I think I may stop contending conservatives...

UPDATE: I'm still getting a ton of hits so I just wanted to let people know that my "blog" is now Under the name of Reason come on over for philosophy, politics, and random oddities from Jim. Also most of my partisan political blogging can be found at henrydems.com

“Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.” --John Wesley


Last night was one of those amazing nights in your life. A week before getting married, speaking at an event of excited voters and volunteers who want to work hard getting better economic policy, fix the health care crisis. I got to be in a huge room full of people to watch probably the best political speech of my era.

In his intro video his wife said something like... "he is always trying to push people forward..."

Politics is difficult--power struggles, coalition building, compromise that will infuriate policy from the ivory tower, and basic biology (10% of our thought is conscious while 90% is unconscious--this makes things very complex when trying to navigate the above mentioned difficulties)

Its time to move on from the A Speculative Fiction Blog... I will be moving www.JimNichols4.com to a new blog I will be starting: Jim Nichols which will contain my writings and other efforts to bring policy to the forefront of the debate... Context on working within the two party system; of which politicians, which policies, should be stopped; and which should be promoted and supported.

I didn't get home till 11:30 last night... I was then on the phone with a reporter--after having been up since 1:30am that morning I sometimes worry how well I can articulate ideas without getting intellectually sloppy. I was in bed by midnight and back up at 1:30am. Despite how tired I was, I couldn't have felt better when I got up this morning.

My life has so much meaning and so much happiness and love in it. For so long in my life I could never get to a place that would end the anguish and rage. My mind can perpetuate bad and make it worse... grow hobgoblins from minor mistakes or slip ups from those around me.

When I got off of work about 8:30am this morning I had a phone call from a man in Henry that wanted to get involved in helping increase the education and awareness of democrats on policy. It was a wonderful conversation I had with him. One of my passionate beliefs in my efforts to reform the Democratic Party is that we are terribly inarticulate when it comes to policy.

The impacts of the inability to respond to attack ads, smear campaigns, inaccurate and manipulative data... means that the intimidation works to keep people silent. I learned that no matter how much I tried to argue policy in the run up to the war. The attacks on me personally were very effective in undermining my ability to communicate with those who were honestly trying to make a careful informed decision.

I learned from that that I'm going to fight within the Democratic party to make sure that we are a well organized and are running quality candidates. I also learned that I will no longer let conservatives attack anyone who is trying to fight to improve the lives of neighbors down the street, on the other side of the country, or on the other side of the world.

MLK Jr. said, "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people." And that is something I have finally understood. I'm trying to push and prod those who should be rolling up their sleeves to keep political power out of the hands of those who "do not know"

"Now, I don't believe John McCain doesn't care whats going on in the lives of Americans; I just think he does not know." --Barack Obama

That floored me. In a single phrase, Obama was able to articulate in the manner of MLK or Gandhi that the opposition is wrong and we will never stop until we have made such ideas null and void.

Its a way of saying things that stays true to Ghandi's nonviolence of the mind that we all must nurture.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

That single phrase has inspired me to stop holding back and as Henry Rollins said once in a spoken word--you got to cut the shit.


I'm in... I'm all in. I don't know where it goes and what the path will lead. But I know that to accomplish my goal of helping organize and lead a strong community of people who want to improve our lives--all of our lives. Therefore I have to let go of some of that which is me, some of the decoration and novelty that helped cut me out of the stone. But its a time and place that is no longer called for, and is no longer me, or who I want to be.

Like my other blogs... I will just let it die rather than delete it... I will leave it up but stop promoting it or linking to it. I have said things here that I will look back and smile on for the rest of my life. I've also made mistakes, said unfortunate things, and have shown the struggles and scars of rising up above the world you somehow find yourself in.

I am working with a cohort within the reality based community to create a blog on the upcoming general assembly session as well as continue to pull from the best blogs and articles that can be found online... and throw my two cents in. More attention needs to be brought to the state level... and blogger are just the ones to do it since the local press needs some market competition to keep them honest!

But its now to say goodbye to A Speculative Fiction. In a week I'll be starting the next step in my journey and will be marrying the love of my life--who believed in me long before I did.

I want to say thank you to my readers, the emails, and comments. Its been fun and hopefully fruitful for others, because it has been a huge part of me. But now its time to move on from the "personal blog" form into something more professional. There is nothing wrong with blog as an outlet to describe life, share ideas, and just good old fashion ramble.

But I have a goal of bring a writer, giving good political analysis on the economy, foreign policy, and other important issues. To increase my ability to become more and more productive and more and more skilled in my commentary, I have to remove some of the fluff which may entertain me on good days, and drag me down to the gutter of the blogosphere on worse days.

There is only so much time and my time writing should go predominately to writing at a level that respect the intelligence of my readers and myself.

I will certainly update this last post with any activities or directions that these new steps in my life are taking. But I just wanted to say so long to A Speculative Fiction... the problems that need to be address are neither fiction nor speculation. I didn't know where I was heading with this blog. But it got me to where I needed to be and it was a fun ride.

Please drop me a line at Jim.Nichols@gmail.com

For now I'll leave you with the single greatest statement on why conservative policy makers just don't get it...

In Washington, they call this the "Ownership Society," but what it really means is that you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck, you're on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You are on your own.

Those of us who have been given gifts have an obligation to give back. We must stand up and fight for those who can't fight for themselves, protect what makes us great, and empower our communities to thrive rather than perpetuate self-destructive decline...

And now... for posterity's state. One more angry sigh...

We don't care if we're destroyed. We'll never capitulate. We'll take the whole fucking world down, down with us in flames. Just a speculative fiction. No cause for alarm. We got a good 15 years left till the United We Stand murals on West Broadway finally fade and we wave good-bye to such sad, childish refrains. Replaced with other stupid lullabies like "you can have my guns when you pry them from my cold dead hands". Just a speculative fiction. No cause for alarm. --Propagandhi "A Speculative Fiction"

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

The bridge to nowhere...

Two Three Reasons Sarah Palin Should Not Be Vice President
By Brad DeLong

No reasons so far why Sarah Palin would be qualified to be president--aside from a claim that she shares a hairdresser with Amy Winehouse. And a bunch of big negatives are flooding in. The biggest surround the fact that John McCain stands at least one chance in five of dying over the next four years and that she would then become president. Here are three:

Sarah Palin's Abuse-of-Power Scandal ("Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome State Trooper?" Department)

One of them is her firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monega for no reason anybody can explain--except for the likelihood that Monega had not obeyed her staff's demand to fire State Trouper Mike Wooten, Palin's ex-brother-in-law.

