This is pretty stupid crap IMO. Sorry but that's what it is.

Targetting enemy units and commanders is not a legal function, its a military function which the Constitution entrusts to the Executive. There is NOTHING, NOTHING in the Constitution that says US citizenship is some magic immunity if you're engaged with a foreign military force at war with the US.

It would be one thing if Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by the US military when he was under the jurisdiction of the US or some other resonably competetant jurisdiction, but he wasn't. He was killed conducting operations with an enemy force in a land under little or no legal control by any jurisdiction. The US has every Constitutional right to bomb his convoy as it did to, say, bomb Hitler's bunker *even if* it was known that a member of the high command happened to have US citizenship.

You're saying we would be better off if we provided more incentives to people who invest to loose money?

More importantly an investor can tap $3K per year against other income to offset a massive loss but there's no limit against investment income. If Buffett loses $1M on one stock sale but gains $1.1M on another he can use the $1M loss to make his net gain $100K.

Long term capital gains are treated differently, precisely because the gov’t felt it was in the best interest of the economy if people weren’t constantly flipping stocks.

I'm not convinced the economy needs its 'best interest' looked out for in this manner. Rapid stock trading is hardly an easy road to riches at the expense of the rest of the economy. It's quite easy to make pretty crappy returns doing in and out day trading. For the economy's benefit, though, such rapid traders often provide liquidity to the market which is a good thing.

For example, let’s take Warren Buffet. He has forty-five billion dollars in assets. He could spend a million dollars of that every year for the next forty-five centuries and pay zero income tax because he hasn’t got “income”, only money from the bank. (Obviously there would be capital gains taxes involved, but it’s possible to offset those by selling assets that lost money.)

1. Where those assets are the results of actual earnings, either salary, interest income, rental income or profits on businesses he owns, he ALREADY paid income taxes on that.

2. In order for him to consume, say, some stock that he owns, he will have to sell that stock. At that time he will incur a capital gain if he sold it for a profit compared to what he paid for it. Or he may incur a loss.

Suppose he incurs a loss? A year ago he brought some shares for $1000 but sells them today for $800 in order to throw a party. He already paid income tax on the $1000 he had to earn to originally buy those shares. Now he's just taking back what he originally owned minus a loss of $200 which has probably become someone else's capital gain. (Say the lucky duck who sold that stock to Buffett for $1000 before its market fell to only $800!).

If he incurs a gain (say selling for $1200 making $200), he pays taxes on that.

IMO I don't think its clear that his gains should be treated any different than regular income. I don't think him making $200 buying and selling some shares should be taxed less than a fellow who makes $200 by working some extra overtime hours. But let's continue....

You are right, Buffett could offset his realized gains with realized losses...carefully selling shares at a loss of $200 to offset his sale that produces a gain of $200. Great but then what does this mean?

a. If Buffett happens to have equal amounts of gains and losses....well he hasn't really earned any income has he?

b. If Buffett happens to have more gains than losses, well every time he consumes he must choose to either pay tax on his realized gain or sell off some positions at a loss to offset that gain. Since gains outnumber losses, he will eventually exhaust his offset ability.

c. If Buffett has more losses than gains....well we're back to the point where he's already paid income taxes on that.

Don't mean to be anti-property, just realistic. Lohan has every right to collect her residuals from her previous films over the next year or so. This concept, though, is being sold on the premise that its going to provide an additional incentive for creative people to use their tax savings for productive and fruitful investments. But Lohan is likely not to do that, in fact the next great piece of acting is likely to be from someone who has no special incentive from lower tax rates on high earnings.

If you want to argue that taxes are theft, then do so. But if that's your argument why is it not theft then to tax Lohan or Paris Hilton for spending millions on flashy consumption while not taxing Warren Buffett for his supposedly noble investing and non-consumption? If property is your angle then the fact is you have no right to judge the consumption of one's property as less within one's rights than the investment of one's property.

Let's imagine we keep all other things equal. Let's just abolish taxes for Buffett. Gov't revenue will go down by a few hundred million a year. But that won't make a difference because savings goes up by a few hundred billion a year (remember Buffett is very frugal and would opt to save all the tax cuts he gets). There's no crowding out because the extra borrowing gov't will do will be offset by Buffett's savings (note I'm not saying that Buffett will be necessarily loaning his savings to the gov't, but his addition to the savings market offsets the gov'ts additional borrowing from it).

The question then is what is the interest rate the gov't pays on its borrowing. If its very high, then its likely not a good deal for the gov't, if its very low it likely is.

