Santorum called Obama “elite” for wanting all people to get education after high school — as Obama said, you need more than a high school education to be a factory worker these days.
Not necessarily. A guy from my high school class got hired as a developer for a major software company straight out of high school. I myself was hired for a similar position with some college but no degree, as was a friend of mine.
There's something very wrong with our economy, where going to college confers a huge income premium even if you don't actually learn anything relevant to your job. On an individual basis, people benefit from going to college. But we'd all be better off if fewer people went to college.
It's worth noting that Rothbard was into left-fusionism before he was into paleo-fusionism, and Rockwell started heading back in that direction during the Bush Administration. Libertarians are constantly trying to chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis, and it's not at all clear which side it's worse to err on.
The Koch’s may care about individual liberty and other libertarian values, but they still help bankroll deeply socially conservative causes and would trade many liberties so long as economic liberty was preserved.
Which sounds bad, until you consider that the alternative is to trade away economic liberty for abortion and gay marriage. There is no good option here.
Of course, that's all wrong. If the record companies were really just dead weight because the artists made all their money on touring, then the artists would just go straight to touring and bypass the record companies altogether. The investments made by the record companies--the advances, the production, the promotional work, etc.--are what makes it possible for artists to make money from touring, and for fans to get their hands on recordings. They also eat the losses on less successful acts. There's real added value there.
Granted, the Internet has done a lot to facilitate independent production, promotion, and distribution. But that wasn't the case in Napster's heyday.
There's an essentially unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Thus it has always been, and thus it shall always be. Until the Singularity, anyway.
Right, but that's begging the question. If it's 99:1, then I agree that it's pretty clearly a good thing. But I don't expect that it will be anywhere near 99:1.
Really, that's a major problem with any welfare system. How do you make sure children are taken care of without subsidizing their parents' irresponsible reproductive choices? Short of taking the children away, which has its own set of problems, there doesn't seem to be a good answer.
The downside is large though – it is expensive to run (carrying on my example from above multiply $10,000 by the number of adult sin the United States, and you’ll see what I mean).
It wouldn't actually cost that much. Anybody making more than $30,000 per year pays it all back. And since people making $30,000 or less aren't paying much in taxes anyway under the current system, it's not clear that this would result in a worse fiscal situation overall.
My main concern regarding a system like this is that it might normalize idleness. Right now there's a stigma associated with being on welfare. But if we just cut everyone a check, there might not be as much of a stigma associated with choosing just to live on that instead of working. And thus more people might opt to do that.
I don't think that there's a lot of overlap between the kind of people who go on welfare and the kind of people who do high-productivity work. So the upside is that maybe we can get some members of the underclass to start working at relatively low-productivity jobs. But the downside is that maybe some people who would have had blue-collar or professional jobs are going to opt for slacking, if not permanently than at least for a few years. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the downside potential is greater.
Because it's an additional effect above and beyond everything that happens to other types of income, because the principal is ultimately derived from wages or other non-capital income.
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure that something comparable happens to wage income at all. Could you elaborate with an example like the one I gave?
I must disagree, and I don’t see how consumption could be a more accurate gauge for taxation than declared income if “the rich don’t spend, they invest.”
That's the argument for consumption taxes, not an argument against them. Money is just paper. Or bits. Either way, it's not a real resource. You don't derive any concrete benefit from your money unless and until you spend it, and you having money in your bank account that you're not spending doesn't make me any worse off. In fact, if you invest it, it makes me better off.
Suppose someone's making a million dollars a year, and only spending $50,000. If he's only consuming $50,000 a year in resources, then why should he be taxed on $1,000,000 worth? If he's investing the rest of the money, why would we want to reduce the amount he has available to invest? That's nuts. We shouldn't tax him until he decides to spend it.
And if he never spends it? Then we'll tax his heirs when they spend it. Or maybe he'll give it away, in which case taxing him on that income really means taxing the charity it would have gone to.
Making money and not personally consuming it is one of the best things a person can do for society. We shouldn't be taxing that.
Should capital gains be taxed at a different rate from income?
