Ok, so, how about this. Instead of subsidizing big business by just giving them $80M (knowing full well that they will, within three years, once again threaten to fold) how about telling them to get stuffed and giving the $80M to the workers who will be laid off?

Now tell me, dear readers, as a conversational exercise: what is the difference?

PS: Free trade isn't free.

Study reveals that most middle-class people have absolutely no idea what it's like to be really, honest-to-god poor.

This is not surprising. The article talks about how Kraft Dinner is a bad choice to give to food banks because poor people can't afford milk and butter. Also? It has NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE WHATSOEVER.

Most people don't seem to understand how expensive vegetables are. Honestly, guys, it costs a lot of money to eat healthily.

When I was broke, I used to buy Mr. Noodles by the case, because all you had to do was add water. You didn't need to have, you know, ingredients. Two packs of Mr. Noodles a day and the occasional can of something-or-other was my typical diet for a good few months - why I didn't die of scurvy is still up for debate.

Should we be OK with the fact that cheap food is also really bad for us? When are we going to accept that it costs a lot to nourish people, and that without being nourished we can't expect people to function properly? Yeesh.

This is an interesting observation about the current corn-ethanol fad:

A student came in my office last week and asked: Aren't ethanol subsidies just implicit taxes on the poor? I thought about it for a minute, then said, "Yep."

It always comes down to that, doesn't it?

When I was but a young nerd, I had a friend who was a CGA and he NetFiled his taxes. In, like, 1998. I thought that was SO COOL. As soon as Revenue Canada started offering NetFile to us mere morals, I hopped on board. I think I've been NetFiling since about 2001, and GOD do I love it. I love it THIS MUCH.

I use U-File loyally, because it was free when I was poor (it's free if your income is less than $20,000, and obviously they can tell). Now that I'm less poor, I have no problem paying them what is really a very small amount, which is exactly what they're counting on, I'm sure. It's a great business idea, and the software is pretty easy to use, too. So if you're looking for a good online tax-preparing package, go with them.

This year, because I'm a student, it turns out that I'm getting some cash back. And THANK GOD. My bank account is coughing on the fumes of remembered overdrafts, I now have a stupid cell phone and a stupid cell phone bill to pay, and I can't believe I got talked into joining the 21st century. Whose idea was that?? And I still owe the university hundreds and hundreds of dollars, which I kind of resent because it's not like I'm getting As or anything for all the money I'm giving them. Or maybe those just cost more?

Anyway, NetFiling rocks, especially the part where you can log on incessantly and check to see if you've been assessed (it took less than a day) and exactly when they're going to deposit that cheque (Monday). WOO! They do a pretty good job, those folks at Revenue Canada, even when I owe them, they're still fairly nice about it. But especially when they owe me. Because that's super.

I actually wanted to post about two things, rather than ramble about my taxes.

1. I found a US $20 behind the bus stop. Neat!
2. I was standing outside my class waiting to go in and I saw a prof, armed with a magazine, walk out of his office and into the men's room. Yes, the old boyscout adage applies: Be Prepared.

And now I must return to my environmental impact assessment of me. It's an assignment. I have a lot of impacts. The next time somebody says he ain't heavy, he's my brother, I will look at them and insist that he is VERY HEAVY. Like, megatonnes.

A long time ago, I read a story by Robert Heinlein called "The man who was too lazy to fail," about a guy who made everything he did super-efficient because it was ultimately much easier to spend three hours the first time doing something right than ten hours fixing all his kludges and another ten hours doing it again.

I was reminded of that story by a recent post at Peace, Order & Good Government, eh? He points out that the best way to be green is to be really, really lazy. On a grand scale. And I agree.

One of the Green Party's economic planks which I criticized yesterday is increased efficiency. Here, I agree with them. We need to increase efficiency. But they don't say how, and I don't believe that they have an answer that helps anybody but the people who can afford to work less already, and who can afford buy better, pricier stuff already (eg: organic carrots, efficient water heaters). Not working people, not lower-income families, not poor seniors, not anybody who rents a two-bedroom apartment and has a crummy landlord.

For one thing, nobody seems to have noticed that we have increased efficiency. The last hundred years have been all about increasing efficiency. The coopers noticed it first, when some asshole made a machine that could make watertight barrels faster and cheaper than they could. The unemployed coopers found other jobs, but only because the economy was growing.

Increased efficiency has had a positive outcome because our rate of consumption has outpaced our rate of gains from efficiency, and because technological gains have ignored negative externalities. Now, however, we're operating on such a huge scale that it's coming back to bite us.

That is to say: we've come a long way, baby -- but we consume a hell of a lot of stuff, and pollute a hell of a lot to get it. Also notice that the amount of material wealth we have has increased while the quality and longevity of goods has decreased. We throw out a toaster after a few years, a computer after a few years, a TV after a few years, etc. We have computers, which have spawned sub-industries, and such and so on. That growth cycle is what fuels the economy.

