Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Vancouver Olympics--At What Price? For good alternative Olympics coverage, check out a three-part radio series entitled The Winter Olympics Comes to the Northwest...But at What Price? on KBCS community radio in Bellevue, Wash. (Part of this was rebroadcast on Boston's own Radio With a View this past Sunday--hat-tip to Mark and Dave for alerting us to this series. You can hear last Sunday's show for the next two weeks by clicking here, scrolling down, and clicking on the Feb. 14th link under the RWAV listing.) Also check out the No 2010 Olympics on Stolen Native Land website and the Vancouver Media Co-op website for updates on the excellent activism going on to disrupt the Olympics. Meanwhile, we bring you more satire about Canada from Maurice Dufour, professor of political science at Marianopolis College in Montreal: Arctic Power ... With Added Cleansers. If you like Maurice's satire, check out two of his earlier pieces for us: Shovel-Ready in Canada, about the supposed superiority of the Canadian banking system, and How to Make Mud Cookies, about famine in Haiti in the midst of the commodity crisis of 2008. One of his funniest for us, Hooked on Hydrocarbons, about the Alberta oil sands, is available only in the print edition. But email us and maybe we can send you a pdf (and try to convince you to subscribe). Labels: Canada, Maurice Dufour, Olympics, Stephen Harper, Vancouver, Vancouver Olympics Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). More on Canada (N. Folbre on NYT econ blog)More on Canada's banking system, as Pres. Obama visits our neighbor to the north. This one is by left economist and UMass-Amherst professor Nancy Folbre, at the New York Times Economix blog, to which she seems to be contributing regularly (we re-posted something by her from there on early childhood education last week). She makes some of the same points that Maurice Dufour makes in the article we posted this morning, but Folbre's discussion of public spending, and single-payer in particular, is excellent. And it is nice to see her criticize the fatuous Fareed Zakaria. (For a great critique of Zakaria's oeuvrre, see frequent D&S author Roger Bybee's article in Extra! from a few months back.Canada and the Recession: Angles of Deflection By Nancy Folbre O Canada. That big, beautiful country to the north is a lot like us, just colder and a few degrees less ... neoliberal. Canada has moved more slowly than the United States to deregulate its economy and shrink its social safety net. The resulting differences in the impact of global recession are small, but instructive. As Fareed Zakaria points out in a recent Newsweek article, Canada is weathering the financial crisis better than we are. Canadian banks are more old-fashioned (that is, centrally regulated) than our own. Stricter leverage requirements have been enforced. Subprime mortgages have not been encouraged. Prohibitions against foreign bank takeovers have protected Canadian institutions from competition from the United States, but also buffered them against financial contagion. Mr. Zakaria overstates the case when he claims that no government bailout has taken place there. The Canadian government has provided substantial assistance to the financial sector. But its efforts to increase available credit remain far less costly than our trillion-dollar subsidies. A more serious concern for Canadians is the likelihood that the sinking American and global economy will pull them down. If unemployment continues to rise over the next few months in the United States, as predicted, many families will lose their health insurance coverage or struggle to pay premiums they can ill afford. By contrast, increased unemployment won't reduce Canadian access to health care. As the economist (and fellow Economix blogger) Uwe Reinhardt explains, the single-payer Canadian health care system delivers very good results for about half the per-person cost of ours—with huge savings from reduced paperwork. Economic disparities in access to health care are significantly lower there. President Obama promises to expand health insurance coverage in the United States with little threat or inconvenience to the private sector. But some Democrats in Congress, led by Representative John Conyers, advocate a single-payer "Medicare for All" bill strongly influenced by the Canadian model. Both American and Canadian unemployment insurance systems are less generous than those of most countries of Northwestern Europe. Neither provides assistance for more than 40 percent of the unemployed. But Canadians have long provided a higher replacement rate for lost earnings. According to latest estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a married worker earning the average wage, with two children, could expect 78 percent wage replacement in Canada, compared to 52 percent in the United States. The differences are even greater for those earning higher than average wages, because of low benefit ceilings. The recently passed Economic Stimulus and Recovery Act offers incentives to states to expand unemployment provision to part-time workers and to those leaving jobs for "compelling family reasons." The Canadian unemployment insurance system offers more comprehensive family benefits, including paid sick leave, paid compassionate care leave, and paid maternal and parental leaves of up to 50 weeks. Many American workers aren't even eligible for the 12 weeks of unpaid family leave guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act—although President Obama promises to change that. There's no evidence that Canada's public provision of health care and social benefits has reduced its economic growth, and the federal budget just presented is the first to show a deficit in 11 years. What explains more support for public spending there? Slightly lower income inequality may encourage slightly more solidaristic policies. Such policies, in turn, reduce income inequality. The French social-democratic traditions of the province of Quebec exert a distinct influence. The Canadian political scientist Keith Banting argues that explicit efforts to develop a strong but multicultural national identity have strengthened norms of mutual support. The national anthem ends with a promise (at least in translation of the original French) to protect Canadian homes and rights. (This is the full post.) Labels: bailout, banking crisis, banking regulation, Barack Obama, Canada, Fareed Zakaria, financial crisis, Maurice Dufour, Nancy Folbre, Roger Bybee Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Canadian Banks--Shovel-ReadyAs Obama visits Canada today, we are posting an article by Maurice Dufour on the supposed health of the Canadian financial sector. Maurice has been livening up our pages with satirical articles, including most recently "Hooked on Hydrocarbons?", a piece on the Alberta oil-sands that takes seriously (sort of) the notion that the United States is "addicted to oil." The article is available only in the January/February print edition (here's the table of contents). Order that issue here; subscribe here.Shovel-Ready in Canada Pundits are praising the financial health of the United States's northern neighbor—but should they? Canadians have long been trying to shed what they feel is an undeserved stereotype, namely, that our country is boring. Try as we might, we can't seem to shake the association with dullness. The gap between our self-image and the way others perceive us is still yawning, so to speak. Recent developments might offer an opportunity for an extreme image makeover, though. That's because, amidst the recent global economic carnage, this country's financial system appears to have emerged relatively unscathed. So more and more people these days are actually getting excited when they think about the land of moose, Mounties and maple syrup. Now every country wants to be more like Canada, it seems. Read the rest of the article. Labels: bailout, Barack Obama, Canada, financia crisis, Maurice Dufour Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
