Incidentally, Bloomberg TV featured a profile of Osborne recently, who has had something of a meteoric political career so far (he's still in his thirties).
Showing posts with label Conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conservatism. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2009
A David Brooks column worth reading
His effort from yesterday's New York Times: "The Reality Moment". Brooks wrote about the UK's likely next Prime Minister Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Conservative Party Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, whose party is rising in the polls in Britain not by promising tax cuts or more transfer payments but by being honest about its country's fiscal condition and the austerity measures needed to remedy it. There are other lessons American conservatives can learn from Osborne and his party. Worth reading.
Incidentally, Bloomberg TV featured a profile of Osborne recently, who has had something of a meteoric political career so far (he's still in his thirties).
Incidentally, Bloomberg TV featured a profile of Osborne recently, who has had something of a meteoric political career so far (he's still in his thirties).
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Six Wasted Syllables (for Paul Price)
On the Atlantic's Business Channel, Chris Good posts about the return of Bobby Jindal, noting that, given his expertise in health care policy, Jindal has taken advantage of the current debate over President Obama's proposed health care reform to tiptoe back into the national spotlight, now that memories of his awful response to the President's speech have faded. Good also links to Jindal's op/ed about health care policy in today's Wall Street Journal, "How to Make Health-Care Reform Bipartisan". One paragraph from Jindal's op/ed prompted the title of this post:
What would William Strunk, Jr. have called "refundable tax credits", if such a thing existed in his time? I'm guessing he'd call them what they are: "grants". I'm not sure why Jindal and other conservatives persist in wasting an additional six syllables on the longer euphemism. Perhaps it's so they can characterize government spending on such grants as tax relief instead of government spending, but, if so, this bit of obfuscation just plays into liberals' rhetoric on progressive tax policy. Most liberals are happy to characterize transfer payments to low-income Americans as tax relief, and to characterize tax cuts for the wealthy as a form of government spending. There doesn't seem to be much benefit to conservatives in conceding the rhetorical and policy ground on this, particularly since, as some smart centrists (e.g., Clive Crook) and even at least one smart liberal (Matt Yglesias) acknowledge, we are approaching the point of diminishing returns when it comes to increasing the progressivity of our tax system.
As both men have noted, if American liberals want to expand the welfare state raising taxes on the rich, by itself, won't be enough to pay for it; they'll have to raise taxes (by at least a modest amount) on everyone else. Yglesias has noted that countries such as Sweden, which have social safety nets envied by American liberals, also have much more regressive taxes than we do.
•Refundable tax credits. Low-income working Americans without health insurance should get help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit. This is preferable to building a separate, government-run health-care plan.
What would William Strunk, Jr. have called "refundable tax credits", if such a thing existed in his time? I'm guessing he'd call them what they are: "grants". I'm not sure why Jindal and other conservatives persist in wasting an additional six syllables on the longer euphemism. Perhaps it's so they can characterize government spending on such grants as tax relief instead of government spending, but, if so, this bit of obfuscation just plays into liberals' rhetoric on progressive tax policy. Most liberals are happy to characterize transfer payments to low-income Americans as tax relief, and to characterize tax cuts for the wealthy as a form of government spending. There doesn't seem to be much benefit to conservatives in conceding the rhetorical and policy ground on this, particularly since, as some smart centrists (e.g., Clive Crook) and even at least one smart liberal (Matt Yglesias) acknowledge, we are approaching the point of diminishing returns when it comes to increasing the progressivity of our tax system.
As both men have noted, if American liberals want to expand the welfare state raising taxes on the rich, by itself, won't be enough to pay for it; they'll have to raise taxes (by at least a modest amount) on everyone else. Yglesias has noted that countries such as Sweden, which have social safety nets envied by American liberals, also have much more regressive taxes than we do.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Becoming Sweden
I'm not a frequent viewer of The Daily Show, but I have to give a little credit where credit is due. By suggesting that if certain liberal policies are enacted we'll be in danger of "turning into Sweden", some conservative commentators floated a big softball over the plate. The Daily Show took a swing at that softball with the video below. This is pretty funny, so let it play first. I'll leave a few more comments below the video.
The conservative pundits warning about Sweden missed two obvious points. The first is that, as the video above shows, Sweden seems like a pretty nice place. Better to invoke the specter of a not-so-nice place when warning of the potential consequences of enacting liberal policies. The second point is that even if our tax burden and our government spending as a share of our economy were as high as Sweden's, that wouldn't make us like Sweden. Sweden is known for (among other things) honest, effective government. As Wolfgang Münchau of the Financial Times has noted, Italians have a tax burden similar to that of the Swedes, but get far less effective government from it. Similarly, invidious comparisons between us and Sweden (e.g., the international education comparisons brought up by The Atlantic when they posted on this Daily Show video) are specious because of the homogeneity of Sweden's population. There is a non-trivial number of Americans of Swedish ancestry; I'd bet they'd do fine in any objective comparison with their cousins in Sweden, if anyone wants to compare apples to apples.
Instead of ominously warning that we're in danger of turning into a pleasant European country if certain liberal policies are enacted, conservatives would be smarter to point out that, regardless of what policies are enacted here, we'll still be Americans, and this will still be America. We need to keep our differences in mind when considering policies: e.g., as we suggested in a recent post, the sort of energy policy that works for a small country that juts out into the North Sea might not work for another country that spans a continent.
