The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Government Thuggery, Personal Finance, Politics, Taxation, Welfare State, ethical foundations on Mar 9th, 2010
Per capita GDP in the United States is roughly $47,000.
Per capita personal income is about $39,880.
Let’s think about the kind of tax system we have in the U.S.
What kind of effective marginal tax rates do you think a family faces that has per capita income below half of per capita GDP in the country or [...]
Posted in Taxation on Feb 24th, 2010
Eliot Spitzer today in Slate “proves” that higher marginal tax rates on the rich do not discourage growth. Of course, he proves nothing of the sort, but I don’t want to try to teach economics to the guy, or any of the lefty faithful. I want to ask the statists if they would sign up [...]
Posted in Taxation, Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2010
When you run multi-trillion dollar budget deficits and wish to provide broadband, health care, education and everything else imaginable “free” to Americans, you have to pay for it somehow:
The Wool Trust Fund, which started in 2000, provides tariff relief for domestic makers of wool clothing and fabric on the wool they import. According to U.S. [...]
Posted in Taxation on Jan 27th, 2010
What a bunch of fools. The money quote on the success of the tax increase vote:
It was a victory for public employee unions who were the spearhead of the campaign for the taxes and raised enough money to outspend the opponents.
Yep, politics is about doing what is best for “the people” so long as by [...]
Posted in Taxation on Jan 20th, 2010
My property tax bill is $6,171 on our $187,000 house, meaning that we pay roughly 3.3% of the value of our home in property taxes every single year. So, the principal and interest payment on my house (5% over 30 years) is somewhere south of $900 per month while the monthly payment for property taxes [...]
Posted in Environment, Taxation on Jan 7th, 2010
A popular argument in the “environmentalist” community is that pollution is a moral wrong. By extension this belief holds that using “market-type” instruments such as taxes and tradable permits to control pollution are no different than allowing burglars to pay for the privilege of burgling houses. What is wrong with this analogy?
Pollution is a COST, [...]
Posted in Environment, Taxation on Dec 1st, 2009
A February article by Jason Hill in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimate that the climate-change cost of burning a gallon of gas is 37 cents per gallon. They also estimate that burning each gallon of gas costs 34 cents per gallon in reduced health outcomes. Taken together, the social cost (presumably [...]
Posted in Taxation on Nov 25th, 2009
The way I view the world is that lots of us (most of us) spend a lot of effort and energy making the world a happier place (interpret that term broadly). The analogy is that we spend our time making balloons. We make tiny balloons that make balloon animals at parties; we make water balloons, [...]
Posted in Macroeconomics, Taxation on Nov 17th, 2009
It would be desirable anyway, but if we are talking about how to deal with the unemployment problem, my colleague Mark Bils and coauthors show that:
that cutting the payroll tax by six percentage points (of the 12.4% Social Security component) would, under standard assumptions, increase employment by three million to four million workers—an amount equal [...]
Posted in Taxation on Nov 17th, 2009
Federal income taxes that is. The picture would be different if you included all taxes. Anyway, here is a terrific picture.
And folks want the “rich” to pay even more. I guess the rich can’t buy their way out of that one. Is there any limit to one’s moral obligation to society? If I engage in [...]
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