Monday, June 26, 2006

Tory math makes children cry



Since the minority Tory government was installed in January, the Conservatives have made quite a lot of noise about the importance of their budgetary tax cuts and changes in government spending. In addition to a $1200 per year child support allowance, the Tories have promised a one percent reduction to the GST, a slight increase to the personal exemption credit, a much-needed mass transit credit worth 15.5% of the cost of a pass, and a tax increase from 15 to 15.5 percent on the first $36,000 of your income. That last point is worth noting, as this is the first recorded instance in Canadian history of a government decreasing income taxes by increasing the income tax rate.

In reality, save for the transit credit there is no way that these tax cuts will amount to anything for the vast majority of Canadians. Only those whose income is high enough to allow them to freely spend thousands of dollars each month will see anything of merit. If you have an income of, say, $3000 per month, you might have $500 of it to spend at your leisure. By lowering the GST by 1 percent, you will save around $5 of that $500 per month. A one percent reduction in retail tax does not address any of the problems faced by people who pay taxes or work in this country. It will not stimulate retail sales, or put any extra money back into the pockets of those who might need it.

Furthermore, it really is a shame that the plan for child care in this country fell through the floor. Since when does a $1200 yearly cheque pay for day care? By this, I can only assume that the Conservatives cannot rationalize their costs on this one. If they could, they would see that by giving working families $4.80 per business day (assuming you qualify for the full $1200; since the rebate is reduced by income, if you earn $30,000 you will not see anywhere near $1200) they are insulting employed parents by ignoring their actual living conditions. Furthermore, they are insulting early childhood care providers who surely make more than five bucks in a day. The old Liberal plan for child care was to increase the number of childcare facilities and staff to the point where it could be incorporated into the educational system as pre-kindergarten. Now I don’t like the Liberals either, but that sounds like a real plan. Some might even call it a strategy for future success. Now, to add balance to this argument let’s look again at the Conservative plan.

There is no Conservative plan for childcare in Canada. Instead, the Tories are doing something for which they have criticized every other party: throwing money at the problem. Literally. “Hey problem-with-childcare-in-Canda-wherein-working-families-
cannot-afford-childcare, how are you doing?” Stephen Harper might say. “Here’s $1200 bucks. Go away.”

To analogize, the Tory "plan" for daycare is akin to giving parents $15 bucks a day and calling it a functional educational system. Maybe the Tories thought you could add the $5 monthly GST rebate to the $4.80 childcare “program” to further provide for the well-being of your family. This brings the total amount of care that the Conservative government wishes for your children to $5.04 per day. Which is about the cost of a movie rental these days. Which gives us a TV babysitter in the guise of a Tory Childcare Plan. Moving on. Dot. Org.

More interesting to those who study semantics is the increase in the tax rate for income up to $36,400. I think it works as follows: for many workers, there will be an increase in the tax rate decrease of negative 0.5 percent. That’s right working-poor, look forward to that tax decrease of -0.5% as if you earn up to $36,400 you will not see your taxes go down, but rather in the negative-down direction. Which is up. As in the poor pay more taxes and have even less disposable income for the GST credit.

This now explains to me why the Tories have changed Canada’s strategy for childcare. To the best of my abilities, the assumption works like this. If you get two overworked parents to spend $1200 on miscellaneous crap to appease their tired lives, they will ignore the fact that their kids underperform at school and their taxes have negatively gone down. This underachieving lifestyle is due primarily to the lack of an “environment of intellectual interest”, which usually involves parents having the time to involve themselves or the money to involve other people in the lives of their children. Hopefully, the $1200 also appeases the many single parents who might have a job or go to school and who thus far don’t have any choice but the whoever-works-for-free-oh-wait-you-aren’t-available-anymore policy that they can afford. In either case, neither parents nor their kids in these situations will have a good chance of securing the education they need to get good jobs and move them out of the $36,400 tax bracket. Since more taxpayers are to be found in a bracket which had its taxes decreased by negative 0.5 percent, the economy is stimulated enough to offset the $15 billion in increased military spending. Now that’s how you grow an economy, son!

Some economists hypothesize that the economy would be best stimulated by raising the disposable income of the bottom twenty percent of income earners. Their reasoning suggests that it is better for the economy and most citizens within to have one million consumers spend ten bucks each rather than one man spending ten million in one go. When you consider that the masses are going to make small purchases more habitual and frequent than the wealthy are going to make large ones, you cannot help but assume that tax cuts for the working poor will make more money available to the system as a whole and thus stimulate the economy in the negative-down direction.

None of these economists are in the employ of the Conservative government.

For such a junk budget, the transit tax break is nice to see, even if it is a direct descendent of a Liberal attempt to adhere with the Kyoto accord. Frankly, with the mounting expenses associated with global climate change, now is indeed the time to encourage progressive solutions such as mass transit through tax incentives.

