Balanced Poll

On globeandmail.com right now there is this poll question, "A number of people were shot at a major retail site in Toronto on Boxing Day. Is a federal ban on handguns an appropriate approach to curbing such crimes?"

What a loaded question! The initial statement makes people lean a certain way. If the question was asked, "In other countries that have instituted a handgun ban, gun crime has actually increased. Is a federal ban on handguns appropriate?" Or, "Most gun crime happens with unregistered firearms that are illegally purchased on the black market. Should the federal government ban the registered handguns that law abiding citizens own?"

Clearly the two questions I made up are biased, even though they are true. When the Globe and Mail decides to start the question with a preamble that will produce certain results, they clearly aren't trying to gauge their readers' true opinions on the subject.

Victimless Crime?

The one thing missing from this whole Goodale scandal is the victims. Clearly there was someone that broke the law here, and it seems to have come from the Finance Minister's office, but I think the reason there isn't all that much outrage is that no one really gets hurt from insider trading. When insider trading happens there is no real loser, even though there is a winner.

Let's say a stock is going to go way up once information goes public (everything works in reverse if stock will go down). On an efficient market, such as the TSX, there are always buyers and sellers at the given market price. So when the insider decides to buy extra shares that he knows will soon go up, the seller actually is doing what they would be doing regardless. Again, the seller would have sold their shares regardless of the insider. So what impact did the insider have? Well he actually, very slightly, rose the current market value of the stock. As there is more buyers than sellers at the market price the market price rises. The market price is the equilibrium price that is arrived at by balancing the buyers and sellers that have the same knowledge base (in theory). So when the insider has this advanced knowledge, there is nothing the stock can do but go up since there is an extra buyer. I understand everyone hates the ideas of these powerful insider traders stealing money from the common folk, but I just don't agree that it really harms them. Any crime where you cannot mention a victim should not be a crime, no exceptions.

So now that I argued why Martha Stewart really didn't do anything all that, I will go on to explain why Ralph Goodale did. There is a big difference between a private citizen knowing something about a company or a government official knowing how new legislation would change stocks. That private citizen would have found this new information from a completely legitimate source, just one that not enough people (deemed by insider trading laws) also had access to. With Goodale, he made the information himself, he didn't get this information from talking with anyone or hiring a private research company, he is in government and chose this new legislation. This is a vastly different situation. He took advantage of his role as the Finance Minister to affect his personal situation. By only informing a select group of people about the upcoming annoucement there was an opportunity cost to every Canadian that weren't in Goodale's inner circle. There was no productivity increase in any of these companies whose shares went up, it was purely that a more beneficial tax system for them raised their value. With regular insider trading, any new information is heard by many different people at different times before it is deemed that it is public knowledge, but in this situation Goodale created the gain for the companies by his role as the Finance Minister, and then abused his power by telling only a select group of people before the rest of the country. Shame on you Mr. Goodale. This announcement should have been made after the close of trading, as it was, but the leak was a pure abuse of power that the Canadian public trusted him to have.

As Unqualified As You Can Get

After seeing Aaron's post, I was shocked who got nominated for the NDP in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. Liam McHugh-Russell had to be the worst student official I have ever come into contact with. In his role as the University of Waterloo VP Education, his goal was to keep tuition low, which is fine enough, but he wanted to keep tuition low regardless of quality of education. While I never had a smear campaign against me like Aaron did, I will recount one anecdote.

In my 2nd year of university, while Liam was VP Education, Liam decided to speak at a Mathematics Society council meeting. At this meeting he wanted to address the problem of Wilfrid Laurier University's proposed BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) tuition deregulation. The reason this mattered to the UW students was that there is a joint double degree program where you can get a BBA from WLU and a BMath from UW in 5 years. I am a student of this program, so this is why Liam's comments came to my attention. At the meeting he said (paraphrasing), "I want to hear about how if your program was deregulated, you would not have chosen to come here. I want to hear about how if your program was deregulated, how you would not be able to afford to come here. I just want to hear feedback. Even if you want to send emails that say 'I hate Laurier' that's fine." He wasn't interested in any type of feedback so he can see how to best represent the students, he just wanted to get negative comments from double degree students so he can use us as quotes as evidence to his conclusion that he came to before talking to anyone. So I sent him a fairly lengthy reply to this saying that I was completely in favour of deregulation, and that I expect him to apologize for insulting WLU in his official capacity when there are a number of joint students that he represents. I never got a response to my e-mail. At the time I wasn't involved with any conservative campus club or political party, so he didn't ignore me for any reason other than I disagreed with his conclusion that double degree students were against deregulation (and for the record, every double degree student I talked to was either in favour or indifferent to deregulation).

This has to be one of the only ridings where I would actually prefer the Liberal candidate to the NDP due to Liam's extreme lack of qualifications. Plus him running pisses me off since there is a weak dipper candidate so the center-left votes may go to the grits. I'm hoping that John Capobianco can clean house here.

More on guns...

