On the very same night as the Oscars were disseminating from Hollywood, the WWE produced a live pay-per-view that looked intriguing on paper, especially from the standpoint of not knowing for sure who was going to win most of the matches. That is always a bonus. Here are my thoughts on the show:
1. Vince missed the boat again!!: Vince McMahon gave himself a mulligan after the Royal Rumble, where the crowd, to a man/woman/child, booed not only Roman Reigns, but the Rock out of the building, too, after choosing Reigns as the anointed future face of the company instead of crowd favourite Daniel Bryan. So, WWE called an audible and gave the fans what they wanted by putting Bryan in a match with Reigns at Fastlane to see who would take on Brock Lesner for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship at the show of shows: Wrestlemania 31. And what does Vince choose to do? Have Bryan win? No. Have a controversial finish so there can be a triple-threat match at Mania to keep fans happy? Nope. Piss fans off more by having Reigns win clean? Bingo! The match was good and both men are rising stars. Hopefully one day they can be the next Rock and Austin, but right now Daniel Bryan is a much better all-around performer and has the crowd on his side. Reigns is getting there, but it is too early for him and a push too early may ruin his chance to ever get over with fans. He deserves better!!
2. Impressive Tag Team: Cesaro and Tyson Kidd won the tag-team titles last night, the only belts to actually change hands, and they looked good doing it. Ceasaro has been on the upswing in terms of performance and fan love since last Wrestlemania, where he won the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal. After that, WWE's creative team tried to seemingly destroy his career by keeping him heel, pairing him with Paul Heyman and not being able to figure out that all they needed to do was turn him face and let him have a run on his own, so it was nice to see him win something last night. Tyson Kidd, on the other hand, is very good between the ropes and is finally starting to learn to develop a character that fans actually care about. Good on them for winning and hopefully they will stay together long enough to build a decent following.
3. STING: Obviously WWE is going back to Sting's glory days in WCW where he wouldn't speak and wielded the great equalizer, a black baseball bat, against his treacherous foes, with his WWE character. And I am fine with that. I like the eery supernatural elements and think that staying silent keeps him more mysterious and interesting. Triple H did a great job as the scheming businessman who wants to avoid a real fight at all costs and it was nice to see him actually take Sting down for a minute, just to show the audience that Sting wasn't going to just come in and destroy him every time they met. However, in the end, it was nice to see the baseball bat come out and for the Wrestlemania match to be officially set up. I have no doubt Sting will win the match, but with these 2 trading promos and competing in the ring, an exciting story should unfold over the next 34 days.
4. Cena finally puts someone over: As much as I want to see Rusev lose after a year of being a beast, I really like how Cena put him over in their match. Cena remained strong by passing out to the Accolade instead of tapping out and Rusev got a big rub from this. He has the potential to be the next great monster heel if they build him right.
OTTAWA—A new paper by
researchers at the International Monetary Fund appears to debunk a tenet
of conservative economic ideology — that taxing the rich to give to the
poor is bad for the economy.
The paper by IMF researchers Jonathan Ostry, Andrew Berg and Charalambos Tsangarides will be applauded by politicians and economists who regard high levels of income inequality as not only a moral stain on society but also economically unsound.
Labelled as the first study to incorporate recently compiled figures comparing pre- and post-tax data from a large number of countries, the authors say there is convincing evidence that lower net inequality is good economics, boosting growth and leading to longer-lasting periods of expansion.
In the most
controversial finding, the study concludes that redistributing wealth,
largely through taxation, does not significantly impact growth unless
the intervention is extreme.
In fact, because redistributing wealth through taxation has the positive impact of reducing inequality, the overall affect on the economy is to boost growth, the researchers conclude.
“We find that higher inequality seems to lower growth. Redistribution, in contrast, has a tiny and statistically insignificant (slightly negative) effect,” the paper states.
“This implies that, rather than a trade-off, the average result across the sample is a win-win situation, in which redistribution has an overall pro-growth effect.”
While the paper is heavy on the economics, there is no mistaking the political implications in the findings.
In Canada, the Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau is set to make supporting the middle class a key plank in the upcoming election and the NDP has also stressed the importance of tackling income inequality.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have boasted that tax cuts, particularly deep reductions in corporate taxation, are at least partly responsible for why the Canadian economy outperformed other G7 countries both during and after the 2008-09 recession.
In the Commons on Tuesday, Employment Minister Jason Kenney said the many tax cuts his government has introduced since 2006, including a two-percentage-point trim of the GST, has helped most Canadians.
Speaking on a Statistics Canada report showing net median family wealth had increased by 44.5 per cent since 2005, he added:
“It is no coincidence because, with the more than 160 tax cuts by this government, Canadian families, on average, have seen their after-tax disposable income increase by 10 per cent across all income categories. We are continuing to lead the world on economic growth and opportunity for working families.”
The authors concede that their conclusions tend to contradict some well-accepted orthodoxy, which holds that taxation is a job killer.
But they say that many previous studies failed to make a distinction between pre-tax inequality and post-tax inequality, and so often compared apples to oranges, among other shortcomings.
The data they looked at showed almost no negative impact from redistribution policies and that economies where incomes are more equally distributed tend to grow faster and have growth cycles that last longer.
Meanwhile, they say the data is not crystal clear that even large redistributions have a direct negative impact, although “from history and first principles . . . after some point redistribution will be destructive of growth.”
Still, they also stop short of saying their conclusions definitively settle the issue, acknowledging it is a complex area of economic theory with many variables at play and a scarcity of hard data.
Instead, they urge more rigorous study and say their findings “highlight the urgency of this agenda.”
The Washington-based institution released the study Wednesday morning but, perhaps due to the controversial nature of the conclusions, calls it a “staff discussion note” that does “not necessarily” represent the IMF views or policy. It was authorized for distribution by Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist.