Taxing Matters

If you find you’re income reduced, you must do some combination of four things: consume less, invest less, give away less, or borrow more. And doing any of those things impact other people. Your standard of living is reduced. The other people you’ve impacted will have their income reduced and standard of living reduced. With their income reduced, they will have reduce their spending in one of the same four ways. The effects of income reduction ripple through society.  Almost everybody’s standard of living is degraded to some degree.

Raising taxes is just another way of reducing people’s income and so will degrade everyone’s standard of living to some degree. That doesn’t mean the raising taxes is bad - it just means that the benefits gained from raising taxes must be compared to the costs. Any talk of “we’re only taxing the rich” or “we’re only taxing businesses” or “we’re only taxing hunters” is silly talk. Everybody is impacted by higher taxes, no matter how isolated and focused the tax appears to be.

If you raise taxes to build a park, you can easily imagine the benefits of the park. It’s harder to imagine the costs to workers, retirees, charities, and borrowers. Yet everyone who works, relies on a pension, relies on charity, or wants to borrow money will be worse off. This doesn’t mean that the park shouldn’t be built or that taxes shouldn’t be raised. The park may provide enough benefit that everyone will gladly accept the impact.

I wish politicians could be honest about this. They always talk about the benefits of a bigger police force, a new bridge, helping the homeless, educating kids - and those benefits are real. But the costs are real too - and it doesn’t matter a whole lot who you tax - everybody pays in the end. I may not want a bigger police force if I know that paying for it will increase crime. I may not want a new bridge if paying for it costs me my job. I may not want to help the homeless if I am hurting them more than I’m helping them. I may not want to improve education for kids if it turns them into paupers.

Discussions of taxes rarely get to the level of refinement needed for such intelligent decision making. It seems that there is little room for common sense in politics.

Seeking Incompetence

This is a pretty good summary of the current Gonzales situation. It ends with these words:

It’s a little reminder that staffing a government with cronies is dangerous to everybody, including the cronies themselves.

Does anyone remember The Peter Principle? Here’s a good review. In a nutshell, the Peter Principle says that competent people will continue to get more and more responsibility until they finally reach a level where they are no longer competent. The percentage of people who actually rise to their level of incompetence before they retire or die is, of course, unknown, but you can bet that it’s greater than zero.

So, I don’t agree that the problem is one of promoting cronies - the problem comes from promoting anyone!

Revised Google Notebooks (Revised)

Google Notebooks just has a major face lift and it seems much improved. Read all about it!

UPDATE: One of the things I like best about the upgrade is that new notes now enter at the top of the page rather than the bottom. This makes it much more suitable for my purposes. I’ve cleaned up my Political Economy Notebook to optimize for this change.

Equality - Who Do I Sue?

This is one kind of thing that irritates me. A good society should provide equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes or circumstance. Any other approach leads to bizarre conclusions that offend common sense. And equality of opportunity means just that - not equality of height, weight, dexterity, education, complexion, intelligence, or the ability to give birth.

Everybody has the opportunity to be a very well paid CEO or President of the United States. Most of us choose not to make the required sacrifices. That’s equality of opportunity. We get to choose. Too many people want to get the benefits without paying the price. Life is about choices, and you get what you choose, as constrained by circumstances. Sure, if I had been taller and more agile, I could have been a pro basketball star. So, who do I sue?

2008 Elections

This is a pretty good overview of the Presidential outlook for 2008. I’ll make a fearless prediction right now: both the new President and the 2008 Congress will be decidedly more liberal than any recent government. Why? It’s simple - demographics. There are now many voters who have never experienced a liberal national government. Jimmy Carter was the last liberal President (Clinton was a moderate). And liberal ideas have a lot of appeal, promising to address all manner of problems that concern people. It’s inevitable that the pendulum will swing - and, sooner or later, swing back again.

And If Iraq Isn’t Enough…

Holy Smoke! The situation with Iran is starting to look grim. It’s hard to get an overview of what’s going on, but this timeline is chilling. Maybe we’ve been fighting Iran for some time and just didn’t know it - well, I didn’t know it. The Middle East has been a problem for every President since Eisenhower, and I doubt that the trend will change. I fear that the next President will look back on Bush’s tenure and long for it’s relative simplicity and calm.

NeoOffice 2.1

If you’re a Mac user, you definitely need NeoOffice. This is the Mac-adapted version of OpenOffice. Like OpenOffice, it supports almost all Microsoft Office capabilities, but with a more Mac friendly interface. It’s free! And now there is a new version that supports the new Word 2007 formats and Excel macros. Whoopee!

Get Organized!

Long time readers will know that I tend to obsess over organization tools. Well, I’ve found what may be the best one yet (Mac only).

When you buy a computer, the vendor usually includes a bunch of free software. I mostly ignore this stuff, having learned over the years that it’s usually worth what you paid for it. But Apple is currently including OmniOutliner on new Macs, and this is a great outlining program. It does all that you would expect, but also provides some interesting features like multi-column support and numerical capabilities. It’s also smart about Web links, other documents, graphics, and Applescript. This is worth checking out.

Shortly before I started this blog, I had a Web page devoted to all things Mac. It contains only my review of Quicksilver and WikityWidget, but you might want to take a peek.

Firefox Hint

Don’t you hate it when some Web site resizes your browser window? You can stop that behavior in Firefox. Here’s how.

March 26 Reminder

I’ve added more to the Political Economy Notebook. Unless I have something significant to add, all the on topic stuff that I find interesting will go there.