wealth

Thursday September 16, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday September 16, 2021

Jagmeet Singh takes aim at billionaires, promises to close corporate tax loopholes

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is recommitting to a crackdown on artful tax dodgers with high net worth.

February 10, 2021

The pledge is part of a basket of measures that aim to raise revenue while lowering inequality, but that fall short of covering the marquee expenditures atop the New Democrats’ election platform, economists say.

At a campaign stop across the Rideau Canal from Parliament, Singh said he would zero in on tax evasion and close loopholes that benefit billionaires.

“We believe that the ultrarich should pay their fair share so we can invest in people,” Singh said.

November 7, 2017

“(Liberal Leader) Justin Trudeau and Conservatives before him have let the super rich have a free ride. We want to put an end to that.”

The New Democrats’ plan to halt that luxury flight ranges from tougher enforcement at the Canada Revenue Agency to enhancing corporate tax transparency and capping stock option gains that are taxed at a lower rate.

Singh said the moves could raise revenue to help pay for programs such as universal pharmacare and more affordable housing. He suggested that investing an additional $100 million in the CRA would lead to a return of up to $25 billion in taxes and revenue in one year.

October 27, 2017

He also spoke about cracking down on large companies that make profits in Canada but pay little to no taxes here.

“These are tens and tens of billions of dollars of revenue that we could increase that would help us pay for the programs that we need,” he said.

In 2019, two reports from the CRA and the parliamentary budget officer found that Ottawa could be losing out on up to $51 billion in uncollected taxes each year due to illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance, both of which rely heavily on offshore tax havens.

CRA data from earlier this summer showed its recent efforts to combat tax evasion by the super rich resulted in zero prosecutions or convictions.

Big-ticket items in the NDP platform include: a guaranteed livable income; universal pharmacare and dental care as well as free mental health care for uninsured patients; $10-a-day childcare “for all parents”; an end to for-profit long-term care; and slashed student debt.

Some of the promises start with smaller targets — the guaranteed minimum income would begin with low-income seniors and Canadians with disabilities — but look to scale up to comprehensive social programs.

They don’t come cheap.

A guaranteed livable income would cost taxpayers between $84.2 billion and $197.2 billion annually by 2024-25, depending on the parameters, according to a November report from the parliamentary budget officer.

The NDP’s universal pharmacare scheme would see Singh spend $38.5 billion over five years, reaching more than $11 billion annually by 2024-25, according to an estimate by budget officer Yves Giroux published Friday.

A national child-care program that sets its sights on $10 a day will cost about $30 billion over five years, based on the amount earmarked for it in the Liberal budget from April.

June 18, 2020

As a counterweight to that hefty expenditure scale, Singh has proposed higher taxes on wealthy Canadians and corporations.

The measures include a wealth tax of one per cent on households with fortunes topping $10 million, an income tax hike of two points to 35 per cent for the highest bracket and a three-point hike to put the corporate tax rate at 18 per cent.

Singh would also impose a 20 per cent foreign buyers’ tax on residential property purchases and a temporary COVID-19 “excess profit tax” of 15 per cent, applicable to extra earnings by big companies. (Global News) 

 

Saturday July 24, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday July 24, 2021

Athletes need a bigger slice of Olympic pie

Money makes the world go round, as they say, and Exhibit A must surely be the Tokyo Olympics.

March 16, 2020

Thousands of athletes from more than 200 countries are literally flying around the world during a pandemic for these Games because of the billions of dollars the broadcast rights are worth to the International Olympic Committee.

There are incredible challenges to hosting and competing in the delayed 2020 Games, which opened on Friday against the desire of the Japanese public, but it’s good business. Indeed, American broadcast giant NBC has already said it expects these Games to be its most profitable ever.

But with all this money sloshing around why does so little of it get to the athletes — a.k.a. the talent that makes the whole show possible?

London – July 27, 2012

The Olympics abandoned its ideals of amateur sport decades ago; we all know that. But these COVID Games — in empty stadiums, with no family and friends to share the experience, and no socializing among athletes to somehow make the world a better place through sport — have stripped away whatever pretence was left that the Olympics are more than a gargantuan money-making TV show.

It’s time the athletes — supported by fans — band together to demand a greater share of the Games revenues.

The athletes who spend years training and competing for these few weeks, made all the harder this time by the pandemic, deserve a fairer share of the financial rewards.