Another thought: the bit at the end of the video with the Swedish pop star was a cleverly chosen example of Swedish egalitarianism, but it's worth noting that Sweden has produced its share of extreme wealth as well. For example, the Swede Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, is listed as the fifth-richest man on this year's Forbes list of billionaires (Kamprad moved to Switzerland though, presumably at least partly for tax purposes). One nice touch in that video was the inclusion of the ominous theme from Dune. You can hear more of that theme at about 40 seconds into the trailer below:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| The Stockholm Syndrome | ||||
| ||||
The conservative pundits warning about Sweden missed two obvious points. The first is that, as the video above shows, Sweden seems like a pretty nice place. Better to invoke the specter of a not-so-nice place when warning of the potential consequences of enacting liberal policies. The second point is that even if our tax burden and our government spending as a share of our economy were as high as Sweden's, that wouldn't make us like Sweden. Sweden is known for (among other things) honest, effective government. As Wolfgang Münchau of the Financial Times has noted, Italians have a tax burden similar to that of the Swedes, but get far less effective government from it. Similarly, invidious comparisons between us and Sweden (e.g., the international education comparisons brought up by The Atlantic when they posted on this Daily Show video) are specious because of the homogeneity of Sweden's population. There is a non-trivial number of Americans of Swedish ancestry; I'd bet they'd do fine in any objective comparison with their cousins in Sweden, if anyone wants to compare apples to apples.
Instead of ominously warning that we're in danger of turning into a pleasant European country if certain liberal policies are enacted, conservatives would be smarter to point out that, regardless of what policies are enacted here, we'll still be Americans, and this will still be America. We need to keep our differences in mind when considering policies: e.g., as we suggested in a recent post, the sort of energy policy that works for a small country that juts out into the North Sea might not work for another country that spans a continent.
Another thought: the bit at the end of the video with the Swedish pop star was a cleverly chosen example of Swedish egalitarianism, but it's worth noting that Sweden has produced its share of extreme wealth as well. For example, the Swede Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, is listed as the fifth-richest man on this year's Forbes list of billionaires (Kamprad moved to Switzerland though, presumably at least partly for tax purposes). One nice touch in that video was the inclusion of the ominous theme from Dune. You can hear more of that theme at about 40 seconds into the trailer below:
Friday, April 17, 2009
Ross Douthat on the Tea Parties
From what appears to be Ross Douthat's penultimate post on his Atlantic blog, before his move to the New York Times op/ed page ("The Tea Parties"):
They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think. The claim that they're hypocritical and partisan is a bit stronger - where were they when Bush was running up the deficit, etc. - but in fairness, many of the organizing figures were anti-TARP from the beginning, and there's something slightly odd about saying that if you didn't take to the streets to protests a $300 billion deficit you aren't allowed to protest a $1 trillion deficit. The numbers matter, surely ...
But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.
In those two paragraphs we may have the case for Douthat as a New York Times token conservative columnist distilled. In the first paragraph Douthat makes a gesture of standing athwart the spending tsunami and... noting that it's troubling; in the second paragraph he expresses his disdain for the grassroots conservative rabble that has been protesting this same spending tsunami. For good measure, Douthat finishes with a soupçon of hypocrisy in that last sentence, where he parrots the snark of the Washington Insider's David Weigel (see the caption below the third photo), while mocking protesters for "parroting talk radio tropes".
The handy graphic above comes from Douthat's post.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Revisiting Liberals and Tax Paying
In a post last month we asked, "Are Liberals Less Inclined to Pay Their Taxes". In a post last week, the blogger Audacious Epigone drew on data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to address this question, "Liberals and tax cheating" (Hat tip: Aaron Edelheit). Excerpt:
With the embarrassing number of hopeful Obama appointments running into tax cheating problems (the latest being Ron Kirk), it's natural to wonder if evasion by high profile leftists is illustrative of a real world trend, or just a string of unfortunate anecdotes.
The GSS provides some relief for that wonder. It provides the results for 2,418 people queried on whether or not cheating on taxes is wrong, by political orientation. The first graphic from the GSS shows the distribution of responses. The second graph shows the mean tax compliance score, computed by designating "not wrong" as 1, "a bit wrong" as 2, "wrong" as 3, and "seriously wrong" as 4, and then averaging the responses for each of the seven categories of political orientation (click for higher resolution).
Politics Compliance Strong Lib 2.70 Liberal 3.05 Weak Lib 3.00 Moderate 3.07 Weak Con 3.14 Conservative 3.35 Strong Con 3.27
The standard deviation for the dataset is .76, so the difference between self-described conservatives and extreme liberals is nearly one full SD. Amalgamating the responses into three categories yields one-third a SD between liberals and conservatives:
Politics Compliance Liberal 3.00 Moderate 3.07 Conservative 3.25
Liberals do not consider cheating on taxes to be as morally problematic as conservatives do. This presents an obvious moral quandary of its own, as, putatively less surprisingly, liberals are more likely than conservatives are to favor greater amounts of taxation and wealth redistribution.
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