Author Archives: wciecon
Julie Dixon’s alternative to the bank tax
Stephen has already posted on Canada's opposition to the proposed international bank tax. I agree with his main point. There is no way Canadian banks (and their customers and workers, who bear the incidence of that tax) should be paying for failures of other countries' banks, regulated (or not) by other countries' regulators. That just […]
L’Europe et l’alchimie monétaire
Cet article nous est envoyé par Guillaume Nolin, qui participe régulièrement ici sur WCI. Les événements survenus en Grèce au cours des derniers jours nous forcent à nous questionner sur la précarité de notre situation économique. L’image d’une Grèce prodigue, sorte de cigale en préretraite manifestant violemment pour conserver des acquis sociaux illusoires, est certes […]
The Eurozone lender of last resort?
OK. Let's simplify this whole Eurozone mess. Central banks do two things:
The optimal destruction of wolves
This post is not about wolves. Sorry. You are an armed shepherd guarding 16 sheep against circling wolves. There are more wolves than you have bullets. It takes ki wolves to kill one sheep, where ki is the strength of sheep i. The number of wolves is greater than SUM{ki}, so they could kill all […]
The rebound in federal government revenues
The Department of Finance publishes monthly numbers for how much money it has taken in, and how much it has spent. It chooses to run these numbers on the afternoon of the last Friday of the month these days. I'm pretty sure that when the feds were running surpluses, these numbers were released first thing […]
Are we wasting half our hockey talent?
Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book Outliers writes “Those born in the last quarter of the year might as well give up on hockey…” Why? There is …an iron law of Canadian hockey: in any elite group of hockey players – the very best of the best – 40 percent of the players will have […]
Negative and Positive sovereign debt feedback loops
There are two sorts of countries: countries that can print money to pay their sovereign debts; and countries that can't. Canada is a printer; Greece is a non-printer. Both sorts of countries can get into trouble if they issue too much sovereign debt; but they get into very different types of trouble. Printers get into […]
Why Aren’t There More Voluntary Aspirational Taxes?
This probably should be part of my tax series, but I thought I would pose the question to the readership. Provincial and municipal governments are always looking for additional money, but taxes are unpopular and have unpleasant economic side effects. Municipal governments and school boards also need to assign names to roads and schools. Why […]
Why is the personal income tax system so complicated?
It wasn't always this way. Recent budgets have seen a flowering of special credits – the employment amount, public transit amount, children's fitness amount, home buyer's amount, the textbook amount, just to name a few. More and more, support for Canadians in need comes through the income tax system. So now your tax return contains […]
Units
Nothing really new here (for most economists). Just the old story re-told. Back in high school, I figured out something neat about units. Both sides of an equation had to have the same units. Obvious now, but I thought it was neat, because it let me "cheat" on exams. If I was too lazy to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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