In my rushed post here after first hearing about the proposed Liberal ban on guns, I forgot to mention possibly the most obvious argument against this. How much will this cost? Canada has about 1 million hand guns (from Coalition for Gun Control). I don't know what the average handgun's market value is, but from a search around Google it seems that if you are paying $300 you are getting a good deal. So there must be guns that are way more expensive than this too. If the government wants to pay the fair market value for handguns, a very conservative estimate would be $500/gun on average. So let's make my almost completed math degree come to use here with this equation:

$500/gun * 1 million guns = HALF A BILLION DOLLARS

This isn't counting any administration and enforcement costs, plus maybe my estimate of $500 was too low. Do they also pay the gun owners for their now useless bullets? I am not sure on how many bullets the average gun owner would have, but I think $30 worth would be fair maybe, which adds on another $30 million. Either this $30 million will be paid extra by the government to these people, or they will be forced to eat their loss which is completely unfair to them. Not to mention the costs and time these people went through to get certified and register their guns. The gun registry was supposed to cost in the low millions, and it ended up over a billion. If the initial projection for this is over half a billion already, how high will this go?

From our cold dead hands...

Well I have actually never owned a gun, but a Liberal proposed ban on handguns really annoys me. The crime wave is happening with illegal guns, not the legal ones that are registered by the billion dollar gun registry. I hardly see how this will solve anything. Criminals already have shown they are willing to break the law by not having registered guns, why would anyone think that a ban on handguns will magically make them not have guns anymore?

This proposed ban reminds me of a conversation I had about 6 years ago, when the gun registry was going into place. My then girlfriend's father was explaining to me that he would not register his guns because then the government may eventually take them away. We had an argument about this, I was thinking he was crazy to even suggest that the government would do something like this. At the time I was thinking that he was completely paranoid. I guess he had reason to be.

I don't get this...

Ok, so for years I have been hearing from the left that a consumption tax disproportionately hurts the poor because they spend a higher percentage of their income. Sure, this is true, someone making $30,000 does spend more of that then the person making $100,000. So now that the Conservative Party announces a plan to cut the GST the left is saying that this will help the rich because luxury items will cost less? So when for years the conservative parties talk about income tax cuts we get told that we are trying to help the rich, and now our consumption taxes are trying to help the rich? Please someone explain this to me because my head hurts.

More on child care...

So the Liberals fight back with their ad hoc plan to throw billions more at the socialized child care. I don't think they even budgeted this or anything, but wanted to respond to Harper's plan with something bigger. Well, bigger is not better. Except if you ask left wing activists, oh and by chance, this article from CTV has.

Monica Lysack, Executive Director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, "If we simply give the money to parents, we're saying 'Take the money, now it's your problem.' And I think that would be a really cowardly thing for the government to do."

I think she has a real point, if we allow parents to raise their own children, they won't be reliant on government for an aspect of their lives. The horror! This day care may not be far enough I fear, we need an department of child punishment too. When a child misbehaves the parent can fill out a standardized form and then 6-8 weeks later the government can let the parent know how to best discipline their child. We need to take the parent out of parenting!

Or... "Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), says the Conservative plan is flawed because it would use public funds to open the door to "big box" commercial child care chains."

What don't you people understand, this will help the big evil corporations! Sure he may not be talking about the quality of care the children will receive, but don't forget that union workers can take these child care jobs that the government could create! Whenever we propose any new child care plan, we need to think of how it can impact our union workers, not those greedy fucking children/parents that want the best child care to meet their specific situation.

Baby Bonus

The Conservatives annouced they want to give every family $1200/year for each child under the age of 6. This is certainly better than the idea of socialized day care that the Liberals and NDP want. If we are going to spend money to help parents raise their children, who knows how to spend the money then the actual parents themselves? This money can still go towards day care if the parents want to send their kids there. But maybe one of the parents wants to work part time then use the $1200 to help pay for a babysitter or one parent does not work and the $1200 will help a parent be able to afford to stay home. Socialized day care really won't be equal for all, many do not live in urban settings and will be paying towards the children in cities while their children recieve nothing. I will always favour giving the user direct payments to let them choose the service that best fits their need over the government providing a service that a family may or may not want.

The money will count as taxable income, but can be counted for either parent. So if one parent does not work and this is their only income, they will not pay any tax on this. This plan certainly helps the poor more than the rich, as the income will be taxable at the marginal tax rate of the lowest income earning parent.

Now this does not get to the real reason that people have trouble paying for child care, taxes are just too high. Consumption, income, payroll, and property taxes take so much of the income that every Canadian earns, it is no wonder they are reliant on the government to help take care of their children. This $1200 will be helpful, but I'm hoping we can reduce the tax burden to the point where it will not be needed.

I'm Back

Well I've stopped blogging a while ago, mainly due to laziness. With the election on, I figured I needed to start up again.

So the NDP support private clinics? This is definitely a good thing. If Layton is talking about private clinics being a "fundamental aspect" of our health care system, clearly the Conservatives can't be attacked as long as we say we want to keep the public system running. Maybe something can be done to allow more private involvement in our system if the NDP support this.