Steven Landsburg had an interesting argument for this. Suppose you work really hard one year, and make a million dollars. Then you want to put it all in the bank and live off the savings. If we had no taxes, and you could earn 10% interest, your income would be $100,000 per year.
Now suppose we have a 30% tax on both wages and interest. So there's $300,000 gone right there, and you can only put $700,000 in the bank. Which means you only make $70,000 per year in interest, before taxes.
See what happened there? By taxing the principal at 30% when it was earned, the government has already diminished the amount of interest you earn by 30%. When we factor in the 30% tax on interest, your interest income is fully 51% less than it would have been under a zero-tax regime.
Since investment income is already diminished by taxing the principal when it's earned, then there's a pretty good argument to be made that investment income shouldn't be taxed at all.
There are also macroeconomic arguments related to elasticities, but I'm not familiar enough with them to explain them myself.
Wouldn't people who wanted to prove that they contributed something just sponsor their own independent ads, or donate to PACs, who would presumably still be at libertiy to reveal their funding?
Well, no. A lot of them really don't have the cognitive skills or personality traits necessary for success in a modern capitalist economy. Ehrenreich does, but she had absolutely zero incentive to exercise them.
Did she really forget all the important stuff about ethics and morals and asserting yourself when dealing with authority and putting off immediate rewards, etc etc while she was working as a housecleaner, a waitress, and a Walmart employee—things that she presumably must know to be a successful PhD-educated journalist in her real life?
If she had done those things, she might not have failed so miserably. And then she wouldn't have a book. Or at least not one with the message she wanted to send.
Hey! I just realized that left-wing logic can be used to prove that a prostate exam is rape. When a man gets a prostate exam, it's not because he enjoys having a finger inserted into his rectum--it's because there's a risk that if he doesn't submit to this invasive procedure, he could die as a result. Ergo prostate exams, like low-wage jobs, are not genuinely consensual. Ergo rape!
For the same reason you don't think taxation is robbery. It's not forced on you. It's just something you have to do if you want to have an abortion/make more than a subsistence income.
On a related note, the idea that Viagra is something that benefits men exclusively is equally absurd. I mean, unless you assume that women prefer to have impotent husbands because they hate sex.
It's not a question of whether we consider contraception a subset of sexual health care. That's just semantics. What I said is that there's no inequality, because Viagra isn't the male analogue of oral contraceptives (at least, I assume that that's the "inequality" to which Chris was referring). There is no real male analogue of oral contraceptives. And if there were, does anyone really think the Catholic hospitals would want to buy it for their employees?
In fact, I'm willing to bet that when non-barrier male contraceptives become commercially available, the Catholic Church's position on them will not be significantly different from its position on female contraceptives. Any takers?
Where there's a genuine equivalence in terms of what's available for men and women--e.g., sterilization procedures--I'm fairly certain that the Church takes the same position regarding both. I'm no fan of the Catholic Church, but neither am I a fan of this kind of inaccurate rhetoric.
By the way, I haven't heard much about vasectomies and/or tubal litigations. If I were a feminist I'd assume that they cover vasectomies but not tubal litigations, but I'm not, so I doubt they cover either. Does the new regulation not require this?
Reversing the inequality of covering men’s sexual health but not women’s doesn’t require affirmative action.
There really isn't any such inequality, is there? I mean, there's not a difference in coverage of treatments of actual sexual dysfunction, is there? Viagra and contraceptives really aren't analogous. One is a treatment for sexual dysfunction, and the other suppresses fertility.
Don't get me wrong--I'm all for suppressing fertility--but it's just not analogous to treating disease.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Ironic Blog Post Of The Day”
Don't the real elites go by first initial and middle name?
Mister T. Harold C. T. Mobile III
I'm actually not sure how that works with multiple middle names. I'm so prole I don't even have one middle name.
"
Santorum called Obama “elite” for wanting all people to get education after high school — as Obama said, you need more than a high school education to be a factory worker these days.
Not necessarily. A guy from my high school class got hired as a developer for a major software company straight out of high school. I myself was hired for a similar position with some college but no degree, as was a friend of mine.
There's something very wrong with our economy, where going to college confers a huge income premium even if you don't actually learn anything relevant to your job. On an individual basis, people benefit from going to college. But we'd all be better off if fewer people went to college.
