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.
Showing posts with label Progressivism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Progressivism. Show all posts
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:
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Where Left-Leaning Pundits and Bloggers Compare Notes
Interesting piece by Michael Calderone on The Politico yesterday, on how liberal commentators compare notes and hone their message, "JournoList: Inside the Echo Chamber". A few brief excerpts follow.
For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.
Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?
Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”
[...]
Last April, criticism of ABC’s handling of a Democratic presidential debate took shape on JList before morphing into an open letter to the network, signed by more than 40 journalists and academics — many of whom are JList members.
POLITICO contacted nearly three dozen current JList members for this story. The majority either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests — and then returned to JList to post items on why they wouldn’t be talking to POLITICO about what goes on there.
In an e-mail, Klein said he understands that the JList’s off-the-record rule “makes it seems secretive.” But he insisted that JList discussions have to be off the record in order to “ensure that folks feel safe giving off-the-cuff analysis and instant reactions.”
One byproduct of that secrecy: For all its high-profile membership — which includes Nobel Prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman; staffers from Newsweek, POLITICO, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and The New Yorker; policy wonks, academics and bloggers such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias — JList itself has received almost no attention from the media.
A LexisNexis search for JournoList reveals exactly nothing. Slate’s Mickey Kaus, a nonmember, may be the only professional writer to have referred to it “in print” more than once — albeit dismissively, as the “Klein Klub.”
[...]
“You don’t want to create a whole separate, like, private blog that only the elite bloggers can go into, and then what you present to the public is sort of the propaganda you’ve decided to go public with,” Kaus argued.
The illustration above, by Matt Wuerker, accompanied Calderone's piece on The Politico.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Are High Energy Prices Shifting Attitudes on Energy Policy?
A Conservative Newspaper's Point of View
The editors of Investor's Business Daily argue in favor of increased domestic energy production in this editorial, "Energy Myths". Excerpts:
[snip]
Are more Americans coming around to the IBD's point of view?
Apparently yes, according to the results of the Pew Poll released this week. As energy prices have gone up this year, support for domestic energy exploration and production has increased:
More interestingly, support for these policies has apparently more than doubled among self-categorized liberals:
Implications of this Shift in Attitudes
The first question is whether this shift in attitudes will lead to a shift in federal energy policy, and if so, when. I imagine that if energy prices stay high long enough, and support builds among the public for increased domestic energy exploration and production, federal policy will eventually change accordingly. There are a few factors that could delay this process though:
- A cyclical correction in oil prices could reduce the political pressure and keep this issue on the back burner.
- Those who have placed their bets on alternative energy may continue to oppose expanded domestic oil & gas production. Politically-savvy alternative energy entrepreneurs such as Vinod Khosla and Al Gore likely will continue to advocate for increased federal funding for alternative energy instead, as will large companies that have been positioning themselves to benefit from an expected surge in green energy initiatives (e.g., GE).
- Affluent political donors tend to be to the left of the general public on energy issues. See, for example, the Rockefellers' recent proxy challenges against Exxon Mobil.
- The current political environment. Recent polls favor Obama to win the presidency, but even if McCain wins, his views on energy policy don't appear to be radically different than Obama's, notwithstanding McCain's recent flip-flop in favor of offshore drilling. McCain still opposes drilling in ANWR, and McCain styles himself as a 21st Century Teddy Roosevelt, the Conservationist, Progressive president who busted up Standard Oil and created scores of national parks. In either case, Congress is likely to have a stronger Democratic majority next year, and the current Democratic Congressional leadership remains opposed to expanding domestic energy production.
The second question is, assuming the political stars align, and policy changes to expand domestic energy exploration and production, what effect will that have on energy prices? The IBD editorial I excerpted above predicts that this would immediately lower energy prices, since it would raise expectations about future supply. I'm skeptical about this for a couple of reasons. First, once new federal lands and waters are opened to exploration, it might take a couple of years of mapping and exploratory drilling to get a better sense of the probably supply; second, large oil finds in recent years (e.g., the discoveries off the coast of Rio de Janeiro) haven't seemed to put much downward pressure on oil prices.
