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Economy

End the coronavirus crisis, before the 'cure' kills our economy | TheHill – The Hill

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The coronavirus health crisis seems to be over. But the economic and constitutional crises continue.

National-level data show that the number of new COVID-19 cases peaked on April 4. Since then, they have declined 22 percent. In New York, the worst of the virus hot spots, the net change in total hospitalizations began to decline April 2 and, by April 13, more people were leaving hospitals than entering them. In addition, the predicted overload of New York’s hospital bed space never happened.

To put things further into perspective, there are currently about 526,000 active diagnosed cases of coronavirus among 329 million Americans. That is, 99.85 percent of the population do not have the virus. This is nowhere near the tens of hundreds of millions of cases some experts predicted only recently.

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Some might argue these radically lower numbers are evidence of the success of the social lockdown measures the government has imposed on us. But even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cannot claim convincingly that “social distancing” is effective in slowing the spread of this ill-understood virus. In fact, a new study out of Israel shows that the coronavirus timeline is the same across countries whether they locked down or not.

We have not seen death and other data for Americans denied access to “elective” medical care due to the effective shutdown of the health care system. There are no models that show the ongoing destruction of health care jobs.

The bigger issue is that we can’t have adequate health care without a strong economy. While only a small percentage of Americans have caught the virus, almost everybody has been affected by the government’s response to the pandemic. Tens of millions are out of work. Businesses are shutting down.

This pain is not spread evenly. Have any “non-essential” federal workers been laid off? Or is just the private sector supposed to go through all the economic “inconvenience” of the coronavirus shutdown? The problem, of course, is that millions of unemployed, small and medium-sized business owners and families have too few advocates in the government or the media.

The consequences of this national shutdown, apart from any pandemic, are dire and will not be materially alleviated by government spending. Budget-busting federal stimulus packages may offer temporary relief, but the best stimulus is opening America back up for business.

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The Constitution also is under threat, thanks to shutdown orders by governors. People are being fined for attending worship services, detained for running on empty beaches, and arrested for not wearing masks in public. Meanwhile, some in the media promote  on your neighbors for supposed violations, seeking to make us into a nation of informants.

The political left has used the pandemic to push its fanciful concept of a “mail-in” 2020 election, which would open the process to unprecedented fraud. Under its plan, ballots would be mailed to everyone whether requested or not; unlicensed ballot harvesters would collect and drop off ballots in bulk; voter ID would be nonexistent.

And many in the media seem to have zero interest in coverage that might lead to reopening the economy. Instead, they are pushing the shutdown drama narrative, ignoring positive statistics and encouraging states to resist federal advice to reopen. Common-sense outbreaks such as in South Dakota are mischaracterized as irresponsible and dangerous. And every effort by the Trump administration to move toward or even discuss reopening the country, in whole or in part, is criticized as a dire threat to public safety, regardless of the economic consequences of maintaining the lockdown.

We can’t wait until May to reopen, which would mean tens of millions more unemployed, further erosion of our liberties, and untold destruction to our national fabric. The president should push back on governors resisting efforts to reopen the economy and who continue to suppress Americans’ constitutional rights.

The national coronavirus response has been a radical experiment on the American people that destroyed our economy and harmed our liberty. We’ve got to get the country moving again — because, when it comes to the nation’s long-term public health, a strong economy is the best insurance. It doesn’t mean you can’t take significant steps, continue reasonable restrictions to secure the public health, whether at the border or internally, and focus on treating new COVID-19 outbreaks as needed. But we’ve got to get people back to work, back to school, in a regular, organized way while balancing the public health risk. We can’t let the cure kill the patient.

Tom Fitton is president of Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit educational and government-watchdog foundation.

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Economy

Yellen Sounds Alarm on China ‘Global Domination’ Industrial Push – Bloomberg

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US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen slammed China’s use of subsidies to give its manufacturers in key new industries a competitive advantage, at the cost of distorting the global economy, and said she plans to press China on the issue in an upcoming visit.

“There is no country in the world that subsidizes its preferred, or priority, industries as heavily as China does,” Yellen said in an interview with MSNBC Wednesday — highlighting “massive” aid to electric-car, battery and solar producers. “China’s desire is to really have global domination of these industries.”

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Economy

Opinion: The future economy will suffer if Canada axes the carbon tax – The Globe and Mail

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Open this photo in gallery:

Poilievre holds a press conference regarding his “Axe the Tax” message from the roof a parking garage in St. John’s on Oct.27, 2023.Paul Daly/The Canadian Press

Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The carbon tax is the single most effective climate policy that Canada has. But the tax is also an important industrial strategy, one that bets correctly on the growing need for greener energy globally and the fact that upstart Canadian companies must rise to meet these needs.

That is why it is such a shame our leaders are sacrificing it for political gains.

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The fact that carbon taxes address a key market failure in the energy industry – polluters are not incentivized to consider the broader societal costs of their pollution – is so well understood by economists that an undergraduate could explain its merits. Experts agree on the effectiveness of the policy for reducing emissions almost as much as they agree on climate change itself.

