So what would an NDP government do?

[cybercoma]

You want to be PM ,then get rid of it. And how much does he make being leader of the NDP.

He wasn't leader of the NDP when he went to the party. There was a nomination election for the party leadership. Don't go twisting your timeline in a knot to fulfill the fantasy narrative you have in your mind about all this. Jack Layton was the leader and a very strong and popular one at that. Layton's diagnosis and death also came about far quicker than anyone expected and all of that happened after Mulcair joined the NDP. More importantly, the leadership convention was quite split on their decision at the time. Mulcair wasn't any sort of shoe in for it.

[Canada_First]

He wasn't leader of the NDP when he went to the party. There was a nomination election for the party leadership. Don't go twisting your timeline in a knot to fulfill the fantasy narrative you have in your mind about all this. Jack Layton was the leader and a very strong and popular one at that. Layton's diagnosis and death also came about far quicker than anyone expected and all of that happened after Mulcair joined the NDP. More importantly, the leadership convention was quite split on their decision at the time. Mulcair wasn't any sort of shoe in for it.

Mulcair was seemingly peoples second choice at the time he was elected leader. I was surprised when he was made leader.

[BC_chick]

I know that if I was a greedy opportunist, I would definitly turn down a consulting job for the newly elected PMO and I'd make that mad dash as an NDP in a province with zero previous allegiance to the party.

Anyone with a half working brain cell in 2008 could see the NDP was going to become the official opposition in 2011 and have a good chance of forming government in 2015.

Mulcair is a sellout. Shoe scum, I say.

Edited June 30, 2015 by BC_chick

[cybercoma]

Hey! That's my schtick!

[ironstone]

For starters,Nycole Turmel as President of the Treasury Board,maybe Libby Davies as Foreign Affairs Minister?

[cybercoma]

For starters,Nycole Turmel as President of the Treasury Board,maybe Libby Davies as Foreign Affairs Minister?

Libby Davies is retiring.

[BC_chick]

Hey! That's my schtick!

Your schtick is legendary, I'm not even in the same league.

[Keepitsimple]

Clammering is correct. Mulcair has already bee interviewed about this and clearly stated he questioned the party position on environmental issues, especially Kyoto, he ended the conversation. I suppose the Harper machine will try to keep it going, but its already yesterdays news.

Both sides can spin it as they see fit - but it's not the outcome that is damaging.....it's the fact that he willingly spoke with them at all! It's no different than Stephen Harper agreeing to sit down with the Liberals at any time prior to becoming PM. How do you think that would play in the media?

[On Guard for Thee]

Both sides can spin it as they see fit - but it's not the outcome that is damaging.....it's the fact that he willingly spoke with them at all! It's no different than Stephen Harper agreeing to sit down with the Liberals at any time prior to becoming PM. How do you think that would play in the media?

It happened 8 years ago.

[PrimeNumber]

It happened 8 years ago.

They're really really clammering!

[On Guard for Thee]

They're really really clammering!

I guess you have to dig deep when the polls are heading so far south.

[PrimeNumber]

I guess you have to dig deep when the polls are heading so far south.

We all knew it was coming. I just thought they'd try a little harder.

[On Guard for Thee]

We all knew it was coming. I just thought they'd try a little harder.

Well they certainly provided an option to return fire with what happened in the senate today with bill 377. Too bad its the BBQ circuit for the house but I reckon we will hear more of this.

[-1=e^ipi]

Originally, I did something more complicated, which took into account the crime feedback effect, but after I found that the crime feedback effect was relatively small compared to the health feedback, I decided to simplify things.

As I mentioned before, reducing income inequality or increasing economic output can improve physical health of a society, which can result in greater economic output and thus a feedback effect. Let Y be a measure of economic output, E be a measure of income inequality and H be a measure of the health of the population. Suppose that Y is a linear function of H, and that H is a linear functions of Y and E.

Suppose that initially, Y, E and H are all in equilibrium and at time t = 0 Y and E are increased by ΔY and ΔE respectively. Then at time t = 1, H will increase by ΔH = β1ΔY + β2ΔE and then at time t = 2, Y will increase by ΔY2 = β3ΔH, where the betas are known coefficients. This feedback will continue until a new equilibrium is reached. For this relation, the equilibrium change in Y is (1/(1 - β1β3))*(ΔY + β2β3ΔE).