On “The Koch brothers and rightwing fusionism”
It's worth noting that Rothbard was into left-fusionism before he was into paleo-fusionism, and Rockwell started heading back in that direction during the Bush Administration. Libertarians are constantly trying to chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis, and it's not at all clear which side it's worse to err on.
The Koch’s may care about individual liberty and other libertarian values, but they still help bankroll deeply socially conservative causes and would trade many liberties so long as economic liberty was preserved.
Which sounds bad, until you consider that the alternative is to trade away economic liberty for abortion and gay marriage. There is no good option here.
On “Mindless Diversions Extra!”
Of course, that's all wrong. If the record companies were really just dead weight because the artists made all their money on touring, then the artists would just go straight to touring and bypass the record companies altogether. The investments made by the record companies--the advances, the production, the promotional work, etc.--are what makes it possible for artists to make money from touring, and for fans to get their hands on recordings. They also eat the losses on less successful acts. There's real added value there.
Granted, the Internet has done a lot to facilitate independent production, promotion, and distribution. But that wasn't the case in Napster's heyday.
On “Saturday Blognado: Taxes and Welfare”
There's an essentially unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Thus it has always been, and thus it shall always be. Until the Singularity, anyway.
"
Right, but that's begging the question. If it's 99:1, then I agree that it's pretty clearly a good thing. But I don't expect that it will be anywhere near 99:1.
"
Really, that's a major problem with any welfare system. How do you make sure children are taken care of without subsidizing their parents' irresponsible reproductive choices? Short of taking the children away, which has its own set of problems, there doesn't seem to be a good answer.
"
The downside is large though – it is expensive to run (carrying on my example from above multiply $10,000 by the number of adult sin the United States, and you’ll see what I mean).
It wouldn't actually cost that much. Anybody making more than $30,000 per year pays it all back. And since people making $30,000 or less aren't paying much in taxes anyway under the current system, it's not clear that this would result in a worse fiscal situation overall.
My main concern regarding a system like this is that it might normalize idleness. Right now there's a stigma associated with being on welfare. But if we just cut everyone a check, there might not be as much of a stigma associated with choosing just to live on that instead of working. And thus more people might opt to do that.
I don't think that there's a lot of overlap between the kind of people who go on welfare and the kind of people who do high-productivity work. So the upside is that maybe we can get some members of the underclass to start working at relatively low-productivity jobs. But the downside is that maybe some people who would have had blue-collar or professional jobs are going to opt for slacking, if not permanently than at least for a few years. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the downside potential is greater.
On “Stolen Valor, Birth Control, Gay Marriage, and Abortion”
For what it's worth, here's Eugene Volokh on precedent as of January 2008.
On “Tuesday Blognado: The taxing question of … tax”
Because it's an additional effect above and beyond everything that happens to other types of income, because the principal is ultimately derived from wages or other non-capital income.
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure that something comparable happens to wage income at all. Could you elaborate with an example like the one I gave?
"
I must disagree, and I don’t see how consumption could be a more accurate gauge for taxation than declared income if “the rich don’t spend, they invest.”
That's the argument for consumption taxes, not an argument against them. Money is just paper. Or bits. Either way, it's not a real resource. You don't derive any concrete benefit from your money unless and until you spend it, and you having money in your bank account that you're not spending doesn't make me any worse off. In fact, if you invest it, it makes me better off.
Suppose someone's making a million dollars a year, and only spending $50,000. If he's only consuming $50,000 a year in resources, then why should he be taxed on $1,000,000 worth? If he's investing the rest of the money, why would we want to reduce the amount he has available to invest? That's nuts. We shouldn't tax him until he decides to spend it.
And if he never spends it? Then we'll tax his heirs when they spend it. Or maybe he'll give it away, in which case taxing him on that income really means taxing the charity it would have gone to.
Making money and not personally consuming it is one of the best things a person can do for society. We shouldn't be taxing that.
"
Should capital gains be taxed at a different rate from income?
