Quotulatiousness

October 18, 2011

Sable Island becomes Canada’s newest national park

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:46

Canada’s newest national park is a tiny dot of sand out in the Atlantic:

It is just a long, slender, green-bean of a thing, but this dune off the cold coast of Nova Scotia is anything but a harmless strip of sand. Its swirling waters are known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, for they have swallowed 350 ships since 1583. Its underwater Scotian Shelf hosts 18 shark species who feast on the island’s grey seals.

The island is tall and narrow — 40-km in length, and only 1.5-km in width — and its body is held together by a skeleton of beach grass that traps the sand granules and the pirate wreckage buried within. Hundreds of untamed horses run wild, their matted manes unruly in the blustering wind where the Labrador current collides with the warm gulf stream and breeds thick fog.

This is Sable Island, a crescent-shaped mass roughly 300 kilometres out to sea. On Monday, Sable Island was formally named a Canadian national park reserve to ensure, the environment minister said in a statement, that the “iconic” and “fabled” island will be protected for all time.

[. . .]

Now that Sable Island is a national park, rigs are prohibited within one nautical mile of its shores, and its surface will never again be drilled. Some fear the new distinction will spur tourism and threaten the island, but Ms. Hirtle said resources are so scarce that she does not foresee a “Sable Island Club Med.”

Politicians should stop lecturing us about our “obesity epidemic”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Rob Lyons in the Yorkshire Post:

I would argue that the obesity panic is greatly exaggerated, that the “cure” for it doesn’t work, and that it usually gets promoted by politicians who have no better way to justify their existence.

For starters, obesity rates have stopped rising for adults, and are actually falling for children. The latest figures from the Health Survey for England, the best source of information we have, show that in 2009, 22.1 per cent of men were obese — compared to 24.1 per cent in 2008; for women, the new figure was 23.9 per cent, as against 24.9 per cent in 2008.

In 2004, 19.4 per cent of boys aged two to 15 were regarded as obese; in 2009, that figure was down to 16.1 per cent. The equivalent figures for girls were 18.5 per cent (2004) and 15.3 per cent (2009).

Even then, what the medical profession regards as obesity and what we commonly recognise as obesity are two different things. About one in four adults is classed as obese.

Now, think about your workmates and friends. Would you really regard a quarter of them as obese? I’ll bet few of them match up to the typical picture that accompanies every story about obesity: a morbidly obese person, whose clothes are straining to hold in their tummies. Such very overweight people only make up about two per cent of the population.

In truth, distinctions between normal weight, overweight and obesity are pretty arbitrary lines, based on something called body mass index (BMI) — that’s your weight in kilos divided the square of your height in metres. BMI is not a particularly good predictor of health, except at the extremes. Those who are mildly obese have much the same life expectancy and health outcomes as those who are normal weight. Being a little underweight is almost certainly worse for you than being mildly obese.

October 16, 2011

“We have reached a point where the average earnings of a two income family can barely support the spending of government”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Canadians have an addiction problem. They’re addicted to government:

Consider the following:

  • The Government of Saskatchewan alone spent over $11 billion last year (April 2010 to March 2011) to provide services for its citizens. That works out to nearly $11,000 for every man, woman, and child in the province, or $44,000 for a family of four.
  • The average wage for a person in Saskatchewan is about $44,000/year.
  • If the provincial government relied solely on the income tax of its citizens, then a family of four would have no choice but to have both parents work . . . one to provide for the family and one to provide for the government.

Now consider what other levels of government spend.

  • At the municipal level, the City of Regina has an operating budget of about $2500/person. Federally, the Government of Canada spends about $8,000/person.
  • All together our three levels of Government spend over $21,000/person . . . or $84,000 for a family of four.

We have reached a point where the average earnings of a two income family can barely support the spending of government . . . let alone pay for food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their children.

The reality is that “free” public services come with a cost . . . and these costs increase as we demand more “free” stuff.

One of the truths about addictions is that they require larger and larger “hits” . . . that provide ever smaller and smaller “highs”. This results in people either becoming so dependent on the substance that they cannot function without it . . . or they pursue the addiction to its ultimate conclusion, an overdose.

