Although the reading suggested below is Canadian, the books noted can be nicely bracketed by a couple of US publications.
The first is a utopian novel,

Looking Backward, published in 1888. Edward Bellamy used the conceit of a wealthy Bostonian with sleeping problems who awakes out of his “mesmeric” sleep in the year 2000 to imagine what his city would be like by that time. Beset by the problems of capitalism in 1888, Julian West awakes in a completely socialized country in which the wealth of an industrial society enables each person to contribute as they are able and to have their needs met as a result. In Bellamy’s world, the credit card each person has resembles the Health card, which brings us medical care without charge. You’ll never see our troubled capitalist world with the same accepting attitude after you read this book!

Linda McQuaig’s Behind Closed Doors:  How the Rich Won Control of Canada’s Tax System . . . And Ended Up Richer, published in 1987 by Penguin Books Canada Ltd, presents the inspiring story of Kenneth Carter’s coming to understand fair taxation and the depressing account of how Canadian governments yielded to pressure from rich people to deny the country the revenues its people needed.

 

Walter Stewart’s Shrug:  Trudeau in Power, published in 1971 by New Press, describes the rhetorical exaggerations in which the Prime Minister indulged in 1969 and the White Paper debacle in regard to tax reform (of which there was practically none).

 

Richard Gwyn’s The Northern Magus:  Pierre Trudeau and Canadians, published in 1980 by McClelland and Stewart, provides a disillusioned commentator’s view of the Prime Minister who still holds many Canadians enthralled. Particularly useful is his description of a search for the purpose of government launched by the Prime Minister after he had won a majority in 1974 by rejecting wage-and-price controls and before he imposed such controls on the country on Thanksgiving Day, 13 October 1975;  see pp. 174-76 about this year-long exercise, carried on while the inflation rate topped 12% and the unemployment rate reached more than 7%.

Linda McQuaig’s The Quick and the Dead:  Brian Mulroney, Big Business and the Seduction of Canada, published in 1991 by Penguin Books, focuses primarily on negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States but also considers establishment of the Goods and Services Tax and the support for it provided by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

 

Linda McQuaig’s The Wealthy Banker’s Wife:  The Assault on Equality in Canada, published in 1993 by the Penguin Group, continues the critique of inequality in Canada which she had launched in The Quick and the Dead as she surveyed the policies of Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives, who were increasing inequality in Canada.

 

Maude Barlow and Bruce Campbell’s Straight Through the Heart:  How the Liberals Abandoned the Just Society and What Canadians Can Do About It, published in 1995 by HarperCollins, presents their horror at the way in which Jean Chrétien’s Liberals broke the promises they made in the 1993 federal election, chose to let the Bank of Canada continue its recessionary policies, and gutted Canada’s social security system.

 

Linda McQuaig’s Shooting the Hippo:  Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths, published in 1995 by the Penguin Group, describes the anti-inflationary, recession-creating policies of the Bank of Canada under John Crow and  reveals that Canada was not under pressure from the bond-rating services when the Chrétien Liberals yielded to the Big Lie of a “debt wall” facing Canada in 1994.

 

Linda McQuaig’s The Cult of Impotence:  Selling the Myth of Powerlessness in the Global Economy, published in 1998 by the Penguin Group, expands on the argument of Shooting the Hippo as she describes the development of the international financial system from the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and how the Bank of Canada, under Governors John Crow and Gordon Thiessen, failed Canadians by their obsession with the value of the dollar (as expressed in anti-inflationary policies involving high-interest rates) rather than by creating employment.

 

Jim Stanford’s Economics for Everyone:  A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism, published in 2008 by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Fernwood Books, assists us to understand the system within which Canadian governments have been creating poverty.

 

 

Dennis Raphael’s Poverty and Policy in Canada:  Implications for Health and Quality of Life, published in 2009 by Canadian Scholars’ Press, helps readers to understand the impact on health of the poverty resulting from the actions of Canadian governments.

 

 

Linda McQuaig’s and Neil Brooks’ The Trouble with Billionaires, published in 2010 by Viking Canada, focuses the development of the wealthy class and its impact on the health of the country.

 

Paul Wells’ The Longer I’m Prime Minister:  Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006-, published in 2013 by Vintage Canada, is less focused on the issues of this Website than the preceding books but does provide some insight into the fiscal policies of the Harper government (including Jim Flaherty’s 2009 budget, produced under Opposition pressure, that contradicted earlier rhetoric:  “a straightforward stimulus budget, seeking to pep up the sagging economy with a multi-billion-dollar Keynesian sugar high”—see p. 239).

 

Ross Jackson’s Occupy World Street:  A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform, published in 2012 by Chelsea Green Publishing, presents the global vision of a Canadian who has been living in Denmark since 1964 and draws on wide business and NGO experience in providing a program for the world of the Occupy movement.

 

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket’s The Spirit Level:  Why Equality is Better for Everyone, published with revisions in 2010 by Penguin Books, provides a penetrating analysis of “The Costs of Inequality” and envisions “A Better Society.”

 

The Great Revenue Robbery, edited by Richard Swift, published in 2013 by Between the Lines and sponsored by Canadians for Tax Fairness, presents the suggestions of Dennis Howlett, Trish Hennessey, Jim Stanford, and Murray Dobbin on how tax policy can be used to rebuild Canada’s social programs.

 

The horrors that “voodoo economics” and increasing social inequality have produced in the United States are explored in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart:  The State of White America, 1960-2010, published in 2012 by Cox and Murray, Inc. Although 2010 followed on the subprime mortgage disaster of 2007-08, which revealed US financial capitalism at its sociopathic worst, Murray shows the depths to which people in our neighbouring country are falling and warns us about what we want to avoid!