So this gives me a way to take into account the positive feedbacks of health if β1, β2, and β3 are known (by rescaling the economic output). I'll use ln(GDP per capita) as my measure of economic output, the Gini coefficient as my measure of income inequality and life expectancy as my measure of health outcome. If I restrict my analysis to 24 western developed countries then variation in outcome due to cultural differences or levels of development or technology will be relatively small.

However, there are other things that may explain differences in economic output. In particular physical capital (the effect of which I can approximate with the ln of the savings rate), human capital (% of population with a tertiary education might be a good indicator of this) and efficiency (I can use ln(1-tax rate) to take into account efficiency due to tax and I can use ln(population) to take into account the economies of scale for having a larger population; I may also want to use a dummy variable for if a country is in Europe or not) are relevant. So I can estimate the effect of health on economic output using a population weighted regression that takes into other relevant factors. For the effect of economic output and inequality on health, I can do a simple population-weighted linear regression where a constant, economic output and inequality are the explanatory variables.

Using data on 24 countries, I estimate β1 = 0.638, β2 = -19.9, β3 = 0.0355. There are probably endogeneity issues, but I just want to see roughly the magnitude of this health feedback. If I redo the results of post #383 with this feedback effect, the optimal level of taxation increases by 5.15 percentage points.

[poochy]

I guess you have to dig deep when the polls are heading so far south.

You know exactly what you would be saying if it was the other way round, but intellectual honesty isn't your thing. I don't care a great deal, but it does seem a bit odd that it was ever a possibility, the idea that he 'just looked into it' as if he and the rest of us didn't know what the conservatives were 8 years ago is such a joke that it doesn't even warrant a mention. But, that's just real world stuff, also not your thing.

Edited July 2, 2015 by poochy

[Evening Star]

Both sides can spin it as they see fit - but it's not the outcome that is damaging.....it's the fact that he willingly spoke with them at all! It's no different than Stephen Harper agreeing to sit down with the Liberals at any time prior to becoming PM. How do you think that would play in the media?

i) Harper was a Young Liberal. I thought this was common knowledge.

ii) I could see this playing poorly with hardcore partisans but I think that it would play fine, even beneficially, with centrist swing voters.

iii) If I were inclined to support him, I would have taken more issue with the fact that he allowed the Alliance/PC merger after promising it wouldn't happen.

[Keepitsimple]

i) Harper was a Young Liberal. I thought this was common knowledge.

ii) I could see this playing poorly with hardcore partisans but I think that it would play fine, even beneficially, with centrist swing voters.

iii) If I were inclined to support him, I would have taken more issue with the fact that he allowed the Alliance/PC merger after promising it wouldn't happen.

Yes - it is common knowledge right in Wikipedia - as is the main reason why he left - Pierre Trudeau and the National Energy Policy. It's the same reason why most of the West continues to be a Liberal wasteland.

All that said - I don't think that Mulcair's dalliance with the Conservatives will hurt him - unless the Liberals return to their mean-spirited ways and start attacking him.

[PIK]

It was the liberals who started this story again.

[Evening Star]

If we're agreeing that this story is cheap and trivial, then I'd actually be interested in discussing what an NDP government would do. I like Mulcair, and prefer the NDP to the other two big parties, but I'm a bit ambivalent about their current platform as it is. I really hope that if they win, they don't reopen the Constitution over something as dumb as abolishing the Senate. (It makes sense for a federation to have an upper body with some sort of regional representation and senators do useful work. Either way, it's definitely not worth going through another round of Constitutional negotiations.) I do hope that there could be some way for Quebec to sign on without demanding something like Meech Lake again, though: Couillard has expressed some interest and I wonder if a Quebec PM might facilitate this. That's more of a pipe dream without any real basis in things that Mulcair has been talking about, though, really.

If we do have to move towards PR, this is the best proposal that I've seen. I don't want to see a mixed-member sort of system, mainly because I don't think that local representatives and partisan hacks from a party list should have the same status. I think I would probably be happiest with a FPTP system where MPs have greater autonomy, maybe with some opportunity for voter recall?