Now Palin's story is that she had absolutely nothing to do with her aide Frank Bailey's demands that Monega fire Wooten.

That story didn't fly when Henry II Plantagenet tried it after the murder of Archbishop Thomas:

Palin's the One: So now we've learned that Sarah Palin is McCain's choice for nominee. I have to say. It's a daring pick but I think a very weak pick. I'm perfectly happy with it. Palin is in the midst of a reasonably serious scandal in her home state. Her brother-in-law is a state trooper who is in the midst of an ugly custody battle with her sister. And she's accused of getting the state police to fire him. Recently she was forced to admit that one of her aides had done this, though she insists she didn't know.... John McCain... a cancer survivor who turns 72 years old today, is picking a vice presidential nominee who has been governor of a small state for less than two years and prior to that was mayor of a town with roughly one-twenty-seventh of the citizens that Barack Obama represented when he was a state senator in Illinois...

Sarah Palin Lies in Her First Speech:

The second is the fact that she could not get through her first speech without telling a lie:

Anchorage Daily News, 10/5/06: Palin Said She Supported The So-Called "Bridge To Nowhere," But Was Concerned Money "Flow" Was "Going to Slow":

As for the infamous 'bridges to nowhere,' MacDonald asked if the candidates would forge ahead with the proposed Knik Arm crossing between Anchorage and Point MacKenzie and Ketchikan's Gravina Island bridge. Each has received more than $90 million in federal funding and drew nationwide attacks as being unnecessary and expensive. He also asked if they support building an access road from Juneau toward -- but not completely connecting to -- Skagway and Haines. 'I do support the infrastructure projects that are on tap here in the state of Alaska that our congressional delegations worked hard for,' Palin said. She said the projects link communities and create jobs. Still, Palin warned that the flow of federal money into the state for such projects is going to slow...
MSNBC, 8/29/08 Palin: "I Told Congress 'Thanks But No Thanks' On That Bridge To Nowhere":

During her speech in Dayton, Ohio, after being introduced as McCain's running mate, Palin said, "I told Congress 'thanks but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said, 'we'd build it ourselves.'...

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Well its going to be hard for Obama...

But at least McCain is working as hard as he can to make it easier....




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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

good blog post...

From Brian Leiter on the Democratic convention...

I guess this is a case study in the decadence of empires in decline. For the first time, I'm living somewhere that has basic cable TV, so have been watching, for amusement, bits and pieces of the Prudent Wing of the Republocrat Party's annual convention in Denver on C-SPAN. It really is an amazingly substance-free zone, in which people are packaged by advertising pros like new automobiles, and talentless speaker follows talentless speaker. Last night featured former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who has the dubious distinction of sounding even more like a total fake than Senator Clinton. Meanwhile, Senator Clinton was celebrated as a great feminist trailblazer without any mention of the most relevant fact about why she's a Senator, let alone a national candidate, namely, her husband. (There are some actual feminist trailblazers in the Prudent Wing of the Republocrat Party, one can only imagine what they were thinking watching this spin job.) I am told that the speech of the Iowa Republican Jim Leach, who is pro-Obama, is already being marketed by sleep disorder specialists for those suffering chronic insomnia. The one bright spot was the funny, and unpolished, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who delivered a few good populist punches that were otherwise sorely missing. But overall, the whole thing was so bland and dreary that one almost wishes they'd retain George Galloway to deliver a thirty-minute address to say something substantive about the war criminals in Washington, D.C., and their annointed successor, Senator McCain.

go read the whole thing... very nice, very nice.


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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

candidate McCain vs. Senator McCain

The best speech Kerry has ever given.



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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Obama ranks number one in urban legends online...

So i've asked people (and I'm asking you as well) to forward me any emails or articles attacking him or Democrats at large so that I can keep up and help local democrats respond to the policy not the trash.

Just got one in my email box and one point was on the estate tax... found two things I wanted to post up... here is that assertion...

INHERITANCE TAX


McCCAIN - 0% (No change, this tax has been repealed.)

OBAMA - keep the inheritance tax.

How does this affect you? Many families have lost
businesses, farms and ranches, and homes that have been in
their families for generations because they could
not afford the inheritance tax.

The number of farms is next to nhil from what everyone is saying... But lets check with one of the most successful businessmen in the world...

November 15, 2007
Buffett Says No Estate Tax Would Be a Gift to the Rich
By BLOOMBERG NEWS

Warren E. Buffett urged Congress yesterday to maintain the estate tax, saying that plans to repeal the tax would benefit a handful of the richest American families and widen income disparity in the United States.

Mr. Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, told the Senate Finance Committee that advocates of repeal were “dead wrong” to call the tax a “death tax.”

It would be more appropriate to call it a “death present,” Mr. Buffett, 77, said. “A meaningful estate tax is needed to prevent our democracy from becoming a dynastic plutocracy.”

Congressional Democrats are likely to seize on Mr. Buffett’s comments to bolster their argument that repeal of the estate tax amounts to a windfall for a few wealthy families. Republicans have pushed to eliminate the tax permanently or reduce the rate and exempt more estates by raising the value at which the tax takes effect.

Mr. Buffett said that in the last 20 years, tax laws have allowed the “superrich” to become richer.

“Tax law changes have benefited this group, including me, in a huge way,” he said. “During that time the average American went exactly nowhere on the economic scale: he’s been on a treadmill while the superrich have been on a spaceship.”

Lawmakers are under pressure to reach some agreement on the future of the tax because a law enacted by Congress in 2001 gradually phases it out through 2010, when it will be fully repealed for one year. The tax is scheduled to return in 2011 with a top rate of 55 percent on estates worth more than $1 million. For this year, individual estates valued at more than $2 million are taxed at a top rate of 45 percent.

The chairman of the finance committee, Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, said yesterday that fewer than 1 percent of United States households currently pay the tax. He said repeal lacked support in the Senate and the purpose of the hearing was to solicit ideas for replacing the shifting rules and uncertainty of the current system.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the panel, said the estate tax should be repealed because “death should not be a taxable event.”

“As long as a person has accumulated an estate in accordance with the law, the government should not be able to profit from that person’s death,” he said.

He said, however, that he might be willing to accept a compromise short of repeal, as long as lawmakers “are looking out for small-business owners and family farmers.”

nonpartisan Tax Policy Center:

The Estate Tax (pg. 19)

Senator McCain’s proposal to reduce the estate tax rate to 15 percent and increase the exemption to $5 million would reduce estate and income tax revenues by approximately $580 billion over 10 years. It would cut estate tax revenues by 90 percent and reduce the extent to which the estate tax backstops the income tax (that is, taxing assets that might have escaped income tax as they accumulated because of careful tax planning or loopholes, including the exemption of capital gains on assets transferred at death). Under the proposal, only about 4,000 estates would be subject to the tax in 2011 (less than 0.2 percent of the 2.5 million adult decedents).

The estate tax has ambiguous effects on working and saving. The tax may discourage some wealthy people who care about their heirs from saving or working by reducing the size of after-tax bequests. Others, however, may have a target amount of wealth they want to transfer, in which case they would need to save more to offset the expected tax liability. Further, the tax may encourage some potential heirs to work and save more because they are less able to live well off the proceeds of inherited wealth (for discussion, see Burman, Gale, and Rohaly 2005). On balance, the proposal is likely to have very small effects on work effort, saving, or overall economic performance. It would, however, reduce the progressivity of the tax system because only the richest estates now pay estate tax. Compared with leaving the 2009 rates and exemptions in place, near repeal of the tax as Senator McCain has proposed would disproportionately benefit a very small group of extremely wealthy individuals.

rich kids need to work just like the rest of us. No free rides, no free rides...
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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Last post then off to school...

People keep asking me where I've learned what I've learned. I don't tend to think I'm that knowledgeable yet... at least I'm nowhere near what I'm capable of and where I should be. Lack of discipline, family, and political obligations keep me too busy to do the intellectual leg work I'd like to do.

But if you like what I have to say I can give you a few recommendations
1. Read often and broadly

2. Read quality blogs (where I've gotten all of my economics for the most part)

3. Read different newspapers from different political perspectives. Most importantly the New York Times since it sets the national media agenda and is the newspaper for movers and shakers in the world. You want to know what they are reading and thinking. Secondly the wall-street journal. I'm sorry to see the decline since Murdock... and they've had some loses because of it. But the WSJ is a great news source. The opinion page is a joke... but the news is par excellance--the reason being if you are going to make good financial decisions you need to know whats actually going on with as little spin as possible. Also Financial Times is a good read as well... NPR in the mornings... when I do watch the news on tv its Jim Leher on PBS. And online news I get at Democracy Now probably THE BEST news source out there. But its so reality based that it sounds as if a news report from mars...

4. COntact people you come across authors, teachers, and other nonprofessional intellectuals you might come across. Stay networked.. ask questions

5. The back of the book... where are the sources and citations go... thats where you learn to leap from...

thats about it. A little tip from me to you. Please feel free to throw out your own in the comments page.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

trade deficit

Econobrowser asks:

Why is the trade deficit, even taking out oil, so large when the dollar is so weak? Maybe some insights can be gleaned from productivity measures.

I like this train of thought he gives...

One possibility is that exactly because productivity growth in the US is very rapid, future prospects for America's wealth (in the form of the present value of future net output) are very bright, and hence we should dis-save now, in order to smooth consumption

contending conservatives for a very good reason indeed--the economy.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Krugman on new census numbers...

About that Bush Boom …

The 2007 income, poverty and health insurance numbers are out. As far as I can tell on a first read, there’s nothing deeply surprising. Still, they represent a landmark — and not in a good way.

The key point is that 2007 was the end of an economic expansion — whether or not the NBER declares a recession, the employment situation, which is what matters to most people, has deteriorated sharply this year. So 2007 was as good as it got in this cycle. Yet median household income was lower than in 2000, while both the poverty rate and the percentage of Americans without health insurance were higher.

In short, the economic policies we’ve been following just aren’t working.
Is the bad economic news all Bush’s fault? No, of course not — but remember, the key argument of the right has always been that tax cuts and deregulation would produce good news, a rising tide that raised all boats. Boy, has that not happened.
But remember, we’re just a nation of whiners.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

compatancy???compentancy??? ahhh competancy!!!!

"The swelling tide of toxic home loans is proving to be even more worrisome than initially feared"

It would be nice if some of the people who get paid big dollars because they supposedly have high skills could acknowledge that they messed up. It would also be nice if the national media did not consider it part of their job to cover up for powerful people who messed up on their job.

Yes, that headline is a a direct quote. It also is the sort of statement that has no place in a serious news article. The swelling tide of toxic loans is not proving to be more worrisome than feared. The problem is that the people who were supposed to be regulating the financial system did not know what they were doling.

The people who did understand the economy knew that an unprecedented run-up in house prices, with no remotely plausible explanation based on fundamentals, with no corresponding increase in rents, was a bubble. We also knew that bubbles burst. And, we knew that when bubbles in a highly leveraged asset like housing burst, that lots of debts go bad and that banks then take really big hits.

The NYT should be exposing the incompetence of people who were paid big dollars to know the housing and financial markets (this includes both bankers at place like Citigroup, Merill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as the top regulators) and completely failed in their responsibilities.

It should not try to tell readers that the housing crash was somehow an unforeseeable event that came out of the blue. It was an entirely predictable event and it was only incompetence that prevented these people from seeing it. Unfortunately, unlike dishwashers and custodians, bank executives and regulators are not held accountable for their performance. Instead, the media covers it up for them.

This goes under contending conservatives because they like to say people who earn a lot deserve it for "obvious" reasons... not so much in the real world.

Move away from sound good feel good theoretical world and conservatives have to run for the hills.



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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Fair Tax tactic...

There are some classic tactic that Fair Tax folks use...

not even making claims about the plan itself it just makes you start off questioning the legitimacy...

A Comment from my last fair tax post

The problem with your question is that basically all the serious economists with any credibility are paid think tankers in one way or another. Almost unanimously, those who have put the most study into the proposal agree that it would be a very good thing in the long run. Those who conclude against the FairTax usually do so because they deem the transitional problems to be too tough to weather.

Show me an unpaid economist who comes down against the FairTax and I will show you where he has missed something or changed something in his model.

I made an empirical statement and asked for an example... its bad form to try to flip the question around on me as if its now my obligation to prove the opposite. To try and make it seem... "wow thats obvious..." but never cite anyone isn't an answer. its an aversion.

I'll check out the post he mention when I get home...

fair tax people don't help their case...