Steven Landsburg had an interesting argument for this. Suppose you work really hard one year, and make a million dollars. Then you want to put it all in the bank and live off the savings. If we had no taxes, and you could earn 10% interest, your income would be $100,000 per year.
Now suppose we have a 30% tax on both wages and interest. So there's $300,000 gone right there, and you can only put $700,000 in the bank. Which means you only make $70,000 per year in interest, before taxes.
See what happened there? By taxing the principal at 30% when it was earned, the government has already diminished the amount of interest you earn by 30%. When we factor in the 30% tax on interest, your interest income is fully 51% less than it would have been under a zero-tax regime.
Since investment income is already diminished by taxing the principal when it's earned, then there's a pretty good argument to be made that investment income shouldn't be taxed at all.
There are also macroeconomic arguments related to elasticities, but I'm not familiar enough with them to explain them myself.
On “Wednesday Blognado: Talk is cheap, except when it’s very expensive”
Wouldn't people who wanted to prove that they contributed something just sponsor their own independent ads, or donate to PACs, who would presumably still be at libertiy to reveal their funding?
On “A Better Way To Do Campaign Finance Reform”
Diminishing returns.
On “Parenting by Class”
Well, no. A lot of them really don't have the cognitive skills or personality traits necessary for success in a modern capitalist economy. Ehrenreich does, but she had absolutely zero incentive to exercise them.
"
Did she really forget all the important stuff about ethics and morals and asserting yourself when dealing with authority and putting off immediate rewards, etc etc while she was working as a housecleaner, a waitress, and a Walmart employee—things that she presumably must know to be a successful PhD-educated journalist in her real life?
If she had done those things, she might not have failed so miserably. And then she wouldn't have a book. Or at least not one with the message she wanted to send.
On “The North Carolina Story Is a Pretty Big Deal”
Crow tastes bitter.
You're overcooking it. Try it medium-rare.
On “Virginia’s Ultrasound Law”
Hey! I just realized that left-wing logic can be used to prove that a prostate exam is rape. When a man gets a prostate exam, it's not because he enjoys having a finger inserted into his rectum--it's because there's a risk that if he doesn't submit to this invasive procedure, he could die as a result. Ergo prostate exams, like low-wage jobs, are not genuinely consensual. Ergo rape!
"
For the same reason you don't think taxation is robbery. It's not forced on you. It's just something you have to do if you want to have an abortion/make more than a subsistence income.
On “Changing a Trumwill’s Mind: HHS Edition”
Where's the inequality? What's the treatment that they cover for men, and the analogous treatment for women that they do not cover?
"
On a related note, the idea that Viagra is something that benefits men exclusively is equally absurd. I mean, unless you assume that women prefer to have impotent husbands because they hate sex.
"
It's not a question of whether we consider contraception a subset of sexual health care. That's just semantics. What I said is that there's no inequality, because Viagra isn't the male analogue of oral contraceptives (at least, I assume that that's the "inequality" to which Chris was referring). There is no real male analogue of oral contraceptives. And if there were, does anyone really think the Catholic hospitals would want to buy it for their employees?
In fact, I'm willing to bet that when non-barrier male contraceptives become commercially available, the Catholic Church's position on them will not be significantly different from its position on female contraceptives. Any takers?
Where there's a genuine equivalence in terms of what's available for men and women--e.g., sterilization procedures--I'm fairly certain that the Church takes the same position regarding both. I'm no fan of the Catholic Church, but neither am I a fan of this kind of inaccurate rhetoric.
"
"They" being the Catholic hospitals' insurance plans.
"
By the way, I haven't heard much about vasectomies and/or tubal litigations. If I were a feminist I'd assume that they cover vasectomies but not tubal litigations, but I'm not, so I doubt they cover either. Does the new regulation not require this?
"
Reversing the inequality of covering men’s sexual health but not women’s doesn’t require affirmative action.
There really isn't any such inequality, is there? I mean, there's not a difference in coverage of treatments of actual sexual dysfunction, is there? Viagra and contraceptives really aren't analogous. One is a treatment for sexual dysfunction, and the other suppresses fertility.
Don't get me wrong--I'm all for suppressing fertility--but it's just not analogous to treating disease.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.