The upshot of all of this, from my perspective, is that although shifting attitudes on energy policy may bode well for increasing energy supplies in the U.S. over the long-term, it doesn't seem that they will have much impact on supplies or prices over the next five years. So I remain confident that, although we'll probably have a cyclical correction or two along the way, the secular bull market in oil will continue for the next five years.
The editors of Investor's Business Daily argue in favor of increased domestic energy production in this editorial, "Energy Myths". Excerpts:
Many in Congress seem either disconnected from reality or intentionally disingenuous about our energy crunch. They have well-honed negative responses to common-sense ideas about solving our energy crisis, particularly drilling for more oil.These responses are based on a number of widely held myths. Sadly, they've become the backbone of the Democrats' energy policy. They include:
• "We can't drill our way out of our energy crisis."
Actually, we can. As we've noted before, conservative estimates put the total amount of recoverable oil in conventional deposits at about 39 billion barrels. Offshore, we have another 89 billion barrels or so. In ANWR, 10 billion barrels.
[snip]
ANWR alone is expected to yield 1 million barrels of oil a day. Now make the highly conservative assumption that we're able to get a like amount of oil from the other sources — for a total increase of 3 million to 4 million barrels of oil a day.
That's an enormous rise in oil output. Today, we produce just under 8 million barrels of oil a day from domestic sources. So we could, in effect, boost our energy output 50%, and thus our energy independence, by bringing an additional 4 million barrels of oil to thirsty world markets each and every day.
By the way, those calculations don't include the trillions and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas found in the same locations, which, along with nuclear power, could be used to fire our power plants.
Are more Americans coming around to the IBD's point of view?
Apparently yes, according to the results of the Pew Poll released this week. As energy prices have gone up this year, support for domestic energy exploration and production has increased:
More interestingly, support for these policies has apparently more than doubled among self-categorized liberals:
Implications of this Shift in Attitudes
The first question is whether this shift in attitudes will lead to a shift in federal energy policy, and if so, when. I imagine that if energy prices stay high long enough, and support builds among the public for increased domestic energy exploration and production, federal policy will eventually change accordingly. There are a few factors that could delay this process though:
- A cyclical correction in oil prices could reduce the political pressure and keep this issue on the back burner.
- Those who have placed their bets on alternative energy may continue to oppose expanded domestic oil & gas production. Politically-savvy alternative energy entrepreneurs such as Vinod Khosla and Al Gore likely will continue to advocate for increased federal funding for alternative energy instead, as will large companies that have been positioning themselves to benefit from an expected surge in green energy initiatives (e.g., GE).
- Affluent political donors tend to be to the left of the general public on energy issues. See, for example, the Rockefellers' recent proxy challenges against Exxon Mobil.
- The current political environment. Recent polls favor Obama to win the presidency, but even if McCain wins, his views on energy policy don't appear to be radically different than Obama's, notwithstanding McCain's recent flip-flop in favor of offshore drilling. McCain still opposes drilling in ANWR, and McCain styles himself as a 21st Century Teddy Roosevelt, the Conservationist, Progressive president who busted up Standard Oil and created scores of national parks. In either case, Congress is likely to have a stronger Democratic majority next year, and the current Democratic Congressional leadership remains opposed to expanding domestic energy production.
The second question is, assuming the political stars align, and policy changes to expand domestic energy exploration and production, what effect will that have on energy prices? The IBD editorial I excerpted above predicts that this would immediately lower energy prices, since it would raise expectations about future supply. I'm skeptical about this for a couple of reasons. First, once new federal lands and waters are opened to exploration, it might take a couple of years of mapping and exploratory drilling to get a better sense of the probably supply; second, large oil finds in recent years (e.g., the discoveries off the coast of Rio de Janeiro) haven't seemed to put much downward pressure on oil prices.
The upshot of all of this, from my perspective, is that although shifting attitudes on energy policy may bode well for increasing energy supplies in the U.S. over the long-term, it doesn't seem that they will have much impact on supplies or prices over the next five years. So I remain confident that, although we'll probably have a cyclical correction or two along the way, the secular bull market in oil will continue for the next five years.
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