…and his fiscal innumeracy. But he supports Barack Obama, so that’s OK.

[Update a while later]

Stop coddling Warren Buffett:

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.

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.