August 3, 2012

Officially, the IOC is a not-for-profit but this is not some shaky charity — it’s a multi-billion-dollar behemoth. It has more than $5 billion (U.S.) in assets, a reserve fund around $1 billion and its average annual revenues exceed $1.4 billion.

The IOC likes to say it spends 90 per cent of its Olympic revenues to “assist athletes and develop sport worldwide.” 

But the vast majority of that is spent on promoting the Olympic brand through a dizzying array of subsidiaries and affiliates, organizing future Games, and helping international sport federations and national Olympic committees. Not funding athletes. 

2016 Summer Olympic Games

The IOC spends a mere 4 per cent of its revenue directly on athletes through scholarships, grants and awards, according to a study by the Global Athlete advocacy group and Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management.

To put that in context, the players in the top professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey leagues get around 50 per cent of their league’s revenues.

It’s not directly comparable, of course, but it’s obvious the IOC should be directing a lot more of its extensive income to the athletes who make the Olympic show possible.

December 6, 2012

And if, as a consequence, the IOC had less money to spend on promoting itself, contributing to well-heeled middlemen and encouraging countries to take on appalling costs to host future Games, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Far from making life easy for athletes, the IOC has a rule that limits how much athletes can raise through their personal sponsors (should they be so lucky to have some) during the Games. It’s been relaxed recently, but not enough.

The truth is most Canadian Olympic athletes rely heavily on federal athlete assistance funding, side jobs, grants from the athlete charity CAN Fund, and the bank of mom and dad in order to train and compete at the level required for the Olympics. 

March 3, 2010

Nationally carded athletes report an average annual income of $28,000 — about minimum wage — leaving them with a deficit of $22,000, states a Sport Canada report.

They’re spending more to live, train, travel and compete than they make from sport. The Olympics relies on athletes and their families being willing to do this year in and year out.

They put on the show and yet the lion’s share of the money never gets near their pockets. It’s long past time that changed.

Calls for a fairer distribution of Olympic dollars are long-standing. And, thankfully, an increasing number of groups are starting the work of organizing athletes from around the globe in dozens of sports to push for change.

Athens – September 1, 2004

The International Swimmers’ Alliance is working to increase athlete influence over the sport and improve the financial situation of its athletes. 

The Athletics Association is looking to become a unifying and vocal voice for elite track and field athletes. Global Athlete wants to help drive a healthier power balance between athletes and sport leaders.

They’re all nascent movements and it will be an uphill battle. But it’s the right battle to take on.

The IOC makes more money. Broadcasters like NBC make more money. It’s time athletes got a bigger share.

Earlier this week, IOC president Thomas Bach updated the Olympic motto. It’s now Faster, Higher, Stronger — Together. The change, he said, was about adapting “to our times.”

Well, the Olympic funding model needs an update, too.

If we’re really in this together, the athletes who will entertain and inspire us over the next two weeks with all those faster, higher, stronger achievements should reap more of the rewards. (The Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Tuesday July 13, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday July 13, 2021

Space Billionaires, Please Read the Room

Dear billionaires, no one cares whom you beat to space.

After Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, announced that he would join the first crewed flight by his rocket company, Blue Origin, later this month, Richard Branson just couldn’t let himself be outdone.* So now Branson, merely the world’s 589th richest person, is joining the crew of his next Virgin Galactic flight on Sunday, nine days before Bezos goes vertical.

May 11, 2021

All of this to go to “space.” Branson will go only about 50 miles up, where the military says space starts. Bezos will go 12 miles higher, just past the internationally recognized Karman Line, but he’ll be there for only four minutes.

Could there be a worse time for two über-rich rocket owners to take a quick jaunt toward the dark? Especially in the United States, the climate crisis is now actually starting to feel like a crisis. The western U.S. is in the thick of fire season, experiencing record-breaking drought and temperatures. Last week, Bezos’s hometown of Seattle hit 108 degrees. Hurricane season is starting early, and a once-in-200-years flood just ravaged northern Mississippi. Oh yeah, then there’s the pandemic that is very much still not over. Anyone would want a break from this planet, but the billionaires are virtually the only ones who are able to leave.

Leaving Earth right now isn’t just bad optics; it’s almost a scene out of a twisted B-list thriller: The world is drowning and scorching, and two of the wealthiest men decide to … race in their private rocket ships to see who can get to space a few days before the other. If this were a movie, these men would be Gordon Gekko and Hal 9000—both venerated and hated. Maybe, I don’t know, delay the missions a bit until people around the world are no longer desperately waiting for vaccines to save them from a deadly virus.

