The word 'resiliency' is one of the more overused words in the wake of the pandemic. Things that were disrupted because of lack of proper investment include our supply chains that move goods around the world. It is not just global pandemics that cause major crises along these supply chains.
Supply chains are still a bit of a mess since the pandemic. The ongoing geopolitical crises, climate change effects, and poor private sector management of large projects are putting intense strain on the transport industry and the costs cannot be understated.
An issue arises when we look at taxes inevitably raised to pay the debt or for the increased spending. There is some strange thing that happens where people expect not to have to pay for things that the government does. Many think every tax dollar they pay is extra spending, even if they suddenly do not have to pay the directly out of pocket higher price in the private market any more. Math is hard and net savings are not obvious to people. The left should start talking about state revenue generation as an alternative.
Believing Canadian pension plans can lead us out of this housing affordability crisis would be a fool’s errand. The irony is that a main cause of the housing affordability crisis is that Canada’s inadequate public pension system forces people to rely on private real estate markets to fund their retirement income.
Some areas of debate exist even within progressive circles of how best to deal with climate change. Investing in and reorganizing current production processes to drastically reduce carbon emissions and build mitigation programs all takes time, energy, overlapping processes, and a heck of a lot of money. But, when we bring all this together, the programs announced are insufficient to get us where we need to be. Here are 10 areas we need to work on.
We are told that Capitalism, at its core, is a crisis-driven economic system. Crises are at the heart of its innovation, transformation of the economy, and are the reason creative destruction is the defining point raised by proponents of this economy-first, anti-social system. However, any reader of history knows that it is only through the leverage and investment of the state that capitalism can find the path around the economic crises it creates. Capital needs to be held-up and protected or -- like most short-sighted adventures -- it runs aground. The alternative is not to hold capitalism up, but to replace it and the response to COVID-19 shows a way forward.
Decades of neoliberal political narratives have attempted to convince us that the only reason for public ownership is to subsidize private capital growth. Neoliberal economics are focused on the transfer of wealth from the public to private capital through commodification of public assets and services. The result has been a society tilted in favour of profit generation through public subsidies of infrastructure and services over human need.
Since the early 1980s, central banks and governments of top capitalist countries have been attempting to save their beloved system. Responding to the collapsing profit rate was their ultimate goal and drove economic and social policy for 40 years. To save our economy and solve the social, health, and environmental crises we now face we must reverse course.
The current economic crisis has led to unprecedented government spending. This spending is funded by borrowing or by 'printing money' (which has an effect similar to borrowing) to support furloughed and unemployed workers to the tune of roughly $80 billion and to subsidize corporate revenue. This has been necessary to prop up basic economic activity in an attempt to delay the impact of the economic consequences of the recession. Unfortunately, neoliberal policy makers are already trying to convince us that giving public services away to private interests is the only way to pay for this debt.
The cheerleaders of neoliberal policy are rising like zombies after the current collection of economic, health, climate, and political crises seemed to bury them for a while. It is not going to be enough for the left to defend the current economic wreck, we must advocate to build something better just to keep what we have. Socialists have the social and economic policy programs to deal directly with these challenges we face. It is time to dust them off and fight for them with abandon.
