The Unbroken Window

It looks like this:

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An Energy Department report showing an unexpectedly large increase in crude oil supplies last week also helped calm investors. If rising inventories help oil prices pull back from record levels, inflation pressures should ease – which would give the Federal Reserve greater opportunity to lower interest rates and boost lending efforts to spur the economy. [...]

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And cows don’t winnie; And dogs don’t meow; And penguins don’t ribbit; And ducks don’t chirp; And griffens and unicorns? Our elected officials are real life human beings with all the warts, scars, ugliness (and good stuff too), etc. just like you and me. They are not some super-human, super-loving, do-gooding heros that many people seem [...]

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Steven Landsburg understands, perhaps better than anyone, what the difference is between the seen and the unseen. I like to say that people hate high prices unless they are receiving them (remember, wages are a price). Landsburg points out that: We see the sad faces of the people moving out, but we don’t as often [...]

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A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution. The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming. … The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California [...]

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Is your house worth fixing up? The music genome project Cheap airfare What is your house worth? What does your phone number spell?

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The political class in Chicago has now made the city the first and only in America where the cumulative sales tax rate exceeds 10%. That seems an awfully strange thing to do in a city where over 21% of the measured population lives under the poverty line (according to the American Community Survey). One of [...]

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The ever interesting Allen Sanderson on how incentives might be put to better use in the public spehere: if treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke were required to hold their entire wealth portfolios in the form of U.S. savings bonds, perhaps we’d see more balanced budgets and less inflation. Read more ideas [...]

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Slope down.

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Effective tax rates on the households in the middle of the income distribution (40th to 60th percentiles) have fallen substantially since 2001 and even more since 1981. Income, payroll and excise taxes now take up 14.2% of income, down from 16.6% of income in 2001 and 19.2% in 1981. My two cents: Couple this trend with [...]

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