I agree that Michele Bachmann’s pledge to reduce gas prices to two bucks a gallon is both unrealistic, and unconservative.
Category Archives: Economics
Texas, Jobs And Rick Perry
An illuminating post. For the record, I don’t think that jobs can be created that well by a chief executive. But they can be destroyed, or prevented from being created, and the president has been doing that with a vengeance since he took office (before, in fact, with his campaign rhetoric).
Going Galt In California
The Amazon tax isn’t working out the way the Theftocrats in Sacramento expected.
Unexpectedly!
Finally, A Real Debt Solution
Warren Buffett
…and his fiscal innumeracy. But he supports Barack Obama, so that’s OK.
[Update a while later]
The statistic I would like to see is the amount of tax paid relative to consumption. By that measure, it is possible that Buffett’s tax rate was more than 100 percent.
I do not care if he pays very little tax on saving. I would rather he pay zero tax on saving. His taxes are too high, not too low.
That doesn’t fit the narrative.
Good Shot By Romney
He’s calling the president’s latest campaign stunt the “Magical Misery Bus Tour.”
Give War A Chance
I quit reading Paul Krugman long ago, so I hadn’t realized that he was now advocating a war on space. Does he have an exit strategy?
I’ll let Maguire properly lampoon it, but I would note something that people rarely do about a payroll-tax cut:
My impression of the general economic consensus is that hiring people to dig and re-fill holes, or monitor for space aliens, does not provide any more stimulus than any other cash transfer to a person likely to spend it. Handing out money on street corners, the Bernanke helicopter drop, and payroll tax cuts should all be in play.
If a proposed stimulative shovel-ready project adds social value (e.g., a usefual bridge, or a useful bridge repair), then borrow the money for it; if the project adds nothing, it won’t be more stimulative than a cash transfer. Krugman’s belief in the power of make-work and his preference for that over tax cuts, is motivated by somethig other than standard economic textbook theory.
The payroll-tax reduction that we managed to get out of the Democrats was on the employee side (as is fitting with their insistence on demand-side, rather than supply-side economics). It is extra money in the employees’ pockets, which they presumably spend. But it does nothing to ensure that they have jobs. A cut on the employer side, on the other hand, would make it cheaper to hire people. This sort of encapsulates the economic divide between the two parties.
Six Ideas
…that the Republican front runners should shamelessly steal from the also rans.
I agree that we have to do more than just repeal SOX and Dodd-Frank — we need real banking and finance reform. I’m not sure just what it would look like, but it wouldn’t look like either of those bills.
Rachel Maddow, Space Policy Analyst
I’m not sure what she’s saying here:
We didn’t put a man on the moon because some company thought they might be able to make a profit doing it. It takes vision to involve the common good of the American people without regard for profit. If you’re charting a course for this country and your big idea is “NO WE CAN’T”, then I don’t want you leading this country.
No, Rachel, we put a man on the moon because we wanted to show that a democratic socialist space program was superior to a totalitarian socialist space program. If we’d done it for profit, it would have taken a lot longer, but we’d still be doing it.
The Berlin Wall
Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of its erection. Ilya Somin discusses its significance:
I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany…
And though the wall has been down for more than two decades, or perhaps because it has, a new generation needs to learn the lessons that such things are the inevitable result of Marxist thinking, and one can engage in Marxist thinking without having ever actually read Marx.