…but the Cubans remain shackled to the corpse.
Category Archives: Business
Gillespie Versus Chait, On Deficits
And it’s Nick in a knockout. As always, though, phrases like this seem jarring, and oxymoronic:
What I showed in the post is that in fact federal revenue increased nicely under Bush, despite the tax cuts. Revenues tailed off at the end of his reign of error, because of the recession and the financial crisis (caused largely by idiotic government policies).
Emphasis mine.
How can federal revenue increase when we cut taxes? The answer is that we didn’t cut taxes. We increased taxes. What we cut was the tax rate. This misleading phraseology makes me crazy and if we could get it right, we’d have a strong rhetorical upper hand, but both conservatives and libertarians almost always feed the left with it. As I wrote a while ago:
Both sides of the aisle continually make the mistake — though it’s no mistake on the part of the Democrats — of confusing a tax rate cut with an actual tax cut. Here is a commonsense, as opposed to the Alice-in-wonderland, definition of a real tax cut. It is a reduction in the amount of taxes paid. Conversely, a tax increase is an increase in the amount of taxes paid to — and revenue received by — the government.
That’s it. Almost too simple, isn’t it?
When a politician says that he’s going to either cut or increase your taxes, he is engaging, wittingly or not, in a conceit and a deceit. He says it as though he has the power to do any such thing, when in fact he does not. He has no power except to reduce or increase the rate at which you pay taxes, whether on property, income, or whatever.
Think of it as the difference between a joystick and a mouse. With a computer mouse, you can point directly to the place that you want to be on a screen. With a joystick, you can only control the rate at which you move toward it, and in so doing, the target may move, and it may move faster or in a different direction than you can keep up with using your rate control. Politicians talk about tax cuts as though they have a computer mouse that allows them to pass a law and a specified amount of revenue will roll in, but the reality is that they have a slow joystick, with a nebulous relationship to the eventual goal.
For instance, he can raise your top income tax rate from, say, thirty to ninety percent. Did he increase your taxes by that amount? Only if you’re as stupid as he is. More likely, you’ll just cut back on how much you work, settle for the lower bracket, or do more work off the books, and he’ll end up getting less in taxes from you than before. So did he increase your taxes? Nope.
Similarly, he could cut your rate, and you might be motivated to go out and earn even more, perhaps enough more that you pay more taxes, even at the lower rate. So did he cut your taxes? No. But the wealth of the nation — including your own — was increased.
I also note in that piece the implicit assumption of the statists that all of your wealth belongs to them, and that you should be brimming with gratitude for whatever they allow you to keep, an assumption that some in the UK want to bring to its logical conclusion:
The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.
But of course! Why hasn’t the IRS thought of that?
Anyway, the simple addition of the word “rate” as a modifier of “cuts” in Nick’s sentence renders it non-oxymoronic and sensible, and more care with phrases like this in general would reduce both confusion and obfuscation on this issue by the Chaits of the world.
Good Space Reporting
It’s so rare, I want to applaud it when it occurs. There’s a story at the WaPo that has a good summary of what’s going on in space policy, though I think that the headline is a little understated. It might have been nice to get a little more elaboration on this, though:
The House bill awaiting action would give twice as much money to Russia for transporting astronauts and cargo to the space station as it would give to U.S. companies working to build that capacity.
Insanity. And it doesn’t even mention the fact that this undermines the non-proliferation regime, due to the need to continually waive the requirements for INKSNA (a subject on which I’ll have more tomorrow).
Home Depot
This makes me glad that I’m a regular customer:
On CNBC, the founder of Home Depot blasted Barack Obama and his administration as a collection of tenured dilettantes who have never had to meet a payroll in their lives. Greg Hengler offers a couple of juicy excerpts from his appearance, especially when Marcus starts “apologizing” for having created over 300,000 jobs through the kind of entrepreneurship that the current White House wants to discourage.
I don’t think that Obama was tenured, though. And I hope he’ll be out of a job himself in a couple years.