We've gained socially from this. We've created a middle ground -- things were so bad a hundred years ago that only a few people could afford any stuff at all (but the stuff that they bought was great stuff -- lots of it is still around today. But, on the other hand, they didn't have flush toilets.) Now, lots of people can afford fairly OK things. And most of them have toilets.

But none of this is sustainable, as we all know. (Especially the toilets.) Why not? Because sustainability is not profitable on a large scale. Doing things in a way that makes them last longer and be more efficient is not something that is compatible with a corporatist growth society. Growth entails waste -- waste fuels the economy too, because every time we create something new rather than reuse something, somebody gets a paycheque. Reusing something, even paying somebody to recycle it, has entropy losses.

Furthermore, sustainability requires management, it requires life-cycle assessments, it requires care, labour, and knowledge, and it means we have to slow things down. If done right, sustainability can provide lots of jobs, but it also requires a change in lifestyle and a change in how we measure the well-being of an economy (and I don't just mean using the GPI to measure national health, I mean systemic changes in how we look at labour and our social structure).

Here's an example: Toronto can't afford to fix their aging infrastructure. Why? Because people aren't using as much water, and the city's billable system usage has decreased as a result. Irony? In a way only Alanis Morrisette could sing about. How do we make a system self-sustaining financially when environmental sustainability dictates that we reduce the thing that brings in revenue?

The answer to this question is how we'll save the world. Part of it lies in strict regulation, not in shuffling around taxation. Part of it lies in constructing solid social programs. Part of it lies in accepting the fact that how we measure our "quality of life" is an illusion, one that is killing us. People were no happier forty years ago in comparison to today, yet they had less stuff and used 1/4 the energy. In fact, studies show that, after a certain comfort point, people are only unhappy with less stuff if their neighbours have more stuff. Their neighbours, presumably, are named Mr. and Mrs. Jones. This is a large clue about how to spur sustainable change -- it's never about stuff, it's about people and how we relate to each other.

The government has a huge role to play in creating a structure in which businesses can grow while producing less stuff. We have a window now, where we can produce the sustainable infrastructure -- transit, housing, sewage, power -- under the current growth system, recognizing that these things will have to be managed under a new model in the future.

But the first step is recognizing that growth itself is the thing we have to account for and counter. And that's kind of scary.

Tax shifting! I got an email from a supporter who was disappointed with my panning of the Green party as an upper-middle-class libertarian party. He pointed out that their "tax shifting" plan had some good points... So I rolled up my sleeves, broke out my Environmental Economics textbook, and wrote a long response for him. I thought I'd post it here for general comment, as well.

Tax Shifting

1. The goal of maximizing efficiency is laudable, but I see nothing socially sustainable to make up for the loss of jobs that increased efficiency ultimately entails.
2. They want to remove corporate subsidies -- and at the same time, reduce corporate income tax! That's just moving subsidies around, and seems purely ideological. More details would be needed here.
3. They fail to address the international implications of "tax shifting" -- companies will produce where it is cheapest to produce, and unless this lifecycle analysis costing can take place on import goods, it's worse than useless -- and I don't see any mention of NAFTA or trade protectionism issues.
4. On the personal side of "tax shifting," people will only reduce consumption when consuming costs them money. If they end up with the same aggregate, nothing changes. They might buy less of something immediately environmentally costly and buy more of something environmentally better, but their overall consumption is unchanged. Even in the medium term, our overall consumption is the real problem. (And, something about human behaviour makes people who drive BMWs scream over the cost of carrots.) Besides which, I don't believe that taxing environmental bads and concommitantly reducing income taxes could ever be revenue neutral, and the Green plan downplays this -- the true cost of negative externalities are immense and remediation / new technologies are very costly. Either way, social justice issues will not be fixed by simply raising the personal income tax exemption.
5. Tax shifting is not sustainable anyway. If it works, people stop consuming the costly goods, and the government finds itself without money. It's a bad model in that it will come to rely on the very inefficiencies it attempts to fight. Furthermore, human behaviour is such that people will pay more for "quality" -- is a Rolex watch really that much more valuable than a Timex? Not really, because it is about preceived value. In the same way, the price of goods only somewhat reflects its cost -- it may provide more or less welfare, but this ratio changes. The point is that increasing prices may change consumpion patterns on some things, but it might not necessarily reduce consumption over the long term in the desired way, because consumption behaviour is more complex than that (eg. poaching).
6. Do the tax revenues go to remediating the environmental costs, in which case the goods would be environmentally neutral? Then, without income taxes, where does the money for social services come from?

Their vision is, in my opinion, extremely conservative in their "trust the markets" approach. I think it dangerously downplays the fact that we must reduce consumption drastically rather than simply encourage people to buy "greener" stuff -- changing the stuff we buy is good, and a great short-term goal, but I'm not convinced that this will happen even under their plan. And their thinking discounts anybody who doesn't want to buy more stuff, or who can't afford the stuff they buy now.

My critiques of the current system are much more radical than anything I see in the Green Party platform -- they're attempting to fix the system using the system itself. It's the system that's broken.

Some of my favourite economists have something to say about this too.