“47% of Americans Are Freeloaders Who Pay No Income Taxes!”
& BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2022-02-23 We
CONDITION: War in Europe:
The four scenarios are: Putin’s puppet in Kiev, Russian annexation of Ukraine, imperial overreach as Putin attempts to bring all of the “near abroad” back into his sphere of influence—and fails but causes multi-decade chaos—and major-power war.
First: “47% of Americans Are Freeloaders Who Pay No Income Taxes!”
The remarkable thing about Rick Scott’s culture-war Republican campaign document—the only thing that the Republican Party has put out about what its legislative program might be—is that in order to achieve his culture-war objectives, Rick Scott did not have to call for raising taxes on more than 100 million people. All he would have had to do was drop the word income from the phrase “all Americans should pay income tax to have skin in the game…”
Lawrence H. Summers: ’Josh Barro points out
that the Republican Senate campaign manifesto vows that “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game.” Wow. I wonder if it reflects ignorance, cruelty or both <<https://t.co/onDmxR2A1j>>. This would mean tax increases for 100 million middle income and poor people. It would require largely cancelling Ronald Reagan’s, and every subsequent president’s, EITC. It would highly disproportionately raise taxes for African Americans and, by eliminating net refunds, massively increase child poverty…
LINK:
Here is Rick Scott’s opening:
The militant left now controls the entire federal government, the news media, academia, Hollywood, and most corporate boardrooms – but they want more. They are redefining America and silencing their opponents. Among the things they plan to change or destroy are: American history, patriotism, border security, the nuclear family, gender, traditional morality, capitalism, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, rugged individualism, Judeo-Christian values, dissent, free speech, color blindness, law enforcement, religious liberty, parental involvement in public schools, and private ownership of firearms…
<https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017f-1cf5-d281-a7ff-3ffd5f4a0000>
And here is the “Economy/Growth” plank:
And here, kinda-sorta economic in part, is “America First”:
Josh says that:
Liberals on Twitter will mostly notice the culture-war content of the document, and they may underestimate the strength of the political ground that Republicans stand on with many of those issues. But the big opportunity for Democrats… lies in a short statement about taxes: “All Americans should pay income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount”… a promise to raise taxes on well over one hundred million people…
So why was it important to whoever wrote Rick Scott’s piece to include the word “income”, rather than simply: “No Americans should be freeloaders—all should pay taxes”?
As best as I can figure out, this meme entrenched itself as part of a process of doubling-down on Mitt Romney’s “47%” comments. For example, back in 2012, Glenn Harlan Reynolds:
A pretty concise summary of the Obama administration's political approach: Vote for us because we'll take other people's money from them and use it to buy you stuff. Whether it's Sandra Fluke's contraceptives, Obama's "spread the wealth" response to Joe The Plumber, his 1998 plan to make welfare recipients a majority coalition or the free phone in the viral "Obamaphone" video, that's the gist of it. And it obviously works. This was the essence of Mitt Romney's worries about the 47% of Americans receiving government benefits…
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2012/10/01/taxes-romney-47-iredistribution/1604089/>
But why does it remain? After all, Mitt Romney is now an Enemy of the Republican People, and no longer the standard-bearer who said something stupid who needs to be defended.
My guess as to what is going on: A huge part of the Republican Party base right now desperately needs to believe that they are a permanent minority in the nation because the Democrats have succeeded in turning the majority of people into freeloaders. Why? Because if that is not true, the flirting and more-than-flirting with authoritarianism and fascism would look to them as stupid as it is in reality.
One Video:
Susan Athey: Machine Learning & Economics: An Introduction <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ZcsxI-HTs>:
One Picture: The Year 1400
Very Briefly Noted:
Steve M.: MEMIFY IT, DEMOCRATS: ‘An appalling phrase in a Republican National Committee resolution condemning Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger… [FOR] participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”…. Hang the phrase around Republicans’ necks… <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2022/02/memify-it-democrats.html>
Joe Weisenthal: It’s Time for Bitcoin to Become a Better Tool for Laundering Money<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/it-s-time-for-bitcoin-to-become-a-better-tool-for-laundering-money>
Dave Winer: Scripting News: Thursday, February 17, 2022: ‘If the open web had a good lawyer we could stop Spotify from calling their radio programs “podcasts” because it’s… fraudulent…. People expect podcasts to work in any player. Spotify is lying… <http://scripting.com/2022/02/17.html>
Laura Spinney: Pandemics Disable People—The History Lesson That Policymakers Ignore: ‘Influenza, polio and more have shown that infections can change lives even decades later. Why the complacency over possible long-term effects of COVID–19?… <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00414-x>
Galadriel: Lament (Quenya) <https://www.elfdict.com/phrases/2-quenya/17-galadriels_lament>
Perry Mehrling: ’Looking forward to this!… The history of international finance, hung on the life and times of Charles P. Kindleberger…. Register here: <https://bit.ly/3gKt4cF>…
Daniel Larison: Yes, Reviving the Nuclear Deal Is ‘Worth It’
Paragraphs:
Jacob Greenspon, Anna Stansbury, & Lawrence H. Summers: Productivity & Pay: A Comparison of the US & Canada: ‘Strong evidence of linkage between productivity and pay in the US but more mixed evidence for Canada, possibly due to it being a smaller, more internationally open economy. Overall, the findings suggest that measures to boost productivity growth are important for raising pay for the average and typical worker…
LINK: <https://voxeu.org/article/productivity-and-pay-comparison-us-and-canada>
Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic: 11 Feb 2022: Daily links from Cory Doctorow: ‘The Big Lie that keeps the Uber bezzle alive: A credulous press continues to report massive losses as profitability…. The (mythical) day Uber attains dominance and profitability, someone else can start a competitor that provides exactly the same services, with exactly the same drivers and exactly the same passengers. The only difference? That new service won’t be $31 billion in the hole…. Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle… just gave stuff away at their initial investors’ expense and pretended there was a path to profitability at the end…
LINK: <https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft>
Steve M: CBS Can’t Process the Fact that Its Poll Says Republicans Want to Punish Disloyalty to Trump: ‘Republicans want the January 6 investigation stopped (72% say so), want the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned (61%), and want Trump to run for president again (69%). And they want future Republican leaders to be very, very Trumpy…. If this is the GOP’s way of saying it’s moved on from Trumpism, I’m… not seeing it…
LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2022/02/cbs-cant-process-fact-that-its-poll.html>
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Matt Yglesias Makes Me Want to Scratch a Philosophy-of-History Itch…
While Matthew Yglesias has affection for Robert Nozick, I have nothing but exasperation: Anarchy, State, & Utopia <https://archive.org/details/anarchystateutop00nozi> claimed to make an argument that the only way legitimate title could be acquired was through direct personal creation or voluntary exchange. Confronted with the fact that all of our title to everything has dirty hands somewhere in the past, those its response was not that this poses a big problem for the view that "what we have, we hold Dash and no one can legitimately take it away from us by, for example, taxing or regulating us”, but instead took his philosophical argument as in some way a justification for taking the current distribution of property as in some sense legitimate, and thus sacred going forward.
