{"id":40322,"date":"2017-09-30T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-09-30T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40322"},"modified":"2017-09-29T09:02:05","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T13:02:05","slug":"kathleen-wynnes-war-on-economics-is-going-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/30\/kathleen-wynnes-war-on-economics-is-going-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Wynne’s “War on Economics” is going great<\/em>!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Giving people “free” stuff will always get you support from people who don’t understand TANSTAAFL<\/acronym> (including the leader of the opposition), as Chris Selley<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

Polls suggest Premier Kathleen Wynne\u2019s ongoing war on economists is paying dividends. Fifty-three per cent approve of her Liberal government extending rent control to units built after 1991, according to a Forum Research poll conducted in May; only 25 per cent disapproved. In June, Forum found 53 per cent of Ontarians supported jacking up the minimum wage to $15 from $11.40 by Jan. 1, 2019, versus 38 per cent opposed. The move was hugely popular among Liberal voters (79 per cent) and NDP voters (28 per cent). Wynne\u2019s approval rating is staggering back up toward, um, 20 per cent. But a Campaign Research poll released Sept. 13 had the Tories just five points ahead of the Liberals. That\u2019s pretty great news for this beleaguered tribe.<\/p>\n

The boffins still aren\u2019t playing along, though.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Queen\u2019s Park\u2019s Financial Accountability Office projected the hike would \u201cresult in a loss of approximately 50,000 jobs \u2026 with job losses concentrated among teens, young adults, and recent immigrants.\u201d And it could be higher, the FAO cautioned, because there\u2019s very little precedent for, and thus little evidence on which to judge, a hike as rapid as the one the Liberals propose \u2014 32 per cent per cent in less than two years.<\/p>\n

This week, TD Economics weighed in with a higher number: \u201ca net reduction in jobs of about 80,000 to 90,000 positions by the end of the decade.\u201d And the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis paints the grimmest picture: \u201cWe (expect) that the Act will, over two years, put 185,000 jobs at risk\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s jobs that already exist or that would otherwise have been created.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why raising the minimum wage is popular. Governments like it because it doesn\u2019t show up in the budget. We in the media can pretty easily find victims of an $11.40 minimum wage, and reasonably compassionate people quite rightly sympathize. Forty hours a week at $11.40 an hour for 50 weeks a year is $22,800. You can\u2019t live on that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, these Liberal policies are flying in the face of mainstream economic theory, so you’d expect the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to have lots of arrows in the quiver to fight … oh, wait. Tory leader Patrick “I’m really a Liberal” Brown supports both the rent control and the minimum wage hike, just not quite as much at Wynne does. There’s Canadian “conservatism” in a nutshell for you: we also<\/em> want to get on the express to Venezuelan economic conditions, just not quite as fast as the government wants. There’s a reason Kathleen Wynne isn’t as worried about getting re-elected as she used to be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giving people “free” stuff will always get you support from people who don’t understand TANSTAAFL (including the leader of the opposition), as Chris Selley explains: Polls suggest Premier Kathleen Wynne\u2019s ongoing war on economists is paying dividends. Fifty-three per cent approve of her Liberal government extending rent control to units built after 1991, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,53],"tags":[957,96,87,1036,75],"class_list":["post-40322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-politics","tag-kathleenwynne","tag-minimumwage","tag-ontario","tag-rentcontrol","tag-tanstaafl"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aum","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40323,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40322\/revisions\/40323"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}