I think the Conservative government needs to go back to school on the tax issue, that is assuming they don't use one of those "10 bucks per day" schools to which I earlier referred. Perhaps the real issue which we should discuss is why $15 billion of our money is being spent on military acquisitions. For example, maybe we could claw that back to $10 billion and spend the other five on a child care program. Oh wait, that was the last Liberal budget, wasn’t it???

I find it more than fascinating that Conservative parties tell us that they are the only ones who have the economic expertise to balance the books while they are in fact a most spendthrift group of faux-economists. Only after a few years will we see whether the Conservatives will maintain Canada’s world-leading budget surpluses (inherited from the Liberals) or squander the wealth for inaccurate tax cuts and bad spending. The fact is, if you search the net for any of Harper’s past writings or speeches, you’ll soon realize that this government is shying away from the media for the very obvious reason that it has a degenerate ideological approach to governance. By giving the Conservatives the vote at last election, we traded a child care plan from a group of lying backscratchers for a short-sighted rebate coupon from a group of covetous and prehensile ideologues whose numbers don’t add up.

By the way, did you notice that your taxes are going up this year?

Friday, June 16, 2006

An Inconvenient Truth



According to the vast majority of the world’s climatologists, when carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere reach 400 parts per million, we will have attained a level that can only be described as “dangerous”. At this point, the earth’s climate will have reached a “tipping point”, after which there is simply no return to the temperate climate which has sustained human civilization for the last ten thousand years. What puts this little fact into perspective is that our CO2 levels are currently sitting at 379 parts per million, and that number is increasing at a rate of 2 ppm per year (a figure which is itself growing as well). That gives us about ten years, folks.

Scientific data such as this constitute the heart of the film An Inconvenient Truth, which documents Al Gore’s project to bring awareness of the implications of climate change to the masses. Thankfully the film sticks to the climate message without getting bogged down in the behind-the-scenes showbiz minutiae of Gore’s speaking tour.

The facts of Gore’s case are ably presented by director Davis Guggenheim. In most cases, both Gore and the science he presents are allowed to speak for themselves. Gore explains some of the processes behind gathering and interpreting such data – ice cores, atmospheric readings, satellite data, etc. – and then follows through with the results, in a typically professional PowerPoint fashion.

It is important to stress that there is little to no dissension among the scientific community. Gore notes that while scientists are universal in warning us of the dangers we are presently facing, the media has considerably distorted and clouded the issue. You don’t have to look further than a recent Fox News (sic) piece in which a senior member of the National Center for Policy Analysis denounced the science in An Inconvenient Truth by referring to a paper which was published by his own organization (note: the NCPA is not a major centre for climatological research) instead of one from, say the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can see some more of Fox News (sic) in action here.

The “tipping point” that was referred to above works as follows. As the atmosphere accumulates CO2 and the Earth continues to warm, the polar ice caps begin melting. Since ocean water absorbs heat while ice reflects sunlight from the Earth, the arctic must be seen as a “canary in a mine”. Gore explains that if even only parts of the arctic melt, sea levels world wide would be raised seven metres, enough to submerge coastal cities such as San Francisco, Shanghai, Calcutta, and New York. When the arctic disappears, we will have a new climate and geography, period.

It’s a message that most people have heard before, although not likely in such a pressing or intimate manner. Gore likens it to the sudden awareness brought forth by science that cigarette smoking would prove fatal to most smokers. His own family earned a fair amount of money growing tobacco over the years until Gore’s sister, herself a smoker, died. We also get to see some telling photographs demonstrating the effects of climate change over the past few decades. One interesting bit of data that has presented itself to recently for this film to document is the occurrence of the fabled North-West Passage – a shipping lane that has been dreamt of for five centuries – in the Canadian arctic this winter. The times they are indeed a changin’.

Some of us had parents who would tell us almost every day of the week to take out the garbage. We ignored and ignored – sometimes even more so when the nagging persisted – and then all of a sudden garbage day had passed and we were left living with a smelly bag of garbage for another week or two. The insistence is more serious in the case of global warming. Since we are out of balance with the natural order of which we are a part, any catastrophic strain on the system is a catastrophe for us. The focus isn’t really on the future but rather, like Gore’s sister, how we live in the present.

After seeing the film, it is hard not to ask the question as to why the Democrats didn’t run with this at the heart of their 2000 presidential campaign. The Al Gore of this film is passionate, funny, intelligent, and a demonstrable leader. Perhaps the fires in Gore’s belly were lit when he saw the presidency stolen out from under him. At the same time, had the American population witnessed the passion and ability of 2006 Gore in 2000, the vote would likely not have been close enough to allow the legislative coup that brought Bush to office. One cannot help but wonder how differently this new millennium might have progressed under an Al Gore White House.

More importantly, maybe some real democratic change can be effected as distribution for this film expands. Gore’s take at Hollywood stardom right before mid-term elections and 18 months before the next presidential campaign might seem like post-modern politics at its best. However, even the most cynical viewers of An Inconvenient Truth will be hard pressed to ignore the consequences of inaction. Begin the process of change by taking several of your more environmentally sceptical friends to see this film.



continue watching the film