But

“Mail call will be welcomed by those inmates serving less than 90 days in provincial correctional facilities, as they are the only convicts eligible for the payments.”

Ok. That seems fine. Tax adjustments shouldn’t apply to inmates? So if an inmate has an income while in prison, and tax rates are increased for his tax bracket, he shouldn’t pay the increased rate?

I’m not that dense, I realize that considering the cheque literally as a bribe means why let criminal offenders benefit from a bribe, but of course it’s not actually a bribe. It’s a bit of money to say “Look, prices won’t come down overnight after businesses start seeing the benefits of HST, so in the meantime here’s a bit of cash to smooth things out.” People in prison for less than 90 days will certainly need that sort of help. And that’s fine.

It’s not a matter of why should they as in why would they feel any moral compunction to do so, but a matter of that’s just how competition works. Unless you have mass price fixing, eventually someone says “Hey, it’s costing me a bit less to produce my crap, so I’m going to lower my costs a bit to beat out my competition,” and then the competition does the same thing and so on and so forth until prices come down.

While we’re just picking numbers out of hats.

I’m thinking at least half of Rossi’s jobs have to be imaginary. That is, they’ll exist in his mind, but nobody will be doing them.

First off, I’m not sure where 9.6% comes from, but that’s fine. That may be the number for the actual city of Toronto. But then there aren’t 250,000 people looking for work in actual Toronto.

The article notes that “Rossi did not explain the formula he used . . . to come up with the 250,000 figure.”

OPTION ONE
Take population of Toronto (somewhere a bit over 2,500,000), multiply by apparent unemployment rate (9.6%), round up, equals 250,000. Which is patently ridiculous (a. it’s impossible to create a job for every single unemployed person, b. there aren’t actually 250,000 unemployed people in Toronto because at any given time about a third of the population (kids, retired people, the hopeless) aren’t looking for jobs). Therefore, Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

Unless… OPTION TWO
Forget about just Toronto. Consider the Toronto CMA. This includes Ajax, Aurora, Bradford West Gwillimbury, Brampton, Caledon, East Gwillimbury, Georgina, Halton Hills, King, Markham, Milton, Mississauga, Mono, New Tecumseth, Newmarket, Oakville, Orangeville, Pickering, Richmond Hill, Toronto, Uxbridge, Vaughan, Whitchurch-Stouffville. (NB: Most of these places are not voting for the mayor of Toronto.) Here there are a shade over 300,000 people looking for work. Create a job for 80% of them, equals 250,000. Of course, this would reduce the unemployment rate to about 2%. Which is economically impossible. Therefore, Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

Unless… OPTION THREE
What he’s really thinking is that his policies will create jobs throughout all of Ontario. In this case there are say, generously, 650,000 people looking for work. Figure you can make jobs for about 40% of them, equals 250,000. Of course, this would reduce the provincial unemployment rate to 5.5%. Which would be well below where it’s ever been before. Therefore, Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

CONCLUSION
Rocco Rossi is ridiculous.

The thing with music theft is people keep making it anyhow. The argument for strong intellectual property rights is primarily that without those rights people wouldn’t bother to innovate/invent/produce. And that’s probably true, generally. I don’t imagine Pfizer saying “That’s fine, even though everything we make is stolen we’ll continue investing billions in medical research.” But that’s apparently exactly what happens with music.

It’s not that “musicians in particular should be giving their music away for no cost” (emphasis mine), it’s that they do. Not intentionally of course (well, not usually), but they know while making music that it will be stolen in large quantities. Yet they keep doing it.

That said, what I personally support is something like an “Artistic Freedom Voucher.” Or full paper here.

Well, not quite, but still.

While a presumably off-the-cuff suggestion, given Canada’s favourable international standing and its financial sector’s general lack of collapse, this is probably a very real possibility. Better to appoint a non-European without any specific ties to any EU countries, although Governor of the Bank of Canada probably isn’t a position where you just give two weeks notice and delete your firefox history.

Also, I’m not clear on European attitudes towards the IMF. I assume “good for others but not for us,” but when you’re
fucked, sometimes attitudes can change.

The Star reports:

The average resale price of a home rose by 19.3 per cent in 2009 to $337,410, despite higher unemployment and the start of economic recovery, said Edward Jones.

“The relative strength of Canadian housing prices in the face of the recent economic recession suggests caution,” said the report by analysts Kate Warne and Craig Fehr.

Things do feel very bubbly in places. The ratio of purchase price to annual rent looks to me to be around 20-25 in Toronto, and should definitely be no higher than 20, probably more like 15.

