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:

•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.

"Beating Buffett"

Occasional commenter Stockdoxc/Dr. Paul Price has his own blog now, BeatingBuffett.com, with an apparently soon-to-be launched subscription-based service. From his "about" page:

Like Warren Buffett, we believe in ‘Value Investing’. Unlike Mr. Buffett, who is so rich that money has ceased to matter for him, we’re still looking to make better than market returns while limiting risk.

Over 31 years of investing we’ve been refining our techniques to allow for achieving outstanding results without incurring margin interest costs. The strategic use of option sales combined with solid fundamental analysis leads to wide statistical bands of high profitability while incurring below average risk.

Our service attempts to identify stocks with well defined upside and limited risk. We then typically add the options component and clearly spell out the best-case and static returns. Break even points are identified and calculated for every suggested trade.

We constantly update company news on our featured selections. We also report on the actual net profit or loss on all closed-out positions. All short and long stock and options positions (held by the authors) are fully disclosed at the time of publication.

Best of luck on the new site, Paul.