Hal Varian has a short article on tax reform in his NYTimes column.  I agree with him that one of the most desirable but also achievable reforms would be to expand and simplify "the current messy system of tax-deferred savings, including I.R.A.’s,
401(k)’s, 403’s and Keough plans. We do not really need all those
different plans and having one, simple tax-deferred savings plan would
make a lot of sense."

The graphic below shows how under the current system the marginal tax rate rises and falls arbitrarily.

Spill all the beans as quickly as possible.  Here is the perspective of one interrogator.  Two key reasons: you don’t signal that torture works on you, and false information can be checked against other sources.  Here is my earlier post posing the question.

Addendum: I am discernibly outraged over torture (read here), but at this point I figure getting people to think about how terrible torture must be will be more effective than simply attacking it.

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Here is the link, and that is via BoingBoing, thanks to Jason van Bruaene for the pointer.

Addendum: Here is an extension of the first idea.

For the curious, and perhaps the prurient, here it is.  I don’t recall having said anything I regretted, but I’m not going to watch it to find out either.  I do talk about barbecue and why terrorism may not be a stable micro-culture.

If you are willing to watch a video, the people are more attractive in the trailer for Serenity.

Let us say that you have been captured and threatened with torture.  You are, for whatever reason, entirely willing to betray the information you hold.  Your primary goal is to avoid pain, and perhaps you positively want to squeal.  How should you present what you know?  I see a few options:

1. Break down immediately, beg for mercy, humiliate yourself, and spill the beans.  (If you talk right away, will they torture you anyway?  And since no further good information can be offered why should they stop?)

2. Go in acting tough, really tough.  At the first sign of serious pain, start crying and switch to strategy #1.

3. Wait until they apply their "best shot" torture, and then talk.  They will feel they have done their job and stop.

4. First offer (or make up) compromising information to show your disloyalty to the cause your torturers are fighting.  Your confession will then be more credible.

5. Say you don’t know anything, try to fight the torture, but break down when you can’t stand it any more.  You can’t fool them, so the best you can do is to actually "go through the wringer."  You are stuck in the pooling equilibrium, and trying to deviate only makes you worse off.

Which of these is the most credible signal that you have told all you know?  Can you do any better than number five?  And how does your best answer depend upon the hypothesized motives of the torturers?  Is there anything you can say to the U.S. to avoid being sent out for rendition?  I do’t see any simple answer here, the question is which behavior your torturers will interpret as an unlikely tactic from a truly determined trickster.

Here is Brad DeLong’s reason number 4 to favor private accounts for social security:

We need to raise our national savings rate. But if we just raise Social
Security taxes, Congress will treat these taxes as general revenue and
spend them. Only by funneling Social Security contributions into some
vehicle that Congressional representatives cannot interpret as a
resource available to fund current spending can we raise the national
savings rate. And private accounts are the best vehicle we can find to
(a) accumulate contributions without (b) allowing Congressional
representatives to seize them as resources available to fund current
federal spending.

That reason receives new support from Nataraj and Shoven who present evidence that:

…the trust fund build-up may not help future generations due to the
adoption of the Unified Budget in 1970. The Unified Budget includes
trust fund receipts as income and trust fund payments as expenditures.
The empirical evidence suggests that attempts to balance the Unified
Budget while the trust funds were generating surpluses has led to
increased government spending and personal and corporation income tax
cuts within the rest of the federal government. There is no evidence of
increased government saving as a result of the trust fund accumulations.

Here is Brad DeLong, on Slate.com, on the new Bush proposal.