Category Fiscal policy
“But the pension fund was just sitting there”
The federal government’s economic update was released the other day, complete with the eye-catching proposal to be "debt-free" by 2021. I don’t know what’s worse: that the Conservatives expected it to be swallowed, or the fact that some journalists did. It turns out that the measure of debt they’re talking about is "net debt", which […]
Does government size matter?
In today’s National Post, William Watson says ‘Voters deserve to know where parties stand on size of public sector’. I suppose that’s true, but I really don’t see why it matters much. Here’s a graph of various rich countries’ GDP per capita and social spending: I don’t see any obvious tradeoff there. Nor has the […]
David Ricardo’s explanation for the decline in Canada’s savings rates
A graph taken from this IMF report:
An embarrassment of riches
The federal government has been running surpluses since 1997 (data available here), and these surpluses have been used to help drive Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio from 89% down to 44%. But now that we’ve retreated well back from the debt wall, Canadians are starting to wonder if surpluses are really what we want. After all, there […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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