The war against the young
Je n’ai pas suivi ce dossier, je ne sais donc pas exactement de quoi il est question. Je ne sais que le prochain budget des Conservateurs devrait couper progressivement dans les pensions de vieillesse. Certains démontrent que ce ne serait pas vraiment d’un grand apport et qu’il existe d’autres chats à fouetter. Mais j’aime bien cette version des faits de Margaret Wente du Globe and Mail, avec laquelle il est possible de nuancer notre montée de lait. Une seule chose à y ajouter par contre : malgré le lobby, sa force, ne devrait-on pas, malgré tout s’en tenir qu’aux résultats, puisqu’au final c’est tout ce qui importe ? Oui, non ? C’est toujours mieux d’en savoir plus.
The biggest, most powerful and most dangerous lobby in the United States today isn’t the banking lobby or Big Pharma. It’s CARP’s big brother, AARP. No politician dares tangle with the seniors’ lobby. No one dares to question social security and Medicare (health care for seniors), even though these are the entitlements that threaten to keep the U.S. in hock to China forever. As economics writer RobertSamuelson has noted, there’s no path to a balanced budget without restraining retiree spending. And yet it’s strictly off-limits.
With the geezer population set to double, their entitlements will double, too – pensions, health care and all the rest. But it’s worse still because, thanks to modern medicine, people live forever. When the federal government introduced OAS in 1952, the qualifying age was 70 and many people didn’t live long enough to collect it. Today, it’s 65, and a Canadian of that age can expect to collect OAS for nearly 20 years. (…)
I am constantly astonished at the opposition parties’ stout defence of entitlements for people who demonstrably don’t need them. And I think anyone with a social conscience and a CARP membership should tear it up.
Can Ottawa spark innovation? It hasn’t yet
Est-ce que l’innovation a des limites, et est-ce que le Canada en voit la forme ? Jeffrey Simpson dans le Globe and Mail interroge le financement fédéral pour la recherche et le développement. Il y met en confrontation les bonnes intentions dans l’histoire du Canada et les résultats généraux de celles-ci. Le résultat : tout ce qui devient gros et probablement aidé par ce financement, se fait manger tôt ou tard par d’autres provenant de l’extérieur, et le Canada reste ainsi tout petit :
Will all this do any good? The Harper government, like its predecessors, is sufficiently dismayed by lagging productivity that it is willing to shuffle programs around and create new structures. Whether government programs are at the heart of the problem is doubtful, given that the R&D tax credits have been among the most generous in the world.
Canada has industries that just don’t do much research and development, of which the resource extractive ones, especially oil and gas, are at the top of the list. The economy has never fully recovered from the collapse of Nortel, which was the largest private-sector generator of R&D in Canada. Now, Research In Motion, the newest flagship for high-tech R&D, is staggering.
Creative mid-sized Canadian firms are often sold to foreign interests. They become cogs in a big corporate machine that tends to do the bulk of its research in the home country, the classic example being Microsoft, which sells its products everywhere in Canada, sucks up talent from Canadian universities, especially Waterloo, but does no serious R&D in Canada.