If Buffett were paying less money in taxes, he wouldn’t personally consume any more. He’d have more money to invest, and he’d have more money to donate to charity when he dies.

First, giving money to charity is consumption. Too often in these discussions consumption is given some type of negative spin when in reality its just a term. There's nothing inherently wrong with consumption, in fact without consumption there'd be no point in worrying about an economy to begin with (if you never consume anything, why would you worry about your income?).

Second, Buffett's just a hypothetical here. Sure Buffett's ability to allocate resources is probably much better than the gov't. Much better than the average person in the market. That is why he is so much richer than almost everyone else. There's no special reason to think, though, that rich people in general are better at future resource allocation. In fact, I suspect plenty of wealthy people are resting on their bums, milking past innovations.

For example, let's consider actresses' income from Sept to Dec. Lindsey Lohan is probably going to earn income greater than the average actress in this time period. Why? Royalties on her past films, investment income etc. But out of the hundreds, thousands maybe, of paid actresses in that time period, she will probably not do a single movie or performance. Any great acting you see from Sept. to Dec. is likely to not be from Lohan. Yet the economy is paying Lohan and we are talking about giving her a tax cut? But there's every reason to think that the next 'innovative' contribution to actressing is probably going to come from some woman who isn't earning what Lohan will earn.

The key to saving this whole thing is realizing that you can basically just turn the income tax into a consumption tax. Add an unlimited deduction for savings and voila. The trick, of course, is that income = consumption + savings

Problem, this already exists. It's called 401K, Roth IRA, Health Savings Accounts, Educational savings accounts and even capital gains taxes (you don't pay taxes on the increase in value of your stock portfolio, only if you switch from saver to non-saver and sell your stocks to *realize* those gains). Many of these vehicles have an added bonus in that they let you use the savings to consume in the future without any taxes at all. For example, a health savings account can be used to buy health care consumption without any taxes.

While none of these tax vehciles are unlimited, the fact is most people come nowhere close to maxing out on all their potential tax free savings. This being the case, what problem is a consumption tax trying to solve? Are the rich consuming too much? I don't think so, the rich like Paris Hilton who are living large are still in little danger of going broke. The super duper mega rich (Warren Buffet, for example) have so much money that they have effectively a savings rate of nearly 100% already....when you have billions of dollars it becomes literally impossible not to save nearly all of it. The human body simply cannot handle consuming more than a tiny fraction of such a load.

If the problem is the middle and lower class saves too little, this idea doesn't really address the problem since tax free savings is amply available to many of them and they don't take full advantage of it. Also when you're talking about the middle and lower class you are talking about lower tax brackets to begin with so the advantage offered by not taxing savings is likewise lower.

Actually everyone more or less forgot about Ayers. He kept to a quite area of politics (local education reform) that wasn't competitive (since he didn't run for office, there was never anyone who ran against him who had an incentive to review just exactly what he did). Like many in American history, he reinvented himself as a local do-gooder which no one ever really questioned. No doubt he was probably described now and then as an 'ex-60's radical' which to most people probably meant ex-hippie. It helped also that his father had a lot of money and clout among Republicans and Democrats.

I do agree with you that the failure of the Reagan administration to prosecute him for conspiracy to murder US soldiers allowed him to regain legitimacy. For 12 years (Reagan thru Bush I), the Republicans who ran the Justice Dept. opted to give him a pass. That was spitting on US soldiers and I wouldn't blame you if you never voted for the GOP again because of it.

It would seem then that liberals enjoy most taking money from themselves and giving it to people in Red States.

I don't object provided it's clear you're paying for a secular good (i.e. a soup kitchen).

The problem with the fungible money discussion is that it's a very mushy idea that should not be made unless some ground rules are set in place beforehand.

One sensible rule IMO is that money that is exchanged should cease to be considered as belonging to the original person..... For example, if a school teacher teaches for a month, earns $4,000 and then gives $50 to a political group lobbying for increased teacher pay, that isn't the taxpayer 'paying for' lobbying against the tax payer. The money ceased to belong to the taxpayer the moment the teacher finished her teaching for the month...just like if the guy you pay to fix your roof spends his money on porn and beer, well that's his money the moment the last nail was driven.

Likewise if I'm buying something, I'm paying only for that something. If I pay a ticket to see a movie in a theater, I'm paying for that movie and not some other movie the owner may show later in the year....even if the owner uses the 'profits' from one movie to show the other at below cost.

