Tag Archives: Employment

(June 24, 2019-Calgary) With Alberta’s economy still facing challenges and vulnerabilities, the Alberta government should not be doling out tax cuts or cutting social spending, according to the Alberta Alternative Budget (AAB) released today. “Alberta still has, by far, the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio of any province,” says Nick Falvo, editor of the report. “We are in a good position to increase spending on education, invest in affordable child care, offer free dental care to Albertans...

(June 24, 2019-Calgary) With Alberta’s economy still facing challenges and vulnerabilities, the Alberta government should not be doling out tax cuts or cutting social spending, according to the Alberta Alternative Budget (AAB) released today. “Alberta still has, by far, the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio of any province,” says Nick Falvo, editor of the report. “We are in a good position to increase spending on education, invest in affordable child care, offer free dental care to Albertans...

This is an extract from a chapter in Economics For the Many (Verso, 2018) edited by Rt. Hon. John McDonnell MP.  The chapter was written in August, 2017. If we are to secure a sustainable, stable and liveable future for the people of Britain, then implementation of the Green New Deal will be vital. Not just for the sake of the ecosystem, but also for the sake of rebuilding a stable, sustainable economy. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling...

Michael Stephens | August 15, 2018 The job guarantee proposal fleshed out and analyzed by L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, Pavlina Tcherneva, and Stephanie Kelton — dubbed the Public Service Employment (PSE) program — garnered a considerable amount of media attention as support for some version of a job guarantee began appearing on the agendas of various 2020 Democratic hopefuls. This panel discussion at the...

One indication of the growth of self-employment activity has been the rise in the number of people filing Schedule C income and self-employment earnings in their annual tax filings. This growth has been cited to illustrate the escalation of self-employment and to suggest that Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measures of self-employment are missing an important phenomenon. Tracking headcounts of tax filings, however, does not adequately reflect trends in the economic impact of...

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a robot revolution in manufacturing to boost productivity. Wages in China are rising, and it's becoming harder to compete with cheap labor. An aging population in China also necessitates automation. The working-age population, people age 15 to 64, could drop to 800 million by 2050 from 998 million today. Chinese robotic growth is forecast to exceed 20 percent annually through 2020. Interesting article to read in full. China's socialist ideology...

The desire to judge people's motives rather than addressing their needs is a “British disease”. We have been suffering from it for hundreds of years, cycling endlessly through repeated cycles of generosity and harshness. Each cycle ends in public outrage and an abrupt reversal: but the memory eventually fades, and the disease reappears in a new form. In this post, I outline the tragic history of Britain's repeated attempts to "categorise the poor". For centuries, successive British...

The Job Guarantee is finally getting the public debate it deserves and criticism is expected. Building on several decades of research, the Levy Institute’s latest proposal analyzes the program’s economic impact and advances a blueprint for its implementation. Critics have taken note and are (thus far) restating the usual concerns, but with a notably alarmist tone. The latest, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, warns that the Job Guarantee would be 1) an expensive...

Michael Stephens | May 1, 2018 Pavlina Tcherneva — who, along with L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, and Stephanie Kelton, authored this report estimating the economic impact of a job guarantee proposal (the Public Service Employment program) — was interviewed by Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Julia Chatterley about the purposes and costs of the plan. This recently released policy note by L. Randall Wray also...

This week a friend casually explained that he and his wife considered having a second child. But having recently moved into a new house, they were having to fork out a large share of their income on mortgage interest payments. Hearing talk of potential rate rises had therefore persuaded them not to risk another pregnancy.Such are the life-changing impacts of decisions (or non-decisions) made by a group of men (and one woman) on the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank...