Our Unhealthy Political Life

By -
Scott Sumner makes two sound, non-partisan proposals that would greatly improve our tax system. The fact neither has any chance of being enacted demonstrates how bad our politics have gotten: it's special interests all the way down.

Comments

  1. Silas Barta3:02 PM

    Well, one sound, non-partisan proposal, anyway. "Eliminate all the income tax loopholes" is extremely vague, considering that the income tax code has to answer a the difficult question of defining "income", and thus what deductions can be counted against it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:13 PM

      "thus what deductions can be counted against it."

      Well, that would be "no deductions" in Sumner's plan. Defining income is no *more* difficult with no deductions than with some!

      Delete
    2. Silas Barta3:18 PM

      I'm not talking about tax credits/incentives, but about the problem of defining income. Are you really saying that it's a sensible idea that, say, someone filing as a sole proprietor of a restaurant can't deduct the cost of the food he buys?

      Because that was the kind of deduction I'm referring to, and which constitutes all the complexity Sumner wants to wave away.

      Delete
  2. Prateek3:01 AM

    Eliminate all tax loopholes? Sound plan?

    Professor Callahan, surely you are not in favour of taxing donations to charity. Are you?

    A charity payment is not personal consumption. It is actually money out of one's own hands for the use of somebody other than that individual.

    The idea that giving $100 to the church is bad because it cuts $35 from your tax bill is baffling - who would pay $65 to save $35? Surely governments can accept allowing people to keep their money so long as it is done for a non-profit cause?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah10:44 AM

      "Professor Callahan, surely you are not in favour of taxing donations to charity. Are you?"

      No, the tax would be placed on income, regardless of what that income is used for. There are arguments for every single deduction in the tax code. I think the argument for a simple, easy code is stronger, however. And remember, this is only the legal incidence of the tax: the economic incidence is different.

      "The idea that giving $100 to the church is bad because it cuts $35 from your tax bill is baffling..."

      Who said giving money to a church is bad?!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more