Stephen Gordon examines what is said (and left unsaid) in Justin Trudeau’s video on the economy.
For example, the video offers a definition for what means to be middle class in all those Liberal talking points:
the people who live off their incomes, not their assets
This is a bit of a head-scratcher: everyone lives off their incomes. The people who live off their assets have incomes – it’s just that their incomes are generated by their investments and not by working. If Trudeau is referring to people who depend on their earned income, then he’s including most of the one-percenters: the surge in income at the top has been driven by earned income, not their asset holdings. He’s also excluding retirees: their incomes are generated by their asset holdings. (Raising this point gives me an excuse to point people to the CBC Radio series The Invisible Hand, and especially the “Your Grandmother is a Capitalist” episode.) Trudeau probably does not want to include one-percenters in the middle class and almost certainly doesn’t want to ignore retirees, but his definition appears to do just that.
As I said, it’s a head-scratcher.
Later on, Trudeau brings up a compelling point, one that has been raised by many others (including myself):
I worry that at some point, Canadians will say: “Why should we support a growth agenda if it doesn’t help my family?”
I don’t know how the Liberals intend to answer this challenge, but this is a good and constructive way of framing the problem. It is far more likely to generate a useful answer than putting it in terms of terms of class warfare.
