Category: Politics
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Want Prosperity? Tax the Rich
The right-wing blogosphere has lately been touting a table that the Norquistina Tax Foundation cherry-picked from a recent OECD study, showing that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system in the OECD–perhaps excepting Ireland. This may well be true. But I’m not totally sure what they’re trying to say–except maybe that the U.S.…
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A Land of Magical Thinking: Becoming a Millionaire
I saw mention of this statistic in a blog comment last week, and went looking. Here is the central faith-based delusion regarding The American Dream: Belief: 45% of Americans think it is somewhat or very likely that they will become wealthy in their lifetimes.* Fact: in 2005, 5.7% of households were worth a million dollars…
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Bring Back the Philosopher Kings
Paul Light’s proposal in yesterday’s NYT should be receiving enthusiastic support from Fareed Zakaria and Bryan Caplan. Light’s proposal: Congress should create a federal commission to draw up reorg/efficiency plans for the U.S. government. The key rule that legislators need to include: those plans would be submitted to congress for an up-or-down vote, with no…
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“Cheering Germans Will Not Send More Troops to Afghanistan”
The Economist gets this one utterly wrong–explaining, perhaps, why that august newspaper tragically endorsed the war in Iraq (and has yet to acknowledge the tragedy of that endorsement). They don't understand true power. True power–its sine qua non–is the ability to get people to do what you want them to do (with the least possible…
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Extreme Thinking: Dangerous? Or Just Irrelevant?
A recent Bryan Caplan post finally crystallized for me why I find so much libertarian thinking and commentary to be irrelevant: The philosophically insightful breakdown, rather, is the "statist-libertarian" spectrum. Here's the best way to sum up my outlook: The endpoints of the political spectrum are not the "far left" Michael Moore and the "far…
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Conservative “Intellectual” “Ascendancy”
Brad DeLong appropriately derides a WSJ piece by Mark Lilla, who bemoans the decline of conservative intellect. The key Lilla line: For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. Wrong. It has been ascendant because it promised and delivered lower taxes. It’s…
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What’s With Arkansas (and Tennessee and Oklahoma)?
I was looking again at the maps of which way voters swung from 2004 to 2008, and noticed an odd anomaly: a hard line at Arkansas' northern, southern, and eastern borders (and to a lesser extent at Tennessee and Oklahoma borders). At Arkansas' eastern border, well, there's a big river there. But elsewhere, wouldn't you…
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The “Patriotic Pugnacity” Platform
The most striking anomaly in the recent election, to my eyes, was the strong Red countermovement among Appalachians and Okies: These areas swung even harder right this year, while almost every other part of the country went left (excepting McCain’s home state). Steve Sailer (he of the quite convincing “affordable family formation” thesis), explains this…
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Yes We Did. Yes We Will.
A government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. No related posts.
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Making Voters Rational: Mail ‘Em a Ballot
I can’t believe I haven’t posted about Bryan Caplan‘s The Myth of the Rational Voter, a book that I spend a lot of time thinking about (and frequently disagreeing with). You can get the gist of it over on Amazon; I’ll just say that it greatly advances the discussion regarding the (de)merits of democracy. Cf.…
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Why to Love America
No related posts.
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Republicans Create Opportunity? Yeah, Right.
Republicans constantly proclaim that inequality is the price of prosperity. If things are more unequal, there’s more incentive–and crucially, opportunity–for people to better themselves. Everyone benefits from that. Except it’s not true. Let’s think about Joe the Plumber, who made $40K in 2006 but would like to buy the plumbing business he works for–for a…
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The Tidal Wave is Hitting the Beach
No related posts.
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Mankiw’s Right: Money’s Not the Incentive
Subtitle: Pipe Dreams Greg Mankiw makes more than a quarter-million dollars a year. We know that, because he's expecting to pay the 2-4% payroll tax surcharge under Obama's tax plan, on any extra dollars he earns. He's also planning to leave his children more $3.5 million dollars (the current inheritance tax exclusion) when he dies.…
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McCain’s Steel Ceiling: Who Loves Ya, Baby?
As of today, electoral-vote.com has seventeen states going for McCain. Check out how the electoral votes shake out on my friend Mike’s site (dark blue is >10% lead for Obama, lighter blue >5%, and so on; white is EVs from tied states): There’s an almost flat line of almost impregnable red states. It may not…
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All Cashed Up with Nowhere to Go: What Caused the Depression(s), and What to Do About It
I’ve been meaning to post about this great two–part article by James Livingston (H/T to Mark Thoma), on the causes of the Great Depression and the current…whatever it is. Livingston’s explanation for both cases (in my words): There were oceans of money with not enough productive uses available (like, investments in physical plants and wages–things…
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Europe vs. U.S.: Family Time Versus Four-by-Fours and Two-by-Fours
Finally! Someone has come back at me (well he didn’t know he was talking to me) with the key, perhaps-trumping argument on my Europe vs. US longatribes. I gave this argument away in a previous post, hoping someone would pick it up, but have yet to hear it well enunciated elsewhere. Summary of my arguments:…
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Reagan, Bush, and McCain: Selling America First
This 2003 article by Warren Buffet–explaining in his usual pithy manner how we’re frittering away our future well-being by borrowing abroad and selling off our assets–got me looking once again at our country’s long-term financial position in the world. And once again, I came across one of those profound inflection points at–you guessed it–1980. The…
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Pro-Growth Republicans III: Yeah, Right.
Following up on previous posts here, here, and here, yet some more debunking of this myth (Update: yet more here and here): Various have shot spitballs at this chart, but add it to all the others in previous posts–showing that over the long haul, Democrats deliver prosperity and Republicans don’t–and the notion that Republican policies…