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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

More pink floyd

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

a theme for the day.... no?

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

And you may ask yourself....

My mind... can't my mind.... "can't think... where am... what time... who? errr...." He looks over at the small box with music coming out. All he see is 2:32.... 2:32... 2:32... seems to mean something but he is not quite sure.

"What time does that mean? When do I have to go to work? What do I do? Why can't I concentrate on what this little black box is trying to tell me?" 2:32. Still bemused... still staring... his fiances whispers over to him. Its 2:30.... you got to go.

"Yup... knew that... most definitely... I'm JUST NOT SURE WHAT THE CONTEXT FOR THAT NUMBER IS... ahh... wait. Yes 2:30... I have to leave by 3:00. I work at UPS. This is my beautiful house.... that is my beautiful wife... My name is Jim and my mind doesn't work cause it went to bed about 2 and half hours ago. Noting more nothing less."

Its strange when your mind just doesn't work for just a brief moment that seems like eternity. It was very funny... very surreal... very scary/weird.

For fun....



okay this is more like it....



I love my life... even when its weird....

"get some, get some, get some---go again"


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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Obama and new census report

Statement From Senator Obama on the Census Income, Health Insurance and Poverty Numbers

Today’s news confirms what America’s struggling families already know – that over the past seven years our economy has moved backwards. We have now lived through first so-called economic ‘expansion’ on record where typical families saw their incomes fall, and working-age households lost more than $2,000 from their paychecks. Another 816,000 Americans fell into poverty in 2007 – including nearly 500,000 children – bringing the total increase in Americans in poverty under President Bush to 5.7 million. And on Bush’s watch, an additional 7.2 million Americans have fallen into the ranks of the uninsured. This is the failed record of George Bush’s economic policies that Senator McCain has called ‘great progress.’ While Senator McCain is promising four more years of the failed Bush economic policies, my economic plan will restore bottom up economic growth that benefits all Americans by cutting taxes for working Americans, providing affordable, accessible health care for all, and investing in new energy, education and infrastructure so we can create millions of good jobs here in America,” said Senator Barack Obama.

Highlights from the Census report:

Between 2000 and 2007, median income for working age households fell by $2,176. When elderly households are included, median income declined by $324 over the same period. This is the first economic expansion on record where typical households have seen their incomes decline. Under the Clinton Administration, median household income increased by $6,200.

African American household income fell by $1,804 between 2000 and 2007; Hispanic household income fell by $1,256 over the same period

Based on declining wages over the first 7 months of this year, median household income is likely to fall by at least $700 in 2008, bringing total income lost for the typical household under the Bush Administration to over $1000.

An additional 816,000 Americans fell into poverty in 2007, bringing the total increase in Americans in poverty under President Bush to 5.7 million.

500,000 children fell into poverty in 2007. There are 1.7 million more children living in poverty than in 2000.

Between 2000 and 2007, an additional 7.2 million Americans have fallen into the ranks of the uninsured. This is the largest increase in the number of people without health insurance of any Presidential Administration on record.

The share of Americans with private health coverage fell from 67.9% in 2006 to 67.5% in 2007. This share has fallen every year that President Bush has been in office, declining a total of 5 percentage points since 2000.

940,000 African Americans have lost health insurance since 2000, along with 3 million Hispanics

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

I don't live in my mothers basement!!!

anymore.


Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The problem with "traditional media"

I'm with Matt. I just don't have much sympathy of people working at big newspapers whining about the netroots attacking them. Reporters--if they're doing their job--spend their lives bringing scrutiny to other people. There's something weak about complaining when someone does the same to you. Matt points to this particularly egregious quote by Richard Cohen:

"I used to get a lot more on the right," said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq war. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.

"If you're a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face," Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics "were born too late, because they would have been great communists."

Dude, you get paid to state your opinion. Why do you care what some D&D-playing, popcorn eating, living in his mother's basement blogger is saying? I mean really. These guys want the megaphone, and then not the criticism. All power. No responsibility.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

What i'm reading this very second...

Aug. 27 Locke, Second Treatise, sections 132-168, 199, 201-204, 221-229 and 240-243

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke2/2nd-contents.html

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

response on taxes and economy...

Anonymous said...
Jim

You say look at what made our economy the greatest in the world. If you don't believe in the FairTax fine. Now look at what is ruining our economy in relation to the tax laws of other nations. We are becoming more and more uncompetitive.

Exactly! This is the consequence of our move away from Keynesian economics towards the back of a napkin supply side economics. The Laffer curve is laughable! But the impacts of cutting taxes at the expense of our infrastructure and making the middle class.. and future generations pay for it has hurt us dramatically.

I'll quote myself...

The impacts of the Bush tax cuts have been huge. And it has hurt our business competitiveness around the globe. That is reason--as the book, "the politics of Bad Ideas" points out--that the World Economic Forum the deterioration of the US public finances has begun to damage US competitiveness. This is a business research institute in Switzerland. The US experienced the most dramatic drop in rankings of ALL nations.

Also there is a myth that American businesses are being strangled by taxation at the expense of competitiveness. I'll outsource to Economist Mark Thoma at U. Oregon "The Greek Menace" who brings together some stuff around the web... I'll quote the larger point--aside from conservatives once again manipulating with hyperbole rather than data...

Economist Dean Baker:

Washington Post Misleads Readers to Push for Lower Corporate Tax Rates

Today, the preferred policy is further reductions in corporate income taxes. To advance this agenda the Post tells readers that, "U.S. companies operating abroad already labor under a bigger tax burden than most foreign competitors."

That's not what the OECD says. Data from the OECD show that in the average member country corporate taxes are equal to about 3.5 percent of GDP. In the United States, corporate taxes have generally been between and 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent of GDP over the last two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Table F-4).

But more broadly this decline comes from the conservative revolution. The Regan myth--keep in mind he raised taxes twice to try to correct the harm done from his tax cut at the beginning of his term--of taxes cuts creating economic growth was considered flawed by many economist in theory... and now we have the data to back it up. But the propaganda has remained useful. Our society has become less equitable with the reductions in the top economic bracket. Disparities of wealth over the long term have a huge impact in undermining the market system. We haven't seen such disparities of wealth since the 20's. And we have Regan and the pathology of tax cuts.


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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

still not doing homework!! I swear I'm leaving now!

Scale in the Housing Market

The NYT discusses efforts by local governments to use public money to purchase and renovate foreclosed properties to help revitalize hard-hit areas. At one point the article presents a comment from an economist at the CATO Institute complaining the program that supports this effort will distort the housing market and that it would be best to leave this process to the private sector.

It would have been helpful to put the size of the program in context. The program involves $4 billion in federal money. This is equal to approximately 0.02 percent of the value of the $20 trillion housing stock. It is equal to approximately 0.3 percent of annual housing sales. Spending of this magnitude is not likely to lead to large distortions in the housing market.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

more henry dems blog posting... I have to go to homework now!!!

Green jobs, health care, government

I want to respond the Henry Libertarian starting with the purpose of government since this is a fundamental difference between the conservative every man for themselves mentality and a more realistic economics and social governing of Democrats who want to protect citizens and empower our economy.

Henry Libertarian commented:

The Government is NOT here to take care of us.

The government is here to protect and empower. Come on now you are a Libertarian. Look back to your intellectual forefathers such as the Liberal John Locke.

Civil Government is a social contract to protect individuals and their basic liberties from the group. The group. The government is their to protect and empower them as individuals. Its also their to protect and empower the economy. Free-market advocates since Adam Smith have noted that markets require basic structures infrastructure--legal, regulatory, military. Individuals need some entity to protect them from market failures and violence. So your government isn't thier to take care of us is opposed by your own Libertarian ancestory... as well as any accurate conception of how markets work.

Barack Obama promises to "create five million new green jobs." The entire civilian workforce in the US is a little over 145 million people. So if Barack Obama’s adds five million new green jobs then one in every 33 jobs in the United States would be a new "green" job.

The basic response is... I'm not sure where the issue is. I'll outsource this to economist Dean Baker (from email)...

this includes all the derivative jobs that are associated with "green jobs." So if we have 500,000 construction workers employed retrofitting buildings, we might have another 500,000 employed transporting materials, producing the inputs in factories, or even producing raw materials. The same would be the case with fuel efficient cars or hybrids.

The 5 million figure is probably high even by this standard, but it is not ridiculous on its face, especially by political standards.

So Obama may be playing up the numbers... I dunno. Economist fight amoungst themselves on the derivative impacts of policies--since an economy is a collective effort with broad repurcussion outside the direct impacts of the targeted goal.

Henry Libertarian:

Why do "earmarks" always come up? They take up the money that could be spent on things like education and Healthcare.

I'm just going to quote myself on this one...

The Economist magazine pointed out that all earmarks add up to less than $20 billion a year. That for fiscal year 2008 is $64.56. Since that is a very small chunk of my tax dollars and its part of the push and pull of a federal system. I have faith in our processes of checks and balances... and faith that corruption can be founded and dealt with... the sky isn’t falling

This can’t possibly be top priority is it? If it is... we’ll jsut disagree. I put getting Bin Ladin, protecting our national security, protecting our troops, stegthening our economy, ending the health care crise, ending the transportation crisis, ending the education crisis–the Regan revolution sure has created a lot of crisises!

Yes schools are overcrowded. Why? We cannot build schools before the kids are there. Schools get built in responce to the need for them. What good does it do to create 10 new schools if the area does not have enough children to support that? The Federal Government DOES NOT have ANYTHING to do with how the Counties run the school system.

Yeah... part of the problem... Local government is more easily manipulated by feel good economic policies...

Schools are underfunded? Which school systems do not have books?

Couldn’t name them but from what I hear my nephew has had classes where he couldn’t take the book home for homework since there weren’t enough of them. I heard many of the same stories across the board. One of my goals as chairman is to get more substantial data on that one so it’s a fair challenge and I’m certain I can answer it with more than hear-say data–though I trust what these people are telling me, you can’t necessarily take it at face value...

Which school systems cannot provide learning materials for the children?

Teachers pay for large amounts of supplies out of their own pockets... is that really at question here?

Could we possibly give them more money? Sure, but maybe we should look at how the money that the County is being given is being spent first.

The chairmans race here in Henry was focused on economic challenges like bringing in new businesses, fixing the trasnportation issue, development and smart growth... I don’t think penny pinching is a serious solution... but feel free to peruse the henry county budget I’d be intrigued to what you find...

I can tell you this, my child has books at his school and an appropriate amount of educational resources and he attends public school. Teacher pay too low, as compared to what?

Ask his teacher how much out of pocket she has provided... also ask about grants from private sector–families, businesses

Current teacher pay levels do attract talented people to the profession. NEA estimated that the average classroom teacher salary for 2004-05 was $47,674.

Average... If Bill Gates walks into a bar the average jumps sky high... doesn't mean every school gets comparable pay rates... the inner city... and at risk enivronments have trouble with teacher retention. At large teacher retention is a problem because people get fed up with the problems and go back to private sector.


Once again I will repeat myself. Healthcare rises due to lawyers and insurance costs. Also, stop trying to cover illegal aliens. They do not have "rights" to our social benefit systems. In Texas, where the state comptroller estimates illegal immigrants cost hospitals $1.3 billion in 2006. Undocumented immigrants are driving up the number of people without health insurance.

We have an immigration problem... but the idea that this is the reason health care is so expensive is absurd. You got to look at the macro environment as a whole...

Here are the major contributing factors.... NCHC:

Why is the number of uninsured people increasing?

Millions of workers don’t have the opportunity to get health coverage. A third of firms in the U.S. did not offer coverage in 2006.4
Nearly two-fifths (38 percent) of all workers are employed in smaller businesses, where less than two-thirds of firms now offer health benefits to their employees.7 It is estimated that 266,000 companies dropped their health coverage between 2000-2005 and 90 percent of those firms have less than 25 employees.
Rapidly rising health insurance premiums are the main reason cited by all small firms for not offering coverage. Health insurance premiums are rising at extraordinary rates. The average annual increase in inflation has been 2.5 percent while health insurance premiums for small firms have escalated an average of 12 percent annually.4
Even if employees are offered coverage on the job, they can’t always afford their portion of the premium. Employee spending for health insurance coverage (employee’s share of family coverage) has increased 143 percent between 2000 and 2006.8
Losing a job, or quitting voluntarily, can mean losing affordable coverage - not only for the worker but also for their entire family. Only seven (7) percent of the unemployed can afford to pay for COBRA health insurance - the continuation of group coverage offered by their former employers. Premiums for this coverage average almost $700 a month for family coverage and $250 for individual coverage, a very high price given the average $1,100 monthly unemployment check.9
Coverage is unstable during life’s transitions. A person’s link to employer-sponsored coverage can also be cut by a change from full-time to part-time work, or self-employment, retirement or divorce.10

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 59% of the nation's illegal immigrants are uninsured, compared with 25% of legal immigrants and 14% of U.S. citizens.

Immigration reform--how ever it would end up looking like would help this issue... plus why else do they sneak over the boarder... the third world has an impact on our country... increase prosperity in Mexico and you won't see as many people coming here to pay for their own families health care, food, and well-being. Why do you think McCain (he was for it before he was against it) and Bush supported immigration reform. Its a huge problem that needs to be solved in a way that doesn't hurt our economy. Kick them all out mentality of conservatives would cost us economically...

Illegal immigrants represent about 15% of the nation's 47 million uninsured people.

Sorry.. that would be 47 million Americans. Your numbers are just wrong...

DeNavas-Walt, C.B. Proctor, and J. Smith. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006. U.S. Census Bureau., August 2007. http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60-233.pdf

Even Hillary Clinton's story about the woman who died because she didn't have health insurance turned out to be fake.

I don't know and don't care about that story... it was a narrative... campaigns are full of naratives. But thats why social scientific data is where the debate should be... the my brother know a guy who knows a guy who saw x is not a way to get an accurate representation of the world.

You consistently see Republicans use such tactics... escpecially locally. Moderate Repub's do have something substantial to say on policy data... even when I disagree with their priorities I at least applaud their policy efforts--conservatives on the other hand like magic, voodoo (GHW Bush), and other mythical beasts that fight the evil hobgoblins of the world.

There is no Constitutional Right to health care coverage.

Okay... it'd be absurd to think everything needs to be a constitutional right... that'd just be ineffiecient. As a proponent of markets... I don't want to create more needless gridlock in government... I like and want efficiency. But lets not forget "Life, Liberty, and pursuit of happiness." The markets failures infringe on all 3.

NCHC Facts about Health Care:

Studies estimate that the number of excess deaths among uninsured adults age 25-64 is in the range of 18,000 a year. This mortality figure is more than the number of deaths from diabetes (17,500) within the same age group.10

10Institute of Medicine. Insuring America’s Health - Principles and Recommendations. The National Academies Press, 2004.

back to Henry Libertarian...

Private industry works just fine when you leave it alone and stop all of the Liberal regulating.

How is that working out for us so far? I think turning towards mild regulation and market competion from a non-profit making institution that wants effieciencies since they don't have a profit motive to pay ceo's while denying coverage and making doctors increase their staff--and your doctors bills to pay for that staff--to get people the coverage they need. This can't possibly be a real argument on your part.

Plus John McCain doesn't want to remove protectionisms on Doctors and patents... these would lower the cost of people gonig to the doctor and lower the cost of medication. So thats an empty argument all the way around since he doesn't want to end protectionisms and regulation. Obama vs. McCain we are just debating policy priorities of who we want to protect... people... or share-holder values and CEO pay (at the cost of human lives, American bankruptcies, and harm to small businessnesses

Barack Obama is looking to rely mostly on the heavy hand of the government for regulating healthcare.

Modest smart regulations often make markets work better... not always mind you... but in things like health care its obvious. All you need to do is compare us with other nations--we rank 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization... and pay 2-3 times as much as other industrialized nations to get worse quality of care. You don't have much of a case for that one.

What did Bill Clinton do for healthcare reform? Hillary Care was presented to the Democratic-controlled Congress on November 20, 1993. U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D) qualified his agreement against the plan saying "there is no health care crisis" ... "there is an insurance crisis" but also indicated "anyone who thinks [the Clinton health care plan] can work in the real world as presently written isn't living in it." In August 1994, Democratic Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D) introduced a compromise proposal that would have delayed requirements of employers until 2002.

Yes and the reasons health care reform didn't work was--everybody together now--Republicans blocking the efforts.

You can't--well you can, but no one should take you seriously--complain about the impacts of Repubican obstruction. The other issue is the amount of lobbying on behalf of the health care industry... its quite a profitable business if you didn't know. Did I mention we pay 2-3 times as much as other countries... for WORSE care--oh yeah I think I did.

In Great Britain after many decades of shortages, misery and suffering followed until 1989, when some market-based health care competition was reintroduced to the British citizens.

I'm for market competition... the government, with its massive purchasing power, and its lack of a need to pay huge salaries to ceo's (not to mention spending money to keep from getting people care) would be a check on profit motive at the expense of care. I'm not for less market competition I'm for real market competition. No go on that one too...

In Canada, Chaoulli v. Quebec UPDATE (June 9, 2005): In a 4 to 3 decision, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down Quebec's law that prohibits private medical insurance.

Stawman... we're not trying to prohibit private medical insurance. Once again... conservative tactics 101... make up stuff that just isn't true...

The Cuban Government has implemented a two-tiered medical system (e.g. "medical apartheid") that caters to foreign tourists while denying native Cubans access to basic medical necessities (at least it is "free" to them).

If costs keep going up here unchecked by government participation you'll start seeing Americans start going abroad for care... plus once again strawman... you aren't accurately representing the Obama plan. Its market competion with private insurance to bring down the profit motive to a more effieicent and equitable level.

Australia's universal health care scheme is relatively new (introduced in 1983, which built on the 1974 Medibank program). As with all socialized health care systems, there is a mixture of public versus private care (approximately 30% of Australians also retain private health insurance). As a result, the private patients receive better care than their medicare counterparts.

Sure if you are willing to pay for better care... I don't have a problem with that!!!! But citizens... HUMANS deserve a basic level of care. To think otherwise leads you to moral quandaries that would make me appalled. But thats a personal decision for everyone to decide.

The impacts of Republican everyman for themselves... vs. creating an economy that protects and empowers citizens is the distinguishing factor in this debate. plus killing people and unnecessarily creating market inefficiencies in the richest nation in the world is a bit absurd and a very sad statement to the impacts of the conservative revolution on American citizens.




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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Henry Dems blog post...

I work my ass off debating conservatives... some times I think its pointless... I hope people learn something from it... (see main post for links)

This liberal lacks a retort? McCain, Obama, and the economy

I'm glad to see we are getting a more active blog. The more we debate... the more we discuss... the more we have dialouge. The less the right wing swift boat attacks and urban ledgends that Republicans have used time and time again will work.

The discussion is on McCain and his 8 houses... or however many.

Henry Libertarian commented:

That shows how "out of touch" and "privileged" Obama is, which Liberals like to ignore. Sure it is fun to point across the isle and snicker, but when you are guilt of the same thing suddenly you get defensive and don't see the humor anymore. If you want to call McCain rich then show me a politician at the federal levels that isn't. You obviously don't have a retort or you would have said something better. Obama wants to tax businesses that make goods and provide services which will make goods and services more expensive. With Obama's Trillion-Dollar Spending Plan, who do you think is going to pay for it?

First... "when you are guilty of the same thing? How so? The Rezko smear has been shown to be a complete fabrication for more see Factcheck.org which is a nonpartisan group that I highly recommend to those like myself who want to deal in policy and not whitewash the issues. Read the Rezko Reality to see that Henry Libertarian like many Republicans is misinformed on the issue.

If you want to call McCain rich then show me a politician at the federal levels that isn't.

That is known as a straw man in logic. I'm not arguing that Obama has note earned an impressive income. Or that middle class and working class americans are seldom representative of elected officials.

But here is the deal. Obama understand that Americans deserve to be empowered... he wants to help middle class Americans get a higher quality of life. John McCain wants to cut taxes on the rich... which has harmed our economic health over the past 30 years of supply side reganomics.

I mean there are reasons why European nations--and Canada too!--have more economic mobility than we do in America. These are all repurcussion of conservative economics--a less equitable outcome for hard working americans.

So saying I want to have it both ways because "Obama is rich too" is either a misunderstanding or clever rhetorical trick which won't work. I'll assume its a misunderstanding.

Obama wants to tax businesses that make goods and provide services which will make goods and services more expensive. With Obama's Trillion-Dollar Spending Plan, who do you think is going to pay for it?

First... lets go back to the core questions. Obama wants to bring back the strong economic growth that was seen before the conservative revolution of tax cuts at the cost of quality of life.

The impacts of the Bush tax cuts have been huge. And it has hurt our business competativeness around the globe. That is reason--as the book, "the politics of Bad Ideas" points out--that the World Economic Forum the deterioration of the US public finances has begun to damage US competitiveness. This is a business research institute in Switzerland. The US expereienced the most dramatic drop in rankings of ALL nations.

Also there is a myth that American businesses are being strangled by taxation at the expense of competativeness. I'll outsource to Economist Mark Thoma at U. Oregon "The Greek Menace" who brings together some stuff around the web... I'll quote the larger point--aside from conservatives once again manipluating with hyperbole rather than data...

Economist Dean Baker:

Washington Post Misleads Readers to Push for Lower Corporate Tax Rates

Today, the preferred policy is further reductions in corporate income taxes. To advance this agenda the Post tells readers that, "U.S. companies operating abroad already labor under a bigger tax burden than most foreign competitors."

That's not what the OECD says. Data from the OECD show that in the average member country corporate taxes are equal to about 3.5 percent of GDP. In the United States, corporate taxes have generally been between and 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent of GDP over the last two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Table F-4).

Also here is the tax policy center on Obama's "business tax increases" that you claim will destroy our economy (pg 22)

Obama’s proposal to make permanent the Research and Development (R&D) credit and the renewable energy production credit would make it easier for firms to make investment decisions because they would no longer have to worry each time the credits approached their expiration. Both credits encourage particular behavior that Congress has deemed worthwhile and the change would likely increase both the amount of business investment in R&D and the development of more renewable energy sources. Most economists believe, however, that credits for selected investments in renewable energy are a less cost-effective way of reducing global warming and dependence on imported oil than approaches that raise the price of fossil fuels (including the cap-and-trade proposals advanced by both Obama and McCain) and allow private markets to select the least costly ways of reducing fossil fuel use.

The two sets of revenue-raisers that Obama has proposed would raise taxes on corporations and individuals engaging in particular activities and thus might cause them to change their behavior. To the extent that the provisions close loopholes in the current tax system, they could lead to more efficient use of resources, in terms of both how firms invest their funds and the use of financial strategies to exploit loopholes. The Obama campaign is probably overstating how much revenue additional loophole-closing proposals can raise, however, particularly with regard to proposals to reduce revenue lost from taxpayers who conceal offshore income and exploit international differences in tax rates to shift income to low-tax jurisdictions. There is little hard knowledge about how much revenue is lost to these transactions and administrative efforts to control them are ongoing.

These are equitable and smart chagnes in the tax code. Not perfect for my market theory wonkish Jim Nichols world... but politics is about compromise and consensus and this is a great step towards creating a more equitable economy that not only empowers middle class america but increases all our prosperity through economic revival and a move away from supply side economic nonsense.

Your concern about goods and services is moot since the incomes and savings of middle class and working class americans will rise... which will happen since ending the Bush economic fiasco will improve our longterm economic forcast. WHy do you think the Bush tax cuts created a recession recovery that faired so poorly compared to other post war recorvies?

With Obama's Trillion-Dollar Spending Plan, who do you think is going to pay for it?

Trillion dollar spending worries you? Obama would boost the debt by $3.5 trillion but at the same time increase spending and tax cuts that help middle class Americans. McCain would increase the debt by $5 trillion and all we get is more of the Bush economy stagnation and tax cuts for people who will just by bigger houses and nice boats.

Remeber a tax cut is government spending... like it or not.. So McCain is definately not your guy--why defend the worse of two evils by your own parameters.

I'll conclude with the Tax Policy Center again...(Intro)

The two candidates’ tax plans would have sharply different distributional effects. Senator McCain’s tax cuts would primarily benefit those with very high incomes, almost all of whom would receive large tax cuts that would, on average, raise their after-tax incomes by more than twice the average for all households. Many fewer households at the bottom of the income distribution would get tax cuts and those tax cuts would be small as a share of after-tax income. In marked contrast, Senator Obama offers much larger tax breaks to low- and middle-income

This Liberal lacks a retort? Mama said wonk you out...

We understand economics... and we will bring policies that protect and empower Americans. The every man for themselves mentality Republicans promote not only hurts our citizens, our economic competativeness... but its just plain old bad economics and ways of treating our fellow man...



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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

China communist?

Neal Boortz seems to think that infrastructure investment is communist?

At a campaign stop in Chester, Virginia Obama said, "everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now and the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly superior to us now, which means if you're a corporation deciding where to do business, you're starting to think, Beijing looks like a pretty good option."

So not only is Obama praising the Chinese government, but he honestly believes that it takes government in order to make a country great. He honestly thinks that spending your tax dollars will be what makes our country more appealing to corporations ... no mention of the brutally high corporate interest rates in the United States. Maybe that's a reason, Obama, why businesses wouldn't look to the United States as a great place to invest? I guess that's the not the way the "progressive" mind sees it though.

The idea that Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph Stiglitz are communist is laughable and speaks to Neal's knowledge about economics... but heres the question: does anyone still think China is communist? State-Capitalist yes, but yeah Communist? not so much. Someone smarter than I might be able to explain why Neal Boortz is right on this one....

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Fair tax become law?

CAN IT PASS -- ARE YOU KIDDING?

Someone wrote to this blog saying Fairtax can still pass.

Are you kidding?

THe leaders have abandoned ship. No one is even trying to get a Congressional hearing. The 1.5 million man Fairtax rally in Washington was a total flop - NO ONE showed up.

There is nothing going on anywhere that we can see about Fairtax.

Very very strange -- especially since Fairtax was supposed to be so well "researched" with 70 sponsors in Congress, and hundreds of thousands - over a million -- active supporters.

In fact, Fairtax leaders are making sure there are NO hearings. Apparently Fairtax leaders seem more interested avoiding questions - particularly questions under oath -- about their plan.

So how on earth can it pass?? No one is pushing it. Its not only off the national radar -- its off its OWN radar. Even Fairtax supporters have nothing going on.

Thats probably because the leaders found out, what many of us said from the start. Fairtax is a farce. Literally, a farce. Not sort of a farce, not kind of a farce, its a total farce.

For one thing- its the highest sales tax on the planet earth. And it on your RENT. ITs on your UTILITIES. ITs on your car insurance.

And medical costs. These lunatics were going to put the highest sales tax on EARTH on your cancer surgery, chemo, on your child's dental work, on your ER visit.

So the parents of a child with leukemia could have to pay 100K in SALES taxes because they had the audacity to spend money to try to keep their child alive?

When you start to realize things like this -- you start to see the Fairtax would be wildly, absurdly unpopular. People won't like 100K is sales tax on their hospital bill, especially when they don't make half that.

Will renters just go ahead and pay thousands of dollars a year in sales tax on their rent? And food. And utilities. And virtually everything they buy?

Hell no they won't. And Fairtax leaders started to figure this basic fact out. So they wisely just walked away from this well meaning, but luney idea.

Now sit down a minute, and think. Think about this real real hard. Cause its real real easy. Do you really think people will WANT to pay the highest sales tax on earth, on their rent? Their car insurance? AND their medical cost, utilities, ect ect?

You see, few of Fairtax fans even KNOW what the plan is. Oh, they know the hype. THey know the BS. But they have no clue what the real plan is.

What do you think the impact would be if suddenly people were paying the highest sales tax on earth --- on their rent? No one else even charges a sales tax on -- and rent, but Fairtax idiotically pretends all renters will pay these insanely high taxes on their rent.

So Fairtax is a rent tax. Its also a medical tax.


A car insurance tax. A food tax. A utility tax. A cancer surgery tax. A prescription drug tax. Not just a "modest" tax -- but the HIGHEST sales tax ON EARTH tax.

SO people wouldn't go for this tax -- not when they find out what it really is.

Fairtax couldn't possibly pass. Not when people find out.

If the leaders would have Congressional hearings -- people would know better. Thats why you won't ever see Congressional hearings. The leaders are too smart to have any.

But wait will people would find out -- its not 23% _- its more like 60-70%. Because the 23% figure was based on the lie that they could collect 800 billion in revenue FROM the government. Idiots. Take that farce away, refigure the whole plan. And in Congressional hearings, the Fairtax leaders won't get away with the BS tricks the use on their fans at some rally (which they never have anymore anyway)

Plus -- Fairtax bases their BS on cutting the wages of 100 million American workers -- so prices will fall. Riiiiight. Sure - Im sure everyone will want to rush out, take 30% cut in pay, then pay the world's highest sales tax. Wait till "details" like this come out -- as they would in any congressional hearing.

There are no leaders pushing it. IN fact they are hiding from it. Its a farce. People would hate it.

So you tell me -- can it pass?

Fairtax leaders would never actually show up at a Congressional hearing -- or even allow a Congressional hearing -- and answer questions about it.

So no -- it can't pass.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

X-Phi book review

Review - Experimental Philosophy
by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Editors)
Oxford University Press, 2008
Review by Neil Levy, Ph.D.
Aug 12th 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 33)

This anthology mixes together previously published and new work in experimental philosophy, by many of its leading figures (among whom the editors feature prominently). Experimental philosophy is a burgeoning movement that urges philosophers to leave their armchairs and test their philosophical claims empirically. It builds upon but goes further than the movement that Jesse Prinz, in his contribution, calls empirical philosophy; philosophy that turns to existing scientific literature to find evidence for philosophical claim. Experimental philosophy involves philosophers actually getting their hands dirty by conducting experiments.

Part of the motivation for going experimental is that scientists have different concerns to most philosophers, and therefore do not always test the hypotheses in which philosophers are interested. In particular, experimental philosophers are concerned with testing the intuitions of ordinary people. An intuition is, roughly, a disposition to take a claim to be true. Experimental philosophers are interested in intuitions for several different reasons. One is because traditional philosophers have sometimes advanced burden of proof arguments: claiming that some view has the burden of proof because ordinary people find the opposing view intuitive. For instance, some philosophers who hold that incompatibilism is true -- that is, that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism -- argue that the burden of proof is on compatibilists, because ordinary people are incompatibilists. There is now a growing literature testing ordinary people's intuitions on these topics, some of which is reprinted here. The evidence suggests a more complicated pattern than was thought: ordinary people do tend toward incompatibilism, but only under certain conditions. When cases are presented abstractly, so the question is essentially 'can an agent be responsible in a determined world?', subjects lean towards a negative answer, but when the case is presented more concretely, with the details of moral wrongdoing described, subjects tend toward compatibilism. This pattern at least complicates burden of proof arguments.

Other experimental philosophers aim to probe intuitions for a different reason: because it may be that unexpected features of the intuitions of ordinary subjects play a role in the intuitions of professional philosophers as well. The most famous example of experimental philosophy in this mould -- perhaps the most famous example of experimental philosophy at all -- is