H/T to Katewerk for the link.

Rick Mercer on the (secret) border security negotiations

Filed under: Cancon, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

The argument for value-added taxes

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

In an article about the Canadian copy-cat protests, Mike Moffatt addresses some of the demands to increase taxes on the wealthy and explains why value-added taxes (like the much-hated Harmonized Sales Tax) are more efficient:

The Occupy Canada protests which began Saturday took place in over a dozen cities with mostly modest turnouts. They also lacked a cohesive goal or message, as their critics in the media are fond of pointing out. The protests did, however, address a number of important societal issues, such as the growing gap between the rich and the poor. As has been acknowledged by both Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, rising income inequality in Canada is a real and legitimate concern.

Over the last 30 years, the income gap between the top 1 per cent (or more accurately, the top 0.1 per cent) and the rest of us has increased substantially. Furthermore, this inequality is growing faster in Canada than it is in most other countries, including the United States. The Conference Board of Canada has reported that Canada has fallen to 12th out of 17 countries in its peer group when it comes to income inequal-ity. Between 1980 and 2005, before tax earnings increased by 16 per cent for the top 20 per cent, but fell by over 20 per cent for the bottom 20 per cent. The Occupy Canada protests are the product of a rising tide only lifting a few boats.

[. . .]

So how do we reduce inequality? The obvious place to start would be to borrow solutions from countries where after-tax income inequality is relatively low. Three countries that consistently score well on income inequality measures are Denmark, Finland and Sweden. These three Nordic countries share very similar tax structures, featuring moderate-to-low marginal corporate tax rates, moderate-to-high income tax rates and very high value added sales tax rates (VATs, similar to Ontario’s HST). The average VAT in these three countries is 25 per cent, a rate nearly twice that of the average Canadian federal GST plus provincial sales tax or HST. A onepercentage-point increase in the HST alone would raise $5 billion to $6 billion per year for the federal government, so increases by a few percentage points could adequately fund programs designed to reduce inequality. No country on Earth has been able to find a way to fund the kind of social programs and redistribution needed for “reasonable” levels of inequality without VAT rates significantly higher than Ontario’s HST.

Why are high sales taxes needed to fund social programs rather than higher corporate taxes or higher income taxes? Put simply, VATs are the hardest taxes to avoid paying. Higher income taxes reduce labour effort by the taxed. Higher corporate tax rates reduce investment. Canada’s corporate income tax rate was, not so long ago, twice what it is today. Adjusted for the inflation and the size of the economy, however, the higher corporate tax rates brought in similar levels of revenue then as they do now. There are some ways to avoid the HST, of course, but these are far more limited than they are for other taxes. The HST, as with all VATs, is a cash cow that provides governments with the necessary resources to tackle important societal issues.

October 15, 2011

It’s not as stirring a rallying cry to say that the 99% earn 80% of the income

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Lorne Gunter can, if he holds his mouth right, kind of agree with the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, but he says they do themselves no favours by mixing in fake “facts”:

The protesters’ main point also is obscured by all the lefty, social justice, union-financed trash they have heaped on it. The Occupy movement has proclaimed itself in favour of animal rights, a guaranteed living wage, free health care and education, and an end to the “poisoning” of the food supply.

Nor can the protesters help repeating a lot of class-warfare myths, such the “fact” that 1% of the population controls almost all of the wealth. According to Internal Revenue Service statistics in the United States, the “99 per centers” — as OWS types like to call themselves — earn about 80% of all income and control over two-thirds of the personal wealth (both percentages are slightly higher in Canada), while the “one per centers” earn about 20% of income and control about 32% of wealth.

It’s true that the top 1% of earners are taking a greater share of the pie than at any time since the 1950s, when reliable family income figures first became available. But it is also true that even the bottom 20% of earners are better off than they were then — not as much better off than the top 1%, but better off than they were in the mid-20th century.

[. . .]

