News roundup, 24 April 2024

- The US aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan has now cleared both houses of Congress. The pill was sweetened a bit by adding a possible ban on TikTok to the package unless the Chinese owner of the app divests. More details on the package may be found here. Republican leaders in both houses now face an uncertain future; House speaker Mike Johnson still faces a possible ouster, while Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said that he will be stepping down from his leadership role after becoming "increasingly distanced" from his colleagues on Ukraine and other issues.

- Protesters at Columbia University in New York City have been camping out on the university campus, demanding that the institution divest from corporations that benefit from the war on Gaza. The university has ordered that the encampment be cleared by 8:00 AM this morning, lest the university "consider alternative options" for clearing it. Similar conflicts are happening at other campuses across the US.

- Apparently some of the speeches made at a pro-Palestinian rally in Ottawa over the weekend were sufficiently extreme that police are investigating whether they qualify as hate speech, with slogans such as "Long live October 7th".

- The latest federal budget is disliked by half of Canadians, according to a new poll from Leger. I think that what this really reflects, though, is not the actual contents of the budget but who is putting it forward.

- In Ontario, the Ford government's cancellation of the basic income pilot that had been introduced by the previous government is leading to a class action on behalf of the recipients.

- Winnipeg is signing on to the 529 Garage system as a replacement for the existing bicycle registry. The main advantage of this is that it's continent-wide; thus a bike stolen here and shipped to Vancouver could potentially be identified and recovered.

- Conservative MP Gary Vidal, who represents the northern Saskatchewan riding of Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River, will no longer reside in the district under the new boundaries. He hoped to seek the nomination for the new riding that contains his hometown, but the party has already decided not to hold an open nomination race for that riding. In response, Vidal has announced that he will not be running again.

- Some military horses ran amok in central London, UK; several people as well as some of the horses suffered minor injuries before the situation was brought under control.

Basic income... an idea whose time has come?

It's a well kept secret that in the 1970s a joint federal-provincial study was conducted between the Schreyer government in Manitoba and the Trudeau administration in Ottawa on a program called "Mincome". It involved paying a basic income to residents of Dauphin and a like number of people in Winnipeg. The study was aborted when the feds decided to pull the plug on it. The date of the cancellation depends on who you read; according to the Uniter it was killed in 1978 (thus in the dying months of the Trudeau government), while Wikipedia claims it lasted until the following year (perhaps under the Clark government). Either way, the data from the study sat in vaults for decades before Evelyn Forget dusted off the old files and tried to draw some conclusions from the study. What she found was interesting:

Originally designed to test what impact guaranteed income would have on people’s decision to work, Mincome provided Forget with a unique natural experiment to look at the impact of poverty through health and education outcomes.

“Kids [that were part of Mincome] stayed in school longer and people used hospitals less, especially for accidents and injuries and mental health reasons,” said Forget.

What was surprising, she notes, is the strength of the findings. Even though only 30 per cent of the families qualified for support, “many people benefited from Mincome, and not only those who received payments under the scheme,” said Forget.

Participants at Mincome’s sister site in Winnipeg had similar outcomes. Even with guaranteed income, participants still chose to work.

From the previously cited Uniter article (my emphasis). If you think about it, it makes sense, considering the way welfare works right now. After all, if you're on welfare and get a job in a fast food hellhole, you're not going to be making any more money than you were on welfare, so you might as well just stay on the dole in the hope of finding something better. On the other hand, with a basic income, your income from your crappy job is on top of your Mincome payments. So it makes a lot more sense to find a job under a basic income regime than it does with conventional welfare.

Obviously, the elephant in the room is that running something like this on a provincial or national scale would require significantly higher levels of taxation than most Canadians, not to mention Americans, are accustomed to. The folks at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative have looked at the economics of this in more detail, and it's noteworthy that they like the idea in spite of the tax drawbacks. Noteworthy because the WCI folks are pretty mainstream economists, and pretty free-market oriented at that.