Tagged: statistics
Notable Linkage: How OECD governments generate tax revenues
Excerpt:
How Canada ranks internationally for various forms of taxation, including VAT/GST/HST, Corporate income taxes (CIT), Personal income taxes (PIT), Social security contributions (SSC), and “Other”.
Notable Linkage: Public v private sector pay: who earns more?
Excerpt:
Public sector workers are more skilled, work shorter hours and earn more money than their private sector counterparts, according to a new analysis of the differences in pay out today.
But, if you have a degree, you will get paid better in the private sector – and, for five out of eleven years of data published by the Office for National Statistics, the private sector got better pay increases.
The key facts are:
• In 2011, public sector employees were paid on average between 7.7% and 8.7% more than private sector employees
• The public sector is made up of a higher proportion of higher skilled jobs – widening over the last decade as lower skilled jobs have been outsourced from the public to the private sector.
• The public sector consists of a higher proportion of older employees and earnings tend to increase with age and experience
The graphs #Occupy should have on display at every site
50 years of data. No cherry-picking here.
And to the #Occupiers – this comes from the New York Times. Yes, some of the mainstream media bashes you unfairly – but good reporters still exist. Not everyone is Fox or Sun News.
Charted: Canadian and UK crime and criminal systems
Source: United Nations, International Statistics on Crime and Justice
What’s the point of this? I suppose it’s to suggest that, all things considered, perhaps the current UK Criminal Justice System isn’t something for Canada to emulate. A nation’s crime rate isn’t simply a reflection of how many police, prosecutors and judges it has, of course. There are many factors. Nor is it meant to suggest the courts in British Columbia can’t be improved. Harvey Oberfeld has a good post on this today.
But we shouldn’t model our response to a single incident in this country on a single incident in another country.
Chart of the day: We are so overtaxed!
Oh…oh…maybe not. The chart is geared for Americans, but as you can clearly see Canada is in the bottom half. And, as Paul Krugman also wryly notes, the EU crisis point countries are also low tax regimes. Look elsewhere than the “welfare state” for the root of the trouble!
Government by voodoo
Ah, statistics. You’ve got to love them:
In July, the statistical agency reported that “both the volume and severity of police-reported crime fell in 2009,” three per cent from 2008 and 17 per cent from 1999.
So here we have both the short-term and long-term trend declining. So how does Public Safety Minister Toews respond when confronted with the numbers?
“The crime isn’t going down,” Toews insisted. “It is still unacceptably high. Canadians should not be subjected to that kind of crime rate.”
I can almost imagine him stomping his feet with his hands over his ears. Ah, but perhaps Canada’s crime rate is abnormally high compared to other industrialized nations* and a decline of 17% is simply relative? Well, we are #12 on the list. Par for the course, really, and not higher than incarceration mad America.
*The rates for countries with [cough] opaque transparency, like Russia and China, are almost surely low. But I have trust in statistics collected from countries like Germany and France, etc. Of course, by kneecapping StatsCan the Tories are pushing us towards becoming more like the former…