To their credit, the two billionaires aren’t totally oblivious. In recent years, Branson has proposed a climate dividend, while Bezos has pledged to spend $10 billion on climate efforts, though we still don’t know where most of that money will go. But given what humanity has been through in the past year and a half, I can’t help but wonder, what are they thinking? (I reached out to both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic for comment and neither company responded. Branson has insisted that he is not in a competition with Bezos.)

January 6, 2020

And it’s not just them that make this display feel so gross. Their fellow billionaire Elon Musk (currently the No. 2 richest person, if you’re keeping track) may not be far behind in his own space travels and is in the midst of ruining the night sky with his mega-constellation of satellites. While Bezos and Branson will be in space—I mean, “space”—for just a few minutes, their departure is yet another reminder of all the other earthly things they can avoid that the rest of us can’t. Billionaires have purchased private islands, built underground bunkers, and gotten LASIK to prepare for not having glasses during the climate apocalypse. They can’t truly escape Earth now, and they likely never will, but they can avoid helping make this planet better.

However, even after their trip past the atmosphere, the space billionaires still have to come back here and face the world. When they are pushed upward into the sky, they will live-stream their experience, their bodies briefly floating, staring out at the curvature of our delicate and beautiful planet, all of us invisible. Will leaving Earth change them?

This is one of the universal sentiments that astronauts express once setting foot back on the ground: Looking at Earth, from up above, gives you a different perspective, enough to shift something inside. “The thing that really surprised me was that [Earth] projected an air of fragility,” the Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins said. “And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.” Maybe this quick trip really will change the billionaires, but I’m not counting on it. After all, they’re only going to “space.”

*This article previously misstated that Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are vying to become the first billionaires in space. In fact, at least one billionaire, Charles Simonyi, has already traveled to space. (The Atlantic) 

 

Wednesday April 27, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 28, 2021

A tale of immuno-privilege

March 20, 2021

We are immuno-privileged. You might think this adjective is a neologism applicable to bodies vaccinated against Covid-19, but that is not quite it. We were already immuno-privileged before, when we started working from home and did not sink into poverty from losing our income, when we were not frontline workers providing care during the pandemic, or simply when we did not catch the coronavirus because we were living in the halfway world of social isolation. And now that we are vaccinated, we have added another layer of privilege to the term. As documented Latin American women living in the United States, we received the vaccine before our elderly parents in Argentina and Brazil.

February 2, 2021

We feel a dual sense of unease and relief because we are bodies rendered immuno-privileged by life’s inequalities. While it is true that every privilege is a form of immunization, not every immunization comes in the form of a vaccine. Being a man in a patriarchal society is a form of immunization for misogyny, just as being a white body offers immunization against police violence. The vaccine merely makes a product out of what our bodies had already experienced as privilege, naturalized by the policies of life. And like all products, there are disputes over access, control, and distribution. While 26% of the US population has already been fully vaccinated (that is, received all required doses), Argentina has only immunized about 2% of its population and Brazil has reached only 4%. Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas and the Caribbean, has not even begun its vaccination drive. To date, less than 2% of all Covid-19 vaccines administered worldwide have been distributed on the African continent, which is home to 16% of the world’s population.

It is obvious that unequal vaccine distribution has global consequences since it allows new variants to emerge and thus means even the vaccinated may be infected.

January 28, 2021

Here are the geopolitics of immuno-privilege: by early April, 87% of administered vaccines had gone to inhabitants of high- or middle-income countries, whereas only 0.2% had been administered in low-income countries. If global vaccination rates remain at these levels, it will take four to five yearsto reach herd immunity – that is, full vaccination of 70% to 85% of the population. It is readily obvious that unequal vaccine distribution has immediate global consequences since it allows new variants to emerge and thus means even the vaccinated may be infected. But from the other ways we experience privilege, we know that addressing inequality does not mesh well with distributive policies, and countries will begin disputing these products. Hoarding becomes a way to exercise control, and selfish nationalism takes the reins in negotiations between countries.

Wealthy countries have secured vaccine reserves well beyond what is needed to vaccinate their populations. Vaccine development was contingent on this surplus because no vaccine could have been developed this quickly without government investment. But rather than negotiating intellectual property agreements to facilitate equitable vaccine access for middle-income countries with production capability, the governments of rich nations have opted to guarantee their own surplus, under the mattress. Save your own people first, and then think about others. In keeping with this logic, the United States has donated doses to Mexico and Canada, while China is negotiating with Brazil.

