Democracy as stimulus
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - 18 Comments
Canadian Press explains why our fragile recovery depends on a fall election.
Just think of it as a $280-million stimulus package…
Peter Dungan, an economist at the University of Toronto, says the expense amounts to a “drop in a bucket” when set against the national economy. It is, however, targeted, timely and spread locally. ”It’s pretty clear that election expenses don’t get spent on imports,” said Dungan. “At least it is localized.”
A look through individual candidates’ 2008 receipts – available by appointment at Elections Canada – reveals the flurry of local largesse: pizza shops, printing houses, bus companies, computer stores, community newspapers, flower shops and a host of other suppliers all cashed in. Elections Canada also hires thousands of temporary workers, Dungan notes, which could prove timely in this autumn of rising unemployment.
“You might say there are more creative ways of doing that, but it does stimulate the economy,” said the professor. ”The idea that it’s a complete waste is not true.”
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Carney likes the look of 2010. This year, not so much.
By John Geddes - Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 12:36 PM - 8 Comments
The sleekly confident style of Mark Carney, the Bank of Canada’s youthful governor, was the featured act this morning in Ottawa. He’s emerging as one of the most interesting new figures on the federal scene, and the political implications of what he had to say about the economy are considerable.
Carney, 43, was appointed last year by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, reportedly on the strong recommendation of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Given the gruesome economy the government is now coping with, getting the made-for-TV technocrat on the case turned out to be a good call.
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Can we really spend our way out of this mess?
By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 12:00 AM - 87 Comments
The remarkable re-embrace of deficit spending is every bit as mindless as the financial panic that preceded it
The phrase “paradigm shift” was coined by the historian Thomas Kuhn to describe the process by which an old belief system, long entrenched and widely shared, is suddenly overthrown by a new one. But how to describe the sudden revival of an old belief system to replace the new?
How, in particular, to explain the remarkable re-embrace of deficit spending (“fiscal stimulus,” in the phrase of the moment) across much of the developed world—not only by the political class, for whom its appeal is obvious, but by much of the economics profession? How, when so little fresh evidence has been offered of its effectiveness, and so much of the original critique that first discredited it remains intact? And how, in Canada of all places, which suffered more than most from a previous generation’s experimentation with deficit finance, and where the case for Doing Something would seem less pressing than elsewhere?