Conservatives, though, enjoy a odd type of socialism where they try to lay claim to 100% ownership whenever a single penny is provided. If Museum A gets a $5,000 grant to show some Van Gough painting that is touring the country, then everything that is ever displayed there for the rest of time is being 'supported by taxpayers' even if the place's operating budget is $50 million a year. But this only works when they want it to work. I don't get to tell BP not to drill in the ocean because I filled my car up at a BP station a few times last year.

In other words money is indeed fungible but the line between my wallet and your wallet is NOT. When it leaves one wallet and hits another the money may be as fungible as you care to pretend but where it lands isn't. Where fungible does matter is when we are talking about accounting. The Social Security Trust fund, for example, is fungible in the sense that sometimes it makes sense to talk about it as though it's real and other times it makes sense to talk about it as though its fiction. It's really both in the same way your kid's allowance is both a real thing that represents money that goes from you to them but is also just a label you put on spending that's really your own.

It seems that there's a disconnect here. Is charity by gov't putting too many strings on people or not enough? When you complain about it increasing out of wedlock births, for example, it seems like you're demanding more strings (such as no increase in payments for additional kids, a lifetime cap on welfare payments....which BTW is current policy).

But then a 'no strings' welfare policy would look a lot like the negative income tax which sought to give everyone a base amount of cash and let them decide what to do with it (housing, food, medical care, school, booze or whatever). But the negative income tax for the poor never got off the ground because of its lack of strings.

But for entitlements, though, a variation of the negative income tax seems to exist by pretending that people own their entitlements. Medicare cuts are 'death panels' and the gov't telling people what they can't do....when in reality almost everyone who lives more than a few years beyond 65 is taking out more in Medicare than they ever put in.

What seems to be the case, unsurprisingly, is that people want strings on money going to 'those other people' but not themselves. Notice that the dismay about welfare above appears totally ignorant of the fact that many of these rules were dramatically altered under Bill Clinton's welfare reform over a decade ago. If social security was cut 1.5% three years ago I'm sure Brendan's father would know have known about it the moment it happened, yet he probably hasn't kept track of anything that's changed with 'welfare' since the 1980's.

but to give people a choice as to how a certain percentage of their tax dollars are spent

I say no. You have a choice, it's called voting. In reality almost none of your tax dollars really goes to anything that can be called charity. While some spending may never reach you (you may never become unemployed, you may be exceptionally healthy in your 60's and then drop dead of a heart attack unexpectedly or you may die the day before you get your first social security check), the fact is almost all gov't spending is either 'insurance' for you (against unemployment, poverty in old age or lack of medical coverage) or is stuff we have decided collectively to support (wars, national parks, the debt etc.). Almost none of it really goes to things that you can honestly call charity if you take charity to mean funds allocated to help people you are reasonably sure you will never be part a member of.

Good point, if you want to make it analgous note that failing to convict him in the Senate would then be a 'not guilty' verdict.

Impeached = indicted

More importantly, though, perjury is a crime and the Constitution and law clearly lays out how criminal charges are handled...(i.e. indictment, jury trial under most circumstances, confronting witnesses, rules of evidence etc.). Impeachment is a process to kick someone out of a job, not a criminal conviction.

Look at it this way, suppose OJ Simpson was President when his wife was murdered. Maybe Congress would have impeached him for murder but that doesn't mean after getting kicked out of the White House he would go to jail. He would just get kicked out of the job. For OJ to go to jail you need an actual criminal conviction. Likewise having your law license suspended is not a criminal conviction either. Clinton, despite much bluster by the right, was never charged with perjury, never convicted of perjury and never plead guilty to perjury. Libby was.

Those who claim to be motivated by the 'rule of law' have no right therefore to pretend the two are equal at all.

Willie was never convicted of perjury. Never.

Libby was. I don't expect you to know that since you probably didn't go to law school, but then that shouldn't really be necessary.

I don't think its very brave. The 'hard stuff' is placed ten years out and lives in a fantasy world of massive tax cuts combined with assumptions that unemployment would be 2.8% or lower. In that alternative universe cutting food stamps probably wouldn't be so hard and even Medicare cuts might not hurt so much (everyone's kids will be rich and will be happy to share their massive tax cuts with grandma).

In terms of Medicare, it's cuts are very dishonest relative to the obama plan. At least the cuts are clear with Obama, the advisory board will identify things to stop covering based first trying to find things that do not improve actual outcomes. Congress gives the findings an up or down vote.