Now They Tell Us
Home ownership is a lousy investment.
While I don’t dispute the numbers, they are based on averages, and don’t take into account location. Also, there is no accounting for the intangibles of owning your own house, with the ability to make it the way you want it.
NASA’s Fate On The Hill
It still remains unresolved. Amanda Carey has the current state of play over at The Daily Caller.
A Space Bubble?
One of the biggest concerns about the commercial spaceflight industry is whether there will be sufficient demand to support multiple players. Technology Review has an article on the subject.
I would note that the limit on crew rotation to the ISS is somewhat arbitrary, and that the crew capacity is artificially limited by lifeboat capacity. I don’t think it would be that hard to increase the life support to handle a larger crew if they could solve this problem. I personally don’t think it’s really a problem — we don’t have “lifeboats” for McMurdo in winter, and I don’t understand why we really need one at ISS, but if we do, the solution is not to evacuate the entire station and bring everyone back to earth, which is really kind of stupid if you think much about it, but it’s been the default requirement since the eighties. As I’ve noted before, the Titanic’s lifeboats weren’t designed to get people back to Southampton — they were designed to provide a safe haven until their passengers could be rescued by another ship. A much better solution is to have a coorbiting habitat (e.g., a Bigelow facility) with a true lifeboat in the form of a crew tug (I’d make the tug large and inflatable as well, to maximize utilization of the docking port, and it could serve as a temporary safe haven itself). If NASA really wanted to goose the market, they’d buy at least one of each.
Save The Planet
Shop Walmart:
you, and everyone else trying to sell to Walmart, have to spend all your time figuring out how to produce the same product with less. Walmart’s ruthless focus on reducing prices is driving producers everywhere to cut the costs of production: to switch to cheaper materials, use less packaging, cut down on waste of all kinds and to consolidate and rationalize both production and distribution. The result is a steady and inexorable decline in humanity’s impact on the environment for every unit of GDP.
The Green Police couldn’t do it any better. In fact, given the political cluelessness, uncertain signals (is nuclear energy a good thing or a bad thing?), and anti-scientific knuckle dragging from environmentalists on subjects like the use of GMOs in agriculture, it’s likely that a world run by Walmart would be both richer and cleaner than a world run by Greenpeace. Not that I want Walmart (or Greenpeace) to run the world, bu at the end of the day, being ruthlessly cheap is the most important way of being green. To cut out waste, to use methods of production that cut the energy consumed at every stage in the process, to strip packaging to the barest minimum, to reduce the amount of raw materials in every product: this is the mother lode of green. This is how a growing human population limits its impact on the earth. This is where Walmart and green are as one.
I still say that Sam Walton was a greater humanitarian, and did more to improve the lives of the poor, than any politician ever born.
The Last Straw
Kyle-Anne Shiver says that the Democrats sealed their fate in March:
All the other power-grabs — taking over auto companies and banks and insurance companies — might have left the Democrats out of the electoral tsunami zone, but the health care power grab sealed their coming fate.
The health care bill, foisted upon an unwilling American public, has become this era’s Intolerable Act. Just as King George and his elitist parliament pushed our ancestors beyond their breaking point, so has the modern Democrat cabal of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. These are names that will live in American infamy.
No Mount Rushmore for them.
Get Ready For Your Health-Care “Reeducation”
By voting the fascists out in a few weeks.
More thoughts here:
Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They’re more subtle than this in Caracas.
and here:
Secretary Sebelius’ Hugo Chavezesque threats against the health insurance industry demonstrate why the fight to repeal Obamacare is also the fight for the soul of our country. Obamacare and the progressive movement represent a fundamental threat to our founding principles. For the left, “progress” means fundamentally transforming America through bureaucratic dictates that will engineer a “better” society by assuring equal outcomes. Through Obamacare, progressives would redistribute wealth through a distant, patronizing welfare state that regulates more and more of the economy, politics and society. The question Americans face is: Are we a country ruled by law or by bureaucrat?
Time to take the country back.