But the biggest problem with the OWS movement is what they want to do about the problems they see. Because they view most corporate activity as bad and most government programs as good, the Occupiers have convinced themselves the only way to a fairer society lies through bigger government, more public spending and much higher taxes, all of which would only make our economic problems worse, while alleviating none of the disparity protesters believe is so corrosive to democracy.

Conrad Black on “Occupy Wall Street” and its targets

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

Conrad Black looks at the “Occupy Wall Street” movement:

The Wall Street protesters denounce government bail-outs, the political and economic short-shrifting of students and young workers, the high cost of post-secondary education, various forms of discrimination, U.S. foreign policy, union-busting, outsourcing, the oil industry, media misinformation and (more generally) capitalism and globalization.

Of course, this is a pretty hackneyed scatter-gun indictment by people who haven’t really thought it through, but their anger and frustration are largely justified nonetheless: In the past decade, many prominent financial houses joined in the process of issuing consolidated debt obligations (CDOs), consisting of unfathomable patchworks of mortgages on packages of residential real estate, unsupported by any real base of invested equity in the underlying assets by their ostensible owners, and covered by diaphanous fig-leaves of default insurance. These instruments were made deceptively presentable by certifications from the main rating agencies that they were investment-grade, as if issued by serous entities and secured by unquestionable assets.

[. . .]

As for the Wall Street protesters, their largely justified complaints can’t be addressed by the wild methods they suggest. (A proposed list of demands posted at OccupyWallSt.org includes “free college education,” “bring the fossil fuel economy to an end” and “Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.”) The prestige of the U.S. financial leadership, the country’s political class and its economic academics and financial media have all collapsed at once and together, like a soufflé. Except for the military and the pure sciences, the country’s elites have been utterly discredited, and no one believes anything they say. Even if they wanted to, they could not impose on Americans the sort of radical anti-capitalist reforms the protestors urge.

October 14, 2011

Jonathan Turley: “President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

In an interview at NPR, Jonathan Turley explains that while President Bush was bad news for civil liberties, President Obama has been even worse:

It is a strong language, but I think civil libertarians are coming to grips with what is really a building disaster for our movement, and it’s been a rather difficult process. You know, I have a large civil liberties blog, and there’s a lot of soul-searching among civil libertarians about what exactly happened. But we are engaging in a sense of collective denial when we deal with President Obama.

[. . .]

And I think that’s part of the purpose of this column, is to address the fact that President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties. He not only adopted most of President Bush’s policies in the civil liberties areas when it comes to terrorism, but he actually expanded on them. He outdid George Bush.

And they range. His position on torture and refusing to have people investigated or prosecuted for torture, on privacy lawsuits. He pushed aggressively for the dismissal of dozens of lawsuits brought by private interest organizations. He’s for immunity for people who engaged in warrantless surveillance. He has fought standing for people even to be able to get courts to review his programs, much like George Bush. He kept military tribunals and the authority to make the discretionary choice of sending some people to a real court, some people to a military tribunal. He has asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens based solely on his own discretion, that he believes them to be a threat to the country.

His administration has, once again, as with the Bush administration, cited secret law, that — and including a case of assassinating citizens — a law that we’re not allowed to see, but we have to trust them.

[. . .]

They just have a very difficult time opposing a man who’s an icon and has made history — the first black president, but also the guy that replaced George Bush. And the result is something akin to the Stockholm syndrome, where you’ve got this identification with your captor. I mean, the Democratic Party is split, civil libertarians are split, and the Democratic Party itself is now viewed by most of libertarians as very hostile toward civil liberties.

Senators and members of the House, it turns out, were aware of many of these abuses and never informed people.

October 13, 2011

The 14th Amendment, a history

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

October 12, 2011

So, if it wasn’t Wall Street, then who inflated the US housing bubble anyway?

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Peter Wallison has the answer:

Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.

It is certainly possible to find prime borrowers among people with incomes below the median. But when more than half of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie were required to buy were required to have that characteristic, these two government-sponsored enterprises had to significantly reduce their underwriting standards.

Fannie and Freddie were not the only government-backed or government-controlled organizations that were enlisted in this process. The Federal Housing Administration was competing with Fannie and Freddie for the same mortgages. And thanks to rules adopted in 1995 under the Community Reinvestment Act, regulated banks as well as savings and loan associations had to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served.