Ryan's plan tries to obscure the cuts. Why does Medicare not cover something in Ryan's world? Maybe because the vouchers are set too low? Maybe because you choose the wrong plan? Maybe because the insurance companies aren't offering the 'right' plans? Who knows but Medicare instead of being a safety net turns into a casino of winners and loosers. You'll get some people enjoying 'added benefits' like dental coverage an alternative therapies like accpuncture while others are being told a fourth round of chemo is just 'too much' to be covered. ....which is what they wanted to do with Social Security. Set people against each other in their own version of class warefare.

What's interesting is that often the exact opposite argument is made by conservatives in relation to aid for the poor. They tell us again and again that a person who is taxed, say, $500 that goes for aid to some poor family is NOT the same as a person who voluntarily gives $500 to a charity to help the poor family. Note that this argument seems to be premised on the idea that the $500 in taxes is being imposed to help the morality of the taxpayer rather than the more pragmatic cause of helping the poor family.

In regards to abortion, it sounds like they are trying to play it both ways. If helping the poor via the gov't doesn't count as the taxpayer donating to 'charity' then why does the gov't funding abortions (which it doesn't do but let's say it does) count as the taxpayer funding them?

A more rhetorical note might be to respond that conservatives who like to harp on the point are adopting Osama Bin Laden's theory of citizenship. Recall that he justifies terrorism on the grounds that since civilians both pay taxes and vote (well sometimes they do) then attacking them is no different than attacking a column of troops that they are indirectly supporting.

When the Fed wants to lower interest rates it buys 3 month Treasury bonds. It does that by 'creating' money. When it wants to raise interest rates it sells 3 month Treasury bonds, thereby 'destroying' money.

Quantitative easing means that it buys something other than Treasury bills. That could be other types of Treasuries like 10 yr bonds, it could be non-gov't bonds like bonds backed by car loans or mortgages. It could be shares of stock.

The danger/issue with this is that it lowers the Fed's power to destroy money should inflation come. If you brought a 3 month Treasury bill for $990, you can always sell it later for a bit more than $990 thereby getting the cash back. Anything else and you're at the mercy of whatever the market price is. That's the con of QE.

The pro, though, is the same thing. When the Fed does that, it says its really stimulating the economy and investors can trust that. With regular buying of 3 month Treasuries, investors know that the Fed can turn around at any time and easily raise interest rates and destroy all the money they created in less than 3 months.

How exactly would that work in real life? The cop's walking the beat and sees someone breaking the law, does he do nothing because the law's not very serious and budgets are tight? I mean ok he sees the girl scouts on one side selling cookies and a burglary happening on the other side he should go after the latter.....but in real life the cop patrols his area addressing small and large issues in the area.

Actually most cops don't have a stackload of murders that need solving. Even in high crime areas, murders are relatively rare in the daily life of a cop and tend to be investigated by homicide detectives. Cops aren't just released to wander the streets 'solving major crimes' like Batman or Sherlock Holmes.

As for the law itself, well it's not that unreasonable to regulate sidewalk vendors. First of all sidewalks are not private but public property and the brick and mortor businesses that pay serious taxes for them have a legitimate grip with a city that let's anyone hawk anything by just setting up a box on the sidewalk. Second low and moderate level crime does happen with 'sidewalk' vendors, including dubious outfits that have kids selling stuff supposedly to promote 'youth groups'. Third it's not unreasonable to expect a well established outfit like the girl scouts, esp. one that promotes good citizenship, to actually do the leg work of finding out what the local laws are and following them. I remember when my school had us selling stuff for a fund raiser they made the point of issuing each of us a canvassing permit and told us why it was important to carry it with us. It really wasn't a big deal and at least the local police knew the flocks of kids that were out hawking magazines or whatever it was we were selling were engaged in a legitimate business.

Unless I'm mistaken, there is no new deduction. It's the old deduction you can take for medical expenses (if you itemize). The question was whether or not a pump qualified as a medical expense.

Actually from what I understand it's not complicating the tax code. You can already deduct medical expenses (above 2% of AGI) if you itemize, from what I understand the IRS simply ruled that breast pumps qualify as medical devices so can be included as a medical expense.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

I think the concerns are overblown for a few reasons:

1. There's probably standing for Congressional supporters and even others to defend the law. If they hire bad lawyers who fumble the arguments, well Bush demonstrated nicely that it's equally possible to have a Justice Dept. run by an idiot. A real lawyer might provide more here....

2. "Friend of the Court" briefs are filed all the time in important Constitutional cases. Whether the law is defended by the administration or a bumbling lawyer hired by conservative Congressmen, plenty of other lawyers can and will chime in with what they think are the best legal arguments for and against the law.

