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FRASER UPDATE
A weekly digest of our latest research, commentary, and blog posts
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Latest Research
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Ottawa spending 50% more per Canadian in 2020 than during the 2009 recession: $13,226 vs. $8,775
Prime Ministers and Government Spending, Updated 2020 Edition finds that total per-person spending in 2020 will reach $13,226, including $3,920 per Canadian in COVID-related spending. This represents a 46.6 per cent increase over the previous highest spending level reached in 2019 of $9,041. Crucially, 2020’s total program spending, after adjusting for inflation, is 50.7 per cent higher than per-person spending during the 2009 recession, and 74.5 per cent higher than the highest point of per-person spending during the Second World War.
Read More [[link removed]]
To balance the federal government’s pre-recession deficit this year, the GST would have had to increase from the 5% to 9%
Deferring Federal Taxes: Illustrating the Deficit Using the GST is a new study that uses the goods and services tax to highlight how much tax the federal government was deferring before the recession. To contextualize the size of the pre-recession deficit, the federal GST (currently five per cent) would have to have been nine per cent in order to balance the budget.
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Potential permanent changes from our experience with COVID-19
F.I. experts weigh in on how the COVID-19 pandemic and recession might change Canada permanently.
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73 Ontario high schools experienced declining performance in 2019; more than improved
Report Card on Ontario’s Secondary Schools, 2020 ranks 739 anglophone and francophone public and Catholic secondary schools (and a small number of independent and First Nations schools) on nine academic indicators derived from annual provincewide reading, writing and math tests. The Report Card provides parents with information they can’t easily get anywhere else. In addition to five years of academic results, the Report Card also shows which schools are improving or falling behind.
Read More [[link removed]]
Commentary and Blog Posts
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Artificial intelligence joins humans in fight against COVID-19 [[link removed]]
(Appeared in Edmonton Sun) by Steven Globerman
Dozens of U.S. hospitals are using an AI system to predict which COVID-19 patients will become critically ill.
Trudeau government smashes spending record, must right country’s fiscal ship [[link removed]]
(Appeared in the Toronto Sun) by Jason Clemens, Tegan Hill, and Milagros Palacios
Total expected federal per-person spending will eclipse $13,000 in 2020-21.
Tax Freedom Day came early this year—but there’s not much to celebrate [[link removed]]
(Appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press) by Jake Fuss and Milagros Palacios
This year's combined projected federal and provincial government deficits total $315.2 billion.
Modern Monetary Theory, Part 4: MMT and quantitative easing [[link removed]]
by Steven Globerman
Since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, central banks in Canada and elsewhere have pursued quantitative easing.
On the Passing of Harvard economist Alberto Alesina [[link removed]]
by Niels Veldhuis, Jake Fuss, and Alex Whalen
Alesina specifically noted the experience of Canada in the mid-1990s.
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