A "Basic Income" means different things to different people.
At one end there is the @believeinsomeon unconditional cash transfer to selected homeless individuals: should benefits be delivered in-kind with conditions, or as cash with no strings attached?
It speaks to issues of adequate income support, and to the desire to reduce inequality. It has to be judged in terms of the capacity to do this in a fiscally sustainable way.
It often raises questions of labour market engagement, but to judge this economy wide impacts have to be assessed, not just individual and partial impacts.
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Here's what appears to be @OECD source for these @PierrePoilievre statements, which refer to September 2020 unemployment rates
(9 % for Canada and 7.9 % for US)
.@OECD is great for getting comparable statistics, and the unemployment rate is both an important headline indicator but also a tricky one because there are differences in how accepted definitions are operationalized by different statistical agencies
.@StatCan_eng senior researcher René Morissette has written two very interesting papers on jobs, wages, and work-related benefits, offering insights and a backdrop that will inform our understanding of post #COVID19 jobs.
"at least one-half of long tenure displaced men and women aged 25 to 54 saw their real earnings decline by at least 10% from the year before job loss to five years after job loss."
In one hour @StatCan_eng will release the jobs numbers.
They will refer to one particular week in March, from Sunday the 15th to Saturday the 21st, and are a one-week picture, just a single frame in a movie that has now been running for more than a month.
The employment numbers will be an obvious headline, and there will also be a big jump in unemployment, but both of these statistics needed to be rounded out to capture the full extent of the #COVID19 fallout
.@StatCan_eng classifies someone as "employed" if they have at least one hour of paid work in an employer-employee relationship (self-employment aside), so reductions in hours of work, don't reflected in the employment totals
In a few minutes @StatCan_eng will release 2018 information on incomes and the poverty rate, allowing us to update this picture and inform Canadians about progress toward the poverty reduction targets set by @SocDevSoc@HonAhmedHussen
@StatCan_eng@SocDevSoc@HonAhmedHussen .@StatCan_eng may confirm plans on how the poverty line will be updated, something that hasn't happened in more than a decade and probably leading the official poverty line to under-estimate the extent of poverty in Canada.
.@DavidFrum has probably not characterized some economic research correctly, many models are in fact based upon employment rates and shares, not simply labor force participation rates.
What he does get right is a public exasperation with the management of the policy and the efficiency of government administration, particularly the behavior of employers.