Modest carbon taxes and slightly higher corporate taxes would probably be fine, although as I stated earlier, my preference would be for higher personal income taxes and reasonably low business taxes. I tend to agree with taxing capital gains along with income, actually. I don't see why returns on investment in other people's work should be treated more favourably than money that one actually works for.

Reinstating home delivery of mail seems like a good idea to me, considering how helpful it could be to people who are elderly or disabled, and considering that Canada Post has mostly been running profits anyway.

I'm not yet sure what I think of a federal day-care programme. It could be helpful but I'm not sure that it should be done at the federal level. I do hope they scrap income-splitting. I would hope that they would scrap many of the other tax credits, TFSAs, and raise the GST back up, but I doubt that they would do these things.

A $15/h federal minimum wage does not really seem like a great idea to me. $15/h means very different things in different parts of the country. I can see a reason for the feds to set a basic minimum but whether or not the wage should be that high seems like something that should be decided at a lower level.

Where I think they would be a major improvement is in scrapping disastrous legislation such as C-51 and C-24. I also expect that they would have greater regard for academic freedom as pertains to e.g. scientists and librarians in the public sector, and with less of a push towards earmarking federal scholarship/grant money to business-oriented projects. I expect greater support for public broadcasting as well. These issues carry quite a bit of weight with me.

I expect a move away from so-called 'tough on crime' legislation, which imo does not achieve its stated purpose.

Edited July 3, 2015 by Evening Star

[Evening Star]

I've also got real concerns about how readily the current government has entered into deals like the FIPA with China. I would hope that an NDP government would show more caution here.

[Evening Star]

In my dreams, there is a highly principled small-l liberal party for me. The LPC disgusts me, however. I'd be interested to see what the Greens come up with. (I expect that eventually they will replace the Liberals as the centre party.)

[-1=e^ipi]

Modest carbon taxes and slightly higher corporate taxes would probably be fine

What counts as modest carbon dioxide emission taxes? How are you determining what is modest?

I tend to agree with taxing capital gains along with income, actually. I don't see why returns on investment in other people's work should be treated more favourably than money that one actually works for.

You already tax people when they earn money (income tax) and when they use that money to consume things (consumption tax), if you now have a tax on capital gains, that is triple taxation. It also makes saving less favorable compared to using your money right away, which leads to a lower savings rate (thus lower long run gdp).

[-1=e^ipi]

The LPC disgusts me, however. I'd be interested to see what the Greens come up with.

The anti-science party that hates nuclear energy and GMOs? How do they not disgust you as well?

[Evening Star]

What counts as modest carbon dioxide emission taxes? How are you determining what is modest?

Hm, I guess I don't really have a hard answer here. I'll think.

You already tax people when they earn money (income tax) and when they use that money to consume things (consumption tax), if you now have a tax on capital gains, that is triple taxation.

I don't really agree here. First, we do have capital gains taxes already. Only 50% of one's capital gains are taxed now, though. The NDP is talking about taxing all of them.

I can see how a consumption tax could be interpreted as 'double taxation' since one has already paid tax on the income that one is using to buy things, at which point one pays another tax. However, a capital gains tax is different. You are not being taxed on the earned (or inherited or etc.) income that you put into an investment. You are taxed on the additional income that is generated as a result of the investment. I don't see this as triple taxation on the same income.

Edited July 3, 2015 by Evening Star

[-1=e^ipi]

I can see how a consumption tax could be interpreted as 'double taxation' since one has already paid tax on the income that one is using to buy things, at which point one pays another tax. However, a capital gains tax is different. You are not being taxed on the earned (or inherited or etc.) income that you put into an investment. You are taxed on the additional income that is generated as a result of the investment. I don't see this as triple taxation on the same income.

It's triple taxation because that money invested had to be earned at some point.

With respect to how it affects the decision on how much money to save, let's say I have $1000. I can spend it today or I can invest it and then spend the money + interest in 1 years time. Let's say that the interest is 5%, so my decision is $1000 today or $1050 in a year. Now if you have a capital gains tax, that interest is effectively lower (let's say 20% of capital gains are taxed; so the effective interest rate is 4%). Now the decision is $1000 today or $1040 in a year. The capital gains tax makes it less desirable to save, thus it lowers the savings rate.