It is not just that pollution is bad for us. That a patchwork of policies supporting clean industries is proliferating across the United States, China and the European Union means that Canada needs its own hospitable ecosystem for clean-energy companies to set up shop and eventually compete abroad. The earlier we nurture such industries, the more benefits our energy and adjacent sectors can reap down the line.

But with high fixed costs of entry and non-negligible technological hurdles, domestic clean energy is still at a significant disadvantage relative to fossil fuels.

A nuclear energy company considering a reactor project in Canada, for example, must contend with the fact that the upfront investments are enormous, and they may not pay off for years, while incumbent oil and gas firms benefit from low fixed costs, faster economies of scale and established technology.

The carbon tax cannot address these problems on its own, but it does help level the playing field by encouraging demand and capital to flow toward where we need it most. Comparable policies like green subsidies are also useful, but second-best; they weaken the government’s balance sheet and in certain cases can even make emissions worse.

Unfortunately, these arguments hold little sway for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who called for a vote of no-confidence on the dubious basis that the carbon tax is driving the cost-of-living crisis. Nor is it of much consequence to provincial leaders, who have fought the federal government hard on implementing the tax.

Not only is this attack a misleading characterization of the tax’s impact, it is also a deeply political gambit. Most expected the vote to fail. Yet by centering the next election on the carbon tax debate, Mr. Poilievre is hedging against the possibility of a new Liberal candidate, one who lacks the Trudeau baggage but still holds the line on the tax.

With the reality of inflation, a housing crisis and a general atmosphere of Trudeau-exhaustion, Mr. Poilievre has plenty of ammunition for an election campaign that does not leave our climate and our clean industries at risk. The temptation to do what is popular is ever-present in politics. Leadership is knowing when not to.

Nor are the Liberals innocent on this front. The Trudeau government deserves credit for pushing the tax through in the first place, and for structuring it as revenue-neutral. But the government’s attempt to woo Atlantic voters with the heating oil exemption has eroded its credibility and opened a vulnerable flank for Conservative attacks.

Thus, Canadian businesses are faced with the possibility of a Conservative government which has promised to eliminate the tax altogether. This kind of uncertainty is a treacherous environment for nascent companies and existing companies on the precipice of investing billions of dollars in clean tech and processes, under the expectation that demand for their fossil fuel counterparts are being kept at bay.

The tax alone is not enough; the government and opposition need to show the private sector that it can be consistent about this new policy regime long enough for these green investments to pay off. Otherwise, innovation in these much-needed technologies will remain stagnant in Canada, and markets for clean energy will be dominated by our more forward-thinking competitors.

A carbon tax is not a panacea for our climate woes, but it is central to any attempt to protect a rapidly warming planet and to develop the right businesses for that future. We can only hope that the next generation of Canadian leaders will have a little more vision.

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Economy

Business leaders say housing biggest risk to economy: KPMG survey – BNN Bloomberg

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Business leaders see the housing crisis as the biggest risk to the economy, a new survey from KPMG Canada shows.

It found 94 per cent of respondents agreed that high housing costs and a lack of supply are the top risk, and that housing should be a main focus in the upcoming federal budget. The survey questioned 534 businesses.

Housing issues are forcing businesses to boost pay to better attract talent and budget for higher labour costs, agreed 87 per cent of respondents. 

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“What we’re seeing in the survey is that the businesses are needing to pay more to enable their workers to absorb these higher costs of living,” said Caroline Charest, an economist and Montreal-based partner at KPMG.

The need to pay more not only directly affects business finances, but is also making it harder to tamp down the inflation that is keeping interest rates high, said Charest.

High housing costs and interest rates are straining households that are already struggling under high debt, she said.

“It leaves household balance sheets more vulnerable, in particular, in a period of economic slowdown. So it creates areas of vulnerability in the economy.”

Higher housing costs are themselves a big contributor to inflation, also making it harder to get the measure down to allow for lower rates ahead, she said. 

Businesses have been raising the alarm for some time. 

A report out last year from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce also emphasized how much the housing crisis is affecting how well businesses can attract talent. 

Almost 90 per cent of businesses want to see more public-private collaboration to help solve the crisis, the KPMG survey found.

“How can we work bringing all stakeholders, that being governments, not-for-profit organizations and the community and the private sector together, to find solutions to develop new models to deliver housing,” said Charest.

“That came out pretty strong from our survey of businesses.”

The federal government has been working to roll out more funding supports for other levels of government, and introduced measures like a GST rebate for rental housing construction, but it only has limited direct control on the file. 

Part of the federal funding has been to link funding to measures provinces and municipalities adopt that could help boost supply. 

The vast majority of respondents to the KPMG survey supported tax measures to make housing payments more affordable, such as making mortgage interest tax deductible, but also want to maintain the capital gains tax exemption for a primary residence.

The survey of companies was conducted in February using Sago’s Methodify online research platform. Respondents were business owners or executive-level decision makers.

About a third of the leaders are at companies with revenue over $500 million, about half have revenue between $100 million and $500 million, with the rest below. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 27, 2024.

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