […]
Read moreThis story in the Star points at (another) re-announcement of the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB), a Canadian version of the US Earned Income Tax Credit first announced by then-finance minister Ralph Goodale in his economic and fiscal update prior to the last election. In the 2006 federal budget, the Tories announced they were continuing with the WITB, due to […]
Read moreVancouver is suffering from a plague of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, mental health issues and crime. The good news is that all of these are inter-related, and that senior governments have the funds to make a difference. So with the Olympics coming is just three years, the political culture of neglect is showing signs of activism. Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan […]
Read moreAs Marc noted, the Toronto Star is waging a journalistic “war on poverty”. The editorial in Monday’s National Post chastised “The Toronto Star’s poverty scam” for using the Low-Income Cut-Off, a relative measure, as an indicator of poverty. Today’s National Post includes the following letter from yours truly: In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the founder of free-market economics, wrote, […]
Read moreThe latest from the Toronto Star “war on poverty” series. Here is David Olive: A constant state of dread TheStar.com – News – A constant state of dread If the poor weren’t so conveniently invisible, maybe we’d come to our moral senses and devise a national strategy for eliminating poverty. But the one in six Canadians trapped in poverty […]
Read morePhilosopher Peter Singer asks what the super-rich should give in order to reduce global poverty. Drawing on Piketty and Saez, Singer finds that doing the right thing would barely be noticeable to their standard of living. From New York Times Magazine: What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You? By PETER SINGER December 17, 2006 The rich … […]
Read moreNeil Reynolds is at it again in today’s Report on Business (not available on line), defining poverty out of existence by questioning the reliability of standard statistical measures. His main point in a somewhat confused argument is that poverty rates are over-stated by conventional income-based measures such as the LICO. Reynolds argues that the poor – according to consumption surveys […]
Read morehttp://www.campaign2000.ca/rc/index.html Campaign 2000 have released a new report card based mainly on some number crunching by the Canadian Council on Social Development. Among the more interesting findings: The child poverty rate has been essentially unchanged over the past three years (2001- 2004), (and indeed gradually rising by the most commonly used post tax LICO measure). It remains well above the […]
Read moreIt is the policy that dare not speak its name. For the better part of the last 20 years, the idea of a guaranteed annual income (GAI), a government funded unconditional annual income floor below which no family or individual can fall, has been met with ridicule, dismissal, silence and, more often than not, legislation that does the exact opposite […]
Read moreAnother piece for the “ounce of prevention” file. Poverty, homelessness and crime in BC have gotten bad enough that business leaders are starting to call for action. Thus far, the call has been more cosmetic, as in “get these bums out of my doorway” and “panhandlers are bad for tourism”, but it is a start, I suppose. Now the Premier’s […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail is running a series on homelessness in BC (at least, in its BC edition). Mark Hume reiterates the case for supportive housing arrangements to get people off the streets into a place where they can stabilize their lives. It would be highly advisable for senior governments to get back into the housing game, as the market […]
Read moreThe Fraser is on a roll. After taking some time settling into the big chair, new Executive Director Mark Mullins has unleashed a torrent of new releases in the past couple months. Few of these are “new” in the sense of original material, mostly they are updates of previous reports with spanky new ISBN numbers. Let’s look at a couple. […]
Read moreSFU economist Jon Kesselman makes the links between rising homelessness and BC’s abysmal welfare rates in this commentary from the Vancouver Sun: A whole $6! Every day! Imagine that you wake up each morning with six dollars burning a hole in your pocket. Let’s see: How might you spend your money? Maybe contemplate breakfast, a midday meal and supper […]
Read moreSo why is it that microcredit is as celebrated on the right as the left? wondered someone in the comments to a recent post on Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly, it has appeal in elite circles because it reinforces the storyline of hard-working people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps through grit and entrepreneurship. Focus on […]
Read moreSome econo-bloggers have been having fun with the fact that Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and father of micro-credit, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus, an economist who would not be shortlisted for the (kind of) Nobel Prize in Economics, wins a real one instead. I saw Yunus speak in Ottawa over ten years ago, and he was […]
Read moreThe Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom looks at the choices we make that keep the poor, um, poor. Walkom looks only at the working poor, not the welfare poor. If we add to the pile the numerous regressive reforms to provincial welfare programs the picture is even uglier. There’s much we can do to combat poverty Enforcing current laws would help […]
Read moreRemember a few years ago when Ireland was the talk of the chattering classes seeking to get big corporate tax cuts (they succeeded). Left unsaid at the time was that Ireland was the beneficiary of billions of euros in transfers in support of infrastructure, and that Ireland itself invested heavily in its education system (including free post-secondary education), and that […]
Read moreThe last federal Liberal Budget promised to introduce a tax credit to supplement the incomes of the working poor, and this commitment was re-iterated in the first Conservative Budget. The recent Toronto-based task force on Modernizing Income Security for Working Age Adults advocated such a supplement, and this widely-publicized proposal has been taken up by several of the leading federal […]
Read moreSenator Hugh Segal reviews the history and the need for a Guaranteed Annual Income: Canada’s on-again, off-again relationship with a guaranteed annual income (GAI) has made the rounds for many years. The most renowned recommendation for the GAI came out of the 1985 report of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, chaired by Donald […]
Read moreare homes. I find Globe columnist on BC, Gary Mason, obnoxious much of the time, but in this two-column effort to come to grips with Vancouver and Victoria’s growing army of street people, he gets it right. Time to try a home remedy for the homeless … In a groundbreaking study 15 years ago, Prof. Culhane found that 80 per […]
Read moreWriting in the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Policy Options magazine, York University’s (and PEF member) Dennis Raphael comments on poverty in Canada: In modern industrialized nations such as Canada, poverty is best understood as a barrier to citizens, communities and entire societies reaching their full potential. Living in poverty limits participation in a wide range of cultural, economic, […]
Read moreMy latest column for The Tyee: Without any fanfare a report popped up on the web site of Human Resources and Social Development Canada this past month. No press release, no communications strategy at all. Just another statistical report on poverty in a society that thinks of itself as middle class. But this is not just another statistical report on […]
Read morePrinceton economist Alan Kreuger provides another take on the “Adam Smith did not wear the Adam Smith necktie” theme, from a 2001 New York Times column, that reviews “Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment” (Harvard University Press) by Emma Rothschild, director of the Center for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge: Emma Rothschild … argues that Smith […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail reports that the Conservatives are planning to cut CPP premiums that were raised under the Liberals in order ensure that the program would be sustainable over the long term. In the interim they will use surpluses to fill the gap. But what happens if those surpluses disappear? This looks like a move that will make CPP […]
Read moreWriting in the Toronto Star (link lost), economists Arthur Donner and Doug Peters reflect on economics, employment and inequality: The Distorted Priorities of Mainstream Economics Arthur Donner and Douglas Peters, May 2006 There has been a monumental shift in mainstream economics over the past forty years. When we studied economics in the 1960s, economists and public officials who had an […]
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