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Federal Surplus Comes with Social Costs, Critics Say
Federal Surplus Comes with Social Costs, Critics Say
Number of government departments ‘lapsing’ budgets up from 10 years ago: CCPA.
If Canadians want to see how the federal government managed to reach a surplus for the 2014-15 fiscal year, they should think of veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and other wounds, said veterans’ advocate Tom Beaver.
The Conservative government ran a surprise $1.9-billion budget surplus last year, its first since 2008. The surplus has been attributed in part to government “lapses” in spending, in which departments do not spend their full allotted budgets for the year.
Veterans like Beaver have complained a $1.1-billion lapse in spending over several years at Veterans Affairs could have been used to keep department bureaus open across the country, or to help vets who were wounded in the line of duty.
The government has also changed its lifetime pension payments for wounded soldiers to lump-sum payouts, and that has resulted in a court battle.
Beaver said news of the surplus feels like a slap in the face, and the government shouldn’t lapse spending in needed departments. “The [Conservatives] could have had more money if they didn’t spend thousands fighting veterans in the courts,” he said sarcastically.
Beaver said he knows the money didn’t only come from veterans, but from Canadians in general.
On Monday, the Ottawa Citizen reported the government underspent by $8.7 billion in total across government departments last year.
Lapses increased since 2008: CCPA
David Macdonald, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said there’s nothing new about spending lapses, but their frequency has increased since the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing stimulus.
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The Social Cost of Capitalism
The Social Cost of Capitalism
Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties. For example, currently 3 million gallons of toxic waste water from a Colorado mine has escaped and is working its way down two rivers into Utah and Lake Powell. At least seven city water systems dependent on the rivers have been shut down. The waste was left by private enterprise, and the waste was accidentally released by the Environmental Protection Agency, which might be true or might be a coverup for the mine. If the Lake Powell reservoir ends up polluted, it is likely that the cost of the mine imposed on third parties exceeds the total value of the mine’s output over its entire life.
Economists call these costs “external costs” or “social costs.” The mine made its profits by creating pollutants, the cost of which is born by those who had no share in the profits.
As this is the way regulated capitalism works, you can imagine how bad unregulated capitalism would be. Just think about the unregulated financial system, the consequences we are still suffering with more to come.
Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices.
If only.
Progressives have their own counterpart to the libertarians’ romanticism. Progressives regard government as the white knight that protects the public from the greed of capitalists.
If only.
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What you “Owe to Society”
What you “Owe to Society”
The “Club Dues” Theory of Taxation
Sadly this is an ancient thesis that’s being revived now in a country that was founded on denying it. The idea is well expressed in a recent book by Professor William E. Hudson, titled, The Libertarian Illusion: Ideology, Public Policy, and the Assault on the Common Good (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008).
Hudson states, on page 43, that “The ability that any of us have to earn income and acquire wealth depends only partly on our own individual efforts. It relies as well on the operation of political, economic, and social institutions that make it possible for any of us to ‘earn a living.’ . . .Viewed in this light, …deductions from my paycheck can be seen as reimbursements to society for that portion of my earnings derived from social goods.”
Author and confirmed etatiste William E. Hudson, a Professor of Political Science at Providence College where he teaches courses in American politics and public policy, and has also served in a variety of “administrative functions”. In the words of Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “[…] if practically all intellectuals are employed in the multiple branches of the state, then it should hardly come as a surprise that most of their ever-more voluminous output will, either by commission or omission, be statist propaganda.”
Screenshot via wn.com
The very same idea has been championed for years by one of President Obama’s favorite intellectuals, Cass Sunstein, for example in the book the latter co-authored with Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999).
Reimbursements to society! What a lie that is, given that society is nothing more than all of us together as individuals and that what we own, so long as we stole it from no one, ought to be left to each of us to allocate as we judge proper, not to the likes of the sneaky professor and his gang in centers of political power.
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The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth’s Ability To Support Life
The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth’s Ability To Support Life
I admire David Ray Griffin for his wide-ranging intelligence, his research skills, and for his courage. Dr. Griffin is not afraid to take on the controversial topics. He gave us ten books on 9/11, and anyone who has read half of one of them knows that the official story is a lie.
Now Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin’s book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? is no screed. The book is a carefully researched document.
Readers often ask me to write about global warming, chemtrails, vaccines, and other subjects beyond my competence. However, I can see that Griffin has made a huge investment in researching climate change. His book provides a thorough account under one cover.
Griffin concludes that civilization itself is at stake. His evaluation of the evidence is that humans have about three decades to get CO2 emissions under control, and he sees hope in the agreement between Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping that was announced on November 11, 2014.
Griffin argues that instead of rushing to their own destruction like lemmings, the human race must accept the moral challenge of abolishing the fossil-fuel economy. He makes the case that clean energy permits most of modern society’s way of life to continue without the threat posed by ever rising emissions.
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Social Cost Of Carbon Drastically Underestimated: Report
Social Cost Of Carbon Drastically Underestimated: Report
The U.S. government could be drastically underestimating how much climate change is going to cost us, according to astudy published by Stanford researchers in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The researchers concluded that the Obama Administration is using a Social Cost of Carbon estimate that may be just one-sixth of the true cost—and that the true cost is high enough to justify aggressive measures for lowering emissions enough to limit global temperature rise to the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists tell us is the threshold for averting catastrophic climate change.
The Social Cost of Carbon is an official estimate of how much economic damage will be caused per metric ton of carbon emitted into our atmosphere—damages like lower crop yields and higher healthcare costs. It is used by the EPA and other federal agencies to calculate the benefits of policies intended to improve energy efficiency, lower emissions, and combat climate change. It is also often used to justify not taking action if the proposed action would cost more than the damage it is intended to mitigate.
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