1. The courageous Bruce Bartlett, on taxes.
2. Harvard University Press will publish one thousand digital books.
3. Countercyclical assets: remaindered books.
4. Skidelsky on Keynes and on books on Keynes.
Assorted links
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Courageous? More like confused …
So, because Democrats want an endless torrent of unbelievable spending, that means that Republicans think that “deficits don’t matter”? What?
He wants us to have a VAT like Europe … great. That’s clearly led to economic vigor.
He’s a “realist” when it comes to joining the tax and spend bandwagon, but he doesn’t mind being pie in the sky about wanting to get rid of corporate tax.
They fear it would become a money machine and it would help the government grow. I agreed with that for a long time. But the problem now is that we need a money machine! We have all this spending in the pipeline. It’s not a question of whether we’ll create new programs. It’s whether we’ll fund the ones that are already there.
It’s not an either-or situation. A new gusher of tax revenue would both enable the funding of existing programs and the creation of new ones. At present, it appears the only thing holding up the major expansions in the scope of government that the Obama admin has queued up is public fear of massive deficits. It’s becoming clear that the Obama admin will spend as much and run as big a deficit as it can politically get away with in order to ram through programs before the window of opportunity closes. I really don’t want to make that easier — and a VAT would definitely have that effect.
Slocum:
>A new gusher of tax revenue would both enable
>the funding of existing programs and the creation of new
>ones.
Oh, no no! The new tax would be purely for nationalized health care! Because money isn’t fungible!
1959: “That year represented the apex in jazz creativity.”
Uh, you could make a claim that this was the last good year for jazz, but it was nowhere near the best.
The second tier was doing well, but Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown were were all gone or gone derivative by then. Monk was out of commission that year as well, and in any case had already done his best work.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane were gearing up to destroy jazz from the inside, looters that they were.
About 3. remaindered books:
When I owned two used book stores, I frequently considered remainders and hurts. The latter were more interesting, as the prices were lower. But the terms of sale were not acceptable to a small book dealer.
Hurts – also known as returns – are generally unsold books returned by the retailer to the publisher, or sometimes to the wholesaler. Some have been slightly damaged, but not all of them. New book retailers often have contracts which allow them to return unsold inventory.
In 1998, one large publisher offerred me a 40 foot trailer full of returns – about 15,000 books – for $18,000. The catch was that I had no choice about the titles. I might get 10,000 saleable books from the trailer – or I might get only 1,000. No guarantees.
A large used book retailer, such as the Half Price Books chain (annual sales > $200 million), can take that $18,000 gamble once a day. With only two stores, I was unable to take the risk even once per year.
I never asked the publisher if authors received compensation for the sale of hurts.
That’s a great quote from Twain, Slocum. It perfectly describes the idiocy of what Bartlett is proposing. It also reminds me of the following exchange between two people:
Man 1: “Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?”
Man 2: “Because it feels so good when you stop.”
It seems to me that Bartlett just realizes that neither party is going to cut spending (see the last 28 years for proof), so we had better at least pay for that spending. Time to start growing up and realize that Republicans spend just as much, they just run deficits.
Steve
I think Steve hit it on the head.
Bartlett’s comment about offending the average voter is the key to all this…no one is going to voluntarily give up an entitlement, we have to figure out a way to keep it the whole thing to smallest amount possible.
I don’t agree with a lot of what Barlett wrote, but I think he’s trying to think about that question.
Sure, the left will spend until voted out of office. Result – big deficits. No surprises there.
But on the right, cutting taxes hasn’t starved the beast, it’s just put government on sale, and so unsurprisingly, we’re consuming more of it. Result – big deficits.
I think Bartlett’s trying to wrap his head around the fact that the public has an insatiable appetite for govt benefits, but an equally satiable (is that a word?) appetite for paying for it.
Skidelsky seems to be one of many who are now making the argument that there was nothing wrong with Keynesian economics until Thatcher and Reagan came along and brainwashed everyone by bringing back out-dated abstract free market dogma.
This is so typical of the kind of provincial explanations that you hear from Washington or London that tries to explain world events through their capital cities. But this explanation doesn’t tell us why so many other countries moved towards deregulation; not only of financial markets but of labour markets. In Australia it was the left-wing party that brought these reforms about, not the conservative party. Sweden, that great welfare state, adopted similar reforms.
Regardless of whether ‘free market economics’ is right or wrong, the events of the 80s were a reaction to a broken system, not some externally imposed dogma like Skidelsky would have us believe.
I think that the last couple of years have discredited this view. It certainly seemed reasonable to think that Republicans spent “just as much,” because of how much they were spending. But the new Democratic Congress (and Administration) is spending even more, and running even higher deficits*, something scarcely thought possible.
(If you go by the President’s proposed budget, even higher deficits in 2013-2019 than the baseline, than the baseline with common policy extensions, than the GWB deficits, etc. And that’s with several measures, like limiting charitable deductions, that the Democratic leadership has ruled out.)
Any “courageous” progressives out there that are “realist” about spending?
Just sayin’.
Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, Coleman, preceded
by the trail-blazing Bird, made “modernist”
jazz, sacred to some and anathema to others.
Some would argue that the new is always greeted
with venom, others that there is no obligation
to like the new merely because it is new.
Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday,
Pee Wee Russell, Ellington, and Beiderbecke
still have listeners. As another poster has
said, tastes differ.
The people complaining about VAT’s regressiveness seem to have missed the part of the Bartlett interview where he explains the VAT he’s proposing is meant to fund progressive (in an economic sense) measures like healthcare for the poor. While it’s far from the cleanest or most satisfying solution, it’s one worth considering.
On a different note, I wonder why people always assume deregulation started with Reagan. We make fun of him, but it was Carter who really kicked off deregulation.
johnleemk: “I wonder why people always assume deregulation started with Reagan. We make fun of him, but it was Carter who really kicked off deregulation.”
Carter, a Democrat, certainly had the most success with the Deoncratic Congress in enacting deregulation legislation. But we shouldn’t ignore the contribution made earlier by Gerald Ford, who really was the president who initiated deregulation.
Hearings on airline deregulation began in 1975, with the full support of President Gerald Ford. At the same time, Ford appointed John Roberts as head of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Roberts quickly went as far as the law would allow him, terminating two policies which severely inhibited competition: the moratorium on new routes; and the capacity limiting agreements.
In November, 1975, President Gerald Ford called for deregulation of trucking. He quickly followed up by appointing to the Interstate Commerce Commission several members who favored deregulation. Those Ford appointees used their position to rally support across the media and within Congress for trucking deregulation.
Deregulation in the U.S. was a slow, deliberate process. Several U.S. presidents deserve credit for moving the process along.
Courageous how? Conceding that the there’s an insatiable appetite for government freebies and saying it can’t be stopped? Oh no problem, we can go on letting politicians create new serfdoms because after all taxes can just be raised ad infinitum. Its not like taxes have distortive or counterproductive effects, after all.
You implicitly applaud this and think you are taking “small steps toward a much better world”? The steps that lead right down the road to serfdom?
Courageous for supporting implementing a huge new tax, and one that could be raised more easily because much of it is buried in the price of goods? The problem is the dramatic increase in spending over the last 7-8 years. The solution that is both courageous and wise is to cut spending.
What have we come to when even libertarian (sort of) economists praise tax increases.
Commenter Mobile is correct above that lefties are rarely seen as courageous for advocating cutting spending. They rarely if ever advocate cutting spending. They squeal like pigs when someone advocates cutting the growth in planned spending.
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