I wonder whether this is due to the limits on rent increases in residential rental properties generally below normal housing appreciation. There’s no sense renting a house that you can only raise rates on each year at half the rate the house is growing in value. Plus there’s the tax exemption on the sale of a primary residence. Essentially home ownership is subsidized for no real reason.

But still, assuming those subsidies are safe, a 20% decline seems reasonable, at a minimum. “Last Friday, prominent Bay St. economist David Rosenberg predicted a 20 per cent decline in average Canadian house prices.” Of course that doesn’t have to be all at once. Prices could simply fail to rise for a decade.

I’d like to see a price/square foot:people/square kilometer kind of figure, historically, adjusted for inflation. If someone knows where I might find such a thing.

In the same article I mentioned there, Rossi suggests that “since energy rates are provincially regulated, consumers don’t have to worry that privatizing the utility will lead to a rate increase.”

I think the customer service aspect should be part of the conversation. Rogers is terrible (I know), Bell is terrible (I know), Telus is terrible (I’ve heard), everybody’s terrible, but at least you can say “Fuck it, I’m going to your competitor.” Yes, it’s an oligopoly and still blows, but it’s something. If someone’s going to be given a monopoly on something, it shouldn’t just be their pricing that’s regulated, but their customer service. Require certain measurable goals to be met.

Also, with revenues of $2.5 billion, and profits of $42.8 million, Toronto Hydro would be a very large private company. Presumably even bigger if the sale goes over well with the public and similar proposals start spreading in municipalities around the GTA, then leading to mergers (if allowed). The point being, this would go from being part of the government, to a very large private company with a very significant incentive to start putting its resources towards political gain, to adjust the rules governing it.

That sounds familiar: “But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Obama said that not too long ago.

In both cases the remarks are vague enough to be both true and disconcerting.

The throne speech comment is followed immediately with “Spending designed for a rainy day should not become an all-weather practice.” Again, vague enough to be both true and disconcerting.

Spending isn’t necessarily bad. Spending more than you make isn’t necessarily bad either. So long as the spending is useful.

Also, I don’t know about the rest of the country, but there’s clearly a housing bubble in Toronto. You can rent for well below the cost of owning. Maybe this is a demographic thing with too many 20- and 30-somethings buying a house just because it’s what you’re supposed to do? I don’t know, it’s a hypothesis I’m not going to examine right now. Or a rush ahead of the increased restrictions? Are there readily available data on the types of mortgages being taken out? When everything crashes, the next mayor’s going to be fucked.

Didier Sornette thinks so, and is setting out to prove it. Not to prove necessarily that he can do it any given time, but that it’s possible. “The first hypothesis is that financial (and other) bubbles can be diagnosed in real-time before they end. And the second is that the termination of financial (and other) bubbles can be bracketed using probabilistic forecasts, with a reliability better than chance.”

Three forecasts have been made and sealed, to be unveiled May 1, 2010. I’m not sure how many instances you need to prove better/equal to/worse than chance, but it will at least be interesting to see what comes out of that box.

CCPA reports have argued in the past that the minimum wage should put someone working full-time, full-year at (and ideally, above) the poverty line (in this case Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cut-Off). The latest stats put the LICO in 2008 at $22,171 (before taxes) for a single person living in a city larger than 500,000 people. This translates into $10.66 an hour for someone working 40 hours per week, and $12.18 per hour for someone working 35 hours per week (based on 52 weeks, assuming some of this is paid vacation).

That sounds pretty reasonable. I don’t think it’s simply the case that the poverty line at a regular work week is the prima facie correct determining factor. If there were fewer jobs that required so little education or skill that they could all be filled by students and people working just to get out of the house, then they may as well be paid according to market forces. But since things aren’t that way, and probably won’t be in my lifetime (I assume they’ll go the other direction, if anywhere), then fine.

But the bigger question raised is this:

Even these figures are arguably way too low for someone living in a major Canadian city, like Vancouver, where the cost of living (housing, in particular) is much higher. Statscan does not calculate LICOs for big cities, but based on higher housing costs alone (say a $500 place in a smaller centre rents for $1,000 in the city, that is an extra $6,000 in after-tax income required) this adjustment would add another $4-5 per hour.

What scheme would deal with this in a not too disruptive manner? You don’t want to condemn the lower class in cities to a poverty they would escape elsewhere. But you don’t want to create flight to the city scenarios where every uneducated worker decides to move to the higher wages. And if you institute a higher wage for, say, Toronto, then what do businesses on the border in Mississauga do? They raise wages. And then Brampton. Maybe it fades out by degrees, eventually. Yeah, that sounds good to me. Let’s give it a shot.