Category Inequality
Should recent immigrants be eligible for Old Age Security?
Most Canadian seniors are guaranteed an income above the poverty line by Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada Pension Plan. Seniors are less likely to be poor than children or adults under 65 – with one exception. Mike Veall has found that 71 percent of recent immigrants aged 66 and older have […]
“How the ultra-rich get even richer”
That's the title of my latest column on high-income concentration at Canadian Business. Notwithstanding the title, the article's main point is that we don't know how it's happening.
The anglosphere and high-income concentration
Anthony Atkinson and Andrew Leigh have a working paper on the strikingly similar patterns in high-end income concentration in five English-speaking countries.
An update on the concentration of income in Canada
Yesterday saw an odd coincidence: The Globe and Mail ran a bunch of articles about the 10-figure salaries earned by a small number of people ([1],[2],[3]). McMaster University's Mike Veall passed along updated data (preliminary paper and data files [1], [2], [3]) confirming the trend in which income is increasingly concentrated among a small number […]
Lloyd George and Avatar
I haven't seen Avatar. That's good. It means I can take a clearer look at the underlying policy problem. The policy problem in Avatar is that some blue people own all of some valuable natural resource, and won't let anybody else have any. Lloyd George, as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressed the same policy […]
Celebrating pointlessness: minimum wage edition
The minimum wage in Ontario went up today, and Jim Stanford thinks that it's cause for celebration. I'm not sure why. I'm guessing that he – as does the editorial board of the Toronto Star – believes that a higher minimum wage will help reduce poverty. Sadly, this belief is mistaken. As I noted earlier […]
Even more on the ineffectiveness of minimum wages as an anti-poverty measure
As was the case in Ontario, recent evidence from the US illustrates the pointlessness of using the minimum wage as a way to reduce poverty (h/t Craig Newmark): Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor? Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey, we find that […]
Taxing the rich is harder than you think, part 2
A few weeks ago, I wrote this on the effectiveness of introducing a tax surcharge on high income earners as a way to reduce income inequality: [We] have to look at the incidence of the increased tax on high earners. The burden of the tax does not necessarily fall on the people who actually pay […]
Why would unions oppose a basic income?
The Berkeley Electronic Press has a new journal: Basic Income Studies. The Basic Income – also known as the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) in Canada – is a proposal that I'm very much favourably disposed to, even though I'm not familiar with all of the technical details. I took a look at its inaugural issue, […]
Optimal Tax Theorist bleg; can 100% marginal tax rates ever make sense?
This is a bleg. I'm looking for someone who: understands optimal tax theory better than me (shouldn't be too hard); can explain it simply (may be harder). Here's the question: can it ever be part of an optimal tax system to have 100% marginal tax rates on some part of the income distribution?
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