This more than half-convinced me that the book was a joke gone wrong. This conviction that was somewhat reinforced when Nozick then used the Cambridge Rent Control Board to extort $30,000 from his landlord, Erich Segal <https://web.archive.org/web/20030404174732/http://www.daft.com/~rab/liberty/Miscellaneous/Nozick-article>. After all, if even Nozick takes his “philosophy” not as a guide as to how to walk-the-walk, but just as a game, why should any of us pay attention to him?
But Matt this morning focused on one interesting but undeveloped idea of Nozick’s—an idea that he certainly did not think was interesting enough to develop, and may have adopted simply as another way to troll left-wing academics, but that I nevertheless find interesting:
Matt Yglesias: The Case for the Austro-Hungarian Empire: ‘Robert Nozick… taught the seminar …“Philosophy of History: The Russian Revolution”… an effort to develop a philosophical account of historical contingency that he teases a little in his 2003 book Invariances but doesn’t explore at great length…. Some moments in history are causally thin.… If Alexander the Great decides to settle down earlier rather than push his armies east, hundreds of years of Indo-Greek and Greco-Bactrian culture don’t exist. Nozick, to own Marxism-influenced professors, wanted to say that the Russian Revolution was, in fact, highly contingent…. But then he wants to argue that contingent on Lenin’s victory in the Russian Civil War, the lapse into Stalinist totalitarianism is essentially inevitable…
LINK:
My thinking on this has long—for more than 30 years, perhaps?, at least since Krugman and Matsuyama <https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w2971/w2971.pdf>, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24091297_Increasing_Returns_Industrialization_and_Indeterminacy_of_Equilibrium>, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5202703_A_Theory_of_Sectoral_Adjustment>—divided this particular conceptual corner of the world into four separate ideal-types:
Processes that have a single equilibrium, where history and how you got there has next to zero impact on what the situation will be, as individual actions and shocks set in motion countervailing forces that cancel their effects. Here history is barely worth considering.
Processes where the shadow of the past matters greatly, in that a number of different equilibria could have been reached, but in which small differences in how the past actually happened induce equal or smaller differences in how the future will be.
Processes where a butterfly’s wings flapping or not flapping at a particular moment sets into motion a chain of consequences such that there either is or is not a hurricane in the future.
Processes that are none of the above: in which it is neither the case that the history is unimportant, or that the history is important in a way that we can readily comprehend, or that the history is important but in which “the want of a nail” makes big differences in a way in which we can kinda-sorta see a fragile logic elsewhere, but rather something else: processes that have a deep historical logic, but that could have had a very different outcome, and in which we can point to collective human decisions that made things go this way rather than that in an important dimension.
The first of these is “necessity”—a single equilibrium. The second of these is “history”, or “path dependence”. The fourth of these is “expectations”. All three of these are within the purview of the economist. The third of these is “chaos”, or perhaps “narrative”. But here economists have nothing and historians have little to say other than to tell the story and analyze the conditions that made Alexander the Great matter.
I don’t think that this was what Nozick was getting it with his “thin” and “thick”. I do think this is what he ought to have been getting at. Here is me < https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/042amp0XrHgmGx46Sa1sQFvqw> attempting to grope toward classifying historical processes into classes (2), (4), and (3).
As to Nozick’s claim that Leninism was (3), but that, conditional on Lenin, Stalinism was (2)? I am not so sure. Somebody, somewhere, was going to see how large corporations and total-industrial-war militaries worked, and take that and discontent with the market to try to run a central-planning economy. That it was Lenin in Russia definitely (3). That it happened somewhere? That I think is much more likely to be (2). And a Stalin if not the Stalin? I think a Stalin is, rather, a (1), and that a Stalin in Russia is a (2).
Muscovy, after all, had a Czar in the late 1500s. It has a Czar today.
The US personal income tax is not nearly progressive enough and we should be collecting more in taxes from high income earners. Some of this should come from structural reforms like changing deductions into partial tax credits, but higher rates will be needed too. But if we are going to reduce the structural deficit to free up more resources for investment and pay for useful transfer programs like a Child Tax Credit, some of us less than super rich are going to have to pay more too. Shifting from a capped tax on wages to a VAT for funding SS and health insurance subsidies would help, too.