Pandemic Times

Countries are concerned about their own borders or their own trade agendas – about folks whose access to this immuno-privilege matters not because of the genteel values of dignity or right to life, but rather because they are trade partners or political allies. From this twisted perspective of who gets immunized and who is left to die, we find ourselves as privileged bodies not because of who we are, but as the lawful inhabitants of a territory that is not our homeland. Sad to say, there is no way we can distribute our immuno-privilege; it becomes inalienable individual property. This is yet another piece of property for bodies who have survived thanks to privilege and are now privileged because of something we had not seen as property: legitimately and temporarily inhabiting a country that hoards vaccines. (El Pais) 

 

Friday February 19, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 19, 2021

Texas, Land of Wind and Lies

Politicians are neither gods nor saints. Because they aren’t gods, they often make bad policy decisions. Because they aren’t saints, they often try to evade responsibility for their failures, asserting either that they did as well as anyone could have or that someone else deserves the blame.

October 3, 2014

For a while, then, the politics surrounding the power outages that have spread across Texas looked fairly normal. True, the state’s leaders pursued reckless policies that set the stage for catastrophe, then tried to evade responsibility. But while their behavior was reprehensible, it was reprehensible in ways we’ve seen many times over the years.

However, that changed around a day after the severity of the disaster became apparent. Republican politicians and right-wing media, not content with run-of-the-mill blame-shifting, have coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead — the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.

This isn’t normal political malfeasance. It’s the energy-policy equivalent of claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag Antifa operation — raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents. And it’s another indicator of the moral and intellectual collapse of American conservatism.

The underlying story of what happened in Texas appears to be fairly clear. Like many states, Texas has a partly deregulated electricity market, but deregulation has gone further there than elsewhere. In particular, unlike other states, Texas chose not to provide power companies with incentives to install reserve capacity to deal with possible emergencies. This made power cheaper in normal times, but left the system vulnerable when things went wrong.

Texas authorities also ignored warnings about the risks associated with extreme cold. After a 2011 cold snap left millions of Texans in the dark, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission urged the state to winterize its power plants with insulation, heat pipes and other measures. But Texas, which has deliberately cut its power grid off from the rest of the country precisely to exempt itself from federal regulation, only partially implemented the recommendations.

And the deep freeze came.

January 31, 2019

A power grid poorly prepared to deal with extreme cold suffered multiple points of failure. The biggest problems appear to have come in the delivery of natural gas, which normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity, as wellheads and pipelines froze. Nor was this merely a matter of the lights going out; people are freezing too, because many Texas homes have electric heat. Many of the homes without electrical heat rely on, yes, natural gas. We’re looking at enormous suffering and, probably, a significant death toll.

So Texas is experiencing a natural disaster made significantly worse by major policy errors — and the officials who made those errors should be held accountable.

Instead of accepting responsibility, however, officials from Gov. Greg Abbott on down, backed by virtually the entire right-wing media complex, have chosen to lay the blame on green energy, especially wind power.

November 29, 2018

Now, it’s true that the state generates a lot of electricity from wind, although it’s a small fraction of the total. But that’s not because Texas — Texas! — is run by environmental crazies. It’s because these days wind turbines are a cost-effective energy sourcewherever there’s a lot of wind, and one thing Texas has is a lot of wind.

It’s also true that extreme cold forced some of the state’s insufficiently winterized wind turbines to shut down, but as I said, this was happening to Texas energy sources across the board, with the worst problems involving natural gas.

Why, then, the all-out effort to falsely place the blame on wind power?

The incentives are obvious. Attacking wind power is a way for both elected officials and free-market ideologues to dodge responsibility for botched deregulation; it’s a way to please fossil fuel interests, which give the vast bulk of their political contributions to Republicans; and since progressives tend to favor renewable energy, it’s a way to own the libs. And it all dovetails with climate change denial.

But why do they think they can get away with such an obvious lie? The answer, surely, is that those peddling the lie know that they’re operating in a post-truth political landscape. When two-thirds of Republicans believe that Antifa was involved in the assault on the Capitol, selling the base a bogus narrative about the Texas electricity disaster is practically child’s play.

And if you’re expecting any change in the policies that helped cause this disaster, don’t count on it — at least as long as Texas remains Republican. Given everything else we’ve seen, the best bet is that demonization of wind power, not a realistic understanding of what actually happened, will rule policy going forward. (New York Times)