I think the less fracking there is, the better it is for the economy and society.

The worst loophole is what Donald Trump has talked about: the tax deductibility of interest. If you let real estate owners or corporate raiders borrow the money to buy a property or company, and then pay interest to the bondholders, you'll load the company you take over with debt. But you don't have to pay taxes on the profits that you pay out in this way. You can deduct the interest from your tax liability.

If the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up.

What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.

Canada is a malstructured. You could almost call it a failed economy, except that its natural resources are so rich that everybody can get wealthy off making holes in the ground and digging up the oil and polluting the environment.

Economists often define their discipline as "the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends." But when resources or money really become scarce, economists call it a crisis and say that it's a question for politicians, not their own department.

Oil now, as a result of the Saudi production, is priced so low that there are not going to be new fracking investments made. A lot of companies that have gone into fracking are heavily debt-leveraged, and are beginning to default on their loans. The next wave of defaults that banks are talking about is probably going to be in the fracking industry. When the costs of production are so much more than they can end up getting for the oil, they just stop producing and stop paying their loans.