3. Judges themselves are not bound to the arguments they hear. Just because Justice Thomas or Scalia do not hear anyone on the law's side doesn't mean they must accept the plantiff's theory that gay rights should be subject to strict scrutiny and DOMA declared unconstitutional. Court cases are not trials by fire. It's not about which side puts up a better fight, it's about which arguments work. Just because one side doesn't make a good argument doesn't mean that judges are excused from considering it.

This all leads to the question of so what? Whether your talking the health care mandate, school prayer or DOMA are judges really ignorant of the various arguments and need the input from DoJ lawyers? This doesn't seem like a trick to do an end run around Congress by having allies outside the Exec. mount a court challenge to a law and then have the Exec. decline to defend the law. In such a case the judges probably wouldn't be hampered by the lack of a defense in protecting a Constitutional law from unfair attack. I suppose this may be a factor if you had a very obscure law with some technical details that maybe only a few DoJ lawyers have bothered enough to give it a really good defense, but I can't really imagine a plausible hypothetical example. When you're talking about high profile cases like gay rights, abortion, the health care bill, etc. it's really hard to see how the DoJ getting on or off board in defending a law would make a material difference in the outcome.

I think there's an interesting economics question here. How do you evaluate job performance when you have a job that needs to be done by someone but there are simply no easy metrics of success? Teaching, I think, is one such job. Yes a very bad teacher is obvious and a very good one may be obvious but most are in the average range and the question there is who is on the better side of the average bucket and whose on the worse?

I don't think this question has a good answer and as a result we are veering towards a bad answer (whoever gets the bigget boost in test grades wins!). The implication is that the system as it's currently instituted might be the best that we can reasonably do. Namely assuming that tenue and time served is the mark of a good teacher with a portion of evaluation reserved for merit as formulated by test scores, peer reviews and supervisor reviews but only a portion.

My thinking on this has been greatly influenced by the ideas Judith Rich Harris has put forth which have basically been summed up as ‘parents don’t matter’, and neither do teachers.

What drives kids is peer groups and fitting into them. This is the one variable that works consistently in explaining outcomes while numerous others like birth order, parenting styles, income, etc. do not give results that are anywhere nearly consistent. We are animals that instinctually feel there’s safety in numbers hence we will seek out a group to belong and adapt to be accepted by it. If that group considers good school performance to be a norm we will adapt to that, if it considers the opposite to be cool, we’ll go with that too.

IMO, this is why we get positive results for pilot programs that fail to materialize when scaled up. Take a school with 50% of kids in an average group, 25% in the ‘high performing nerd’ group and 25% in the ‘slacker burnout’ group. Imagine you open a special charter school that takes 20% of the bottom group. The kids divide themselves into groups again with so many opting for performance. Now the school has worked a miracle, kids that were bad are now suddenly good! But it’s not a dynamic of the teaching methods of the new school, but the sociology of human groups.

That also explains why many other things sometimes appear to be causative variables that simply don’t pan out. Take birth order. A group has three kids. They notice the first kids are very conservative, good students and don’t get into trouble. They notice that middle kids tend to be good students but veer somewhat liberal in that they are more willing to be adventurous. Young kids veer towards irresponsible behavior. Hypothetical explanations are offered (the first kids were raised by strict parents who were new to parenting, the youngest kids feel they can fall back on older brothers and sisters etc.). But then they don’t pan out when tested against the larger population. But that’s because what’s driving matters is the peer groups. The younger kids all seem the same way because the younger kids all hang out with each other!
The most valuable thing teachers can do then is be aware of this dynamic and head off the development of a subgroup that defines itself in terms of low performance.

I've tutored for over ten years on the side so I've been a spectator to both actual learning (students trying to understand college statistics, algebra and accounting) and 'teaching to the test' (helping students drill for the SAT). You're right that there's an overlap. In order to do really well on the test you're going to have to learn at least a portion of the basic concepts in the subject. But you're not right in the idea that the two can be made to neatly overlap. This is why most college teachers do not build their courses around a single all important final exam (logically they should if you could craft your test to so perfectly overlap the subject...if that was the case colleges should simply make the class optional and charge people simply to take the final exam) but usually multiple exams and projects with the largest rarely being more than 40% of the final grade.

I think the problem was summed up by George Bush in that unfortunate question "Is our children learning?".... The fact is there is no easy simple way to measure this. Standardized tests are helpful in that they provide for an objective measure that can be applied on a mass scale but that's it. Push them too far and what you end up doing is simply paying attention to the metrics based not on what information they reveal but how easy they are to measure, you're like a person who only knows how to check the oil in the car and will only do that and nothing else.