The “Ontario education system [is] a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Stephen Gordon explains why Ontario’s two parallel school systems are helping to prove the efficacy of school choice:

Public funding for the Ontario separate school system is sometimes a controversial topic for reasons I won’t get into here. But by offering one set of parents with the choice of which school they can send their children, the Ontario education system has set up a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice. Catholics have the choice of sending their elementary-school aged children either to separate or to public schools, and non-Catholics do not have this choice.

Elementary school administrators in the two systems face very different constraints:

  • Public schools have a monopoly on non-Catholics who can’t afford private school.
  • Separate schools face a clientele that always has the option of switching to the public school system.

Of the two, separate school administrators have the greater incentive to provide higher-quality education: if the separate system were widely known to be dysfunctional, it would likely disappear.

Basic economics would predict that the competitive pressures on separate school administrators would provide stronger incentives to provide better education outcomes. And that seems to be just what is happening. A recent study (pdf) by McMaster University economists Martin Dooley and Abigail Payne in collaboration with UC-Berkeley’s David Card that examine these effects finds “a statistically significant but modest-sized impact of potential competition on the growth rate of student achievement.” In a related study using similar data, a CD Howe study done by Wilfrid Laurier’s David Johnson finds that of the 13 ‘above-average’ school boards, 11 are in the separate school system, while none of the 10 ‘below-average’ school boards are.

October 11, 2011

Stephen Gordon: There is no case for Canada to “do something” about jobs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:17

One of the side-effects of living right next door to the US is that Canadians often have more information about the state of the economy in the US than they do about their own economy. Calls for the federal government to “do something” about jobs is a good example:

But it doesn’t make much sense for Canada to ‘do something’ about job creation because of problems in the U.S. labour market. Why would anyone look at U.S. data and go on to infer that the rate of job creation in Canada requires a policy response?

[. . .]

The best proxy I’ve been able to find for the hiring rate is the number of workers who have been at their current jobs for less than three months. Movements in the number of people hired should show up here, albeit with a certain lag. As far as I can make out [. . .] the hiring rate fell significantly in 2009, but returned to trend in 2010. The data from 2011 are consistent with those of the boom years of 2005-2007.

Calling for the government to ‘do something’ about job creation when hiring rates are already at pre-recession levels is puzzling. At best, it is a demand that the government undertake busy work: activities that achieve little beyond demonstrating that it is ‘doing something’. And judging from the response, it is also a demand that the government is happy to meet.

“Fat taxes” are doomed to failure

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Patrick Basham and John Luik handily dismiss the potential of government-imposed “fat taxes” on certain foods as tools to reduce obesity or to change peoples’ food choices:

The obesity crusaders’ argument is that a fat tax will reduce junk-food consumption, and thereby improve diets and overall public health. There are many reasons, however, to suspect that a fat tax would be at best unsuccessful, and at worst economically and socially harmful.

For example, scientifically rigorous evidence suggests that higher prices do not reduce soft-drink consumption. There are no studies demonstrating a difference either in aggregate soft-drink consumption or in child and adolescent body mass index (BMI) between jurisdictions with soft-drink taxes and those without such taxes.

[. . .]

These results are confirmed in a study by Christiane Schroeter in the Journal of Health Economics which examined the link between food prices and obesity. The study concluded that while increasing the price of high-calorie food might lead to decreased demand for these foods, ‘it is not clear that such an outcome will actually reduce weight’.

Why do fat taxes fail? The economic answer is that demand for food tends to be largely insensitive to price. Considerable research on food prices has demonstrated this inelasticity. A 10 per cent increase in price, for instance, reduces consumption by less than one per cent.

[. . .]

Furthermore, fat taxes have perverse, unintended consequences. According to the US government’s Economic Research Service, another unintended consequence of a fat tax on consumer behaviour is that taxes on snack foods could lead some consumers to replace the taxed food with equally unhealthy foods. Adam Drewnowksi similarly found that poorer consumers react to higher food prices not by changing their diets, but by consuming even fewer ‘healthy’ foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and eating more processed foods.

A Danish study confirmed this problematic outcome, finding that sin taxes on junk foods would fail to reduce consumption by the population (that is, the poor) who consume these foods most frequently. Additionally, it found that taxes levied on sugar content — the basis for the soft-drinks tax — would increase saturated fat consumption.

October 9, 2011

Matt Gurney: Even the media were bored by the Ontario election

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

Did you find the recent Ontario election a big snore-fest? You’re not alone. So did the journalists covering the “festivities”:

Ontario politics is a bit dull at the best of times, but that’s unfortunate. It’s a large, populous province, with the economy to match. It’s troubled now, battered and bruised from years of mismanagement and the global economic crisis, but it’s still the centre of Canada’s economic gravity. Ontario needs to do well.

And yet, even by the usual standards for snooze-inducing Ontario partisanship, last week’s election was lame. The Liberals, under Dalton McGuinty, essentially breezed through it, never saying much. Whenever a punch was thrown — and not many were — they seemed to just bounce off the inexplicable forcefield that somehow protects Mr. McGuinty from consequences for his electoral missteps. The Tim Hudak-led PCs made the mistake of thinking that Ontarians were eager to vote them into power, and then ran a tone-deaf campaign that was only notable for its costly mistakes. The proof of that is found in the exit polling data: The Tories focused obsessively on Dalton McGuinty’s record of tax hikes, branding him “the Tax Man.” But only 15% of Ontario’s voters identified that as their main worry, meaning that the PCs’ biggest ad buy missed 85% of the electorate. And the NDP, under Andrew Horwath, mainly offered ridiculous suggestions like protectionist Buy Ontario legislation and arbitrarily freezing some consumer prices for purely political purposes. Outside of northern Ontario, not a lot of people think that’ll do much good.

The voter turnout reflected that: It’s estimated right now to have been roughly 49%, less than half of eligible voters. There’s cause to fret about that, and wonder what’s to be done, but for now, let’s just accept that rather than a sign that our democracy is broken, or doomed, it’s really what Rex Murphy said it was in his Saturday column — a deliberate rebuke of all the parties by a frustrated, insulted electorate. A pox on all their houses, as it were. If so, there was some early warning that that would be the case — even the journalists whose job it is to muster up excitement for politics had a hard time concealing their displeasure during this campaign.

I found it interesting that one of the most popular posts I’ve put up in the last several months was the one about how to refuse your ballot under Ontario’s election law. That’s certainly an indication of the relative level of voter disenchantment with the candidates and parties.

October 7, 2011

Matt Gurney: Caledonia, the election issue that wasn’t

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

After a quick run-down of why the Tories blew the election (their bucket of snot campaign offerings that differed only in slight degree from the Liberals) Matt Gurney explains why McGuinty’s win is tragic:

It’s because of one word, a word that was barely spoken during the campaign: Caledonia.

The story is familiar, but warrants recapping: In 2006, sections of that small town were occupied by Six Nations native “protestors” (read: thugs) who were protesting the development of a new subdivision that the thugs believed encroached on their land. The native thugs terrorized local residents, driving some from their homes. Citizens, and police officers, were assaulted. Public property was destroyed.

The Ontario Provincial Police did nothing, despite the palpable shame of many of the officers who were clearly humiliated at standing by and doing nothing while the law was flagrantly broken before their eyes. It was clear to any observer that they had been ordered to simply keep the sides separated and not worry too much about such trivialities such as arresting criminals and detaining them until the Crown could lay charges. They were, as Dalton McGuinty told our editorial board last month, peacekeepers. As he said then, he wished he could give them all a blue helmet.

Nice, fluffy sentiment. Premier Dad at his best. But there’s a problem with it: The police are not peacekeepers. That’s the military’s job. The job of the police is to enforce the law. And it’s not a small difference. Our entire civilization hinges upon the public trusting the government to maintain the lawful peace and at least a rough approximation of justice. In Caledonia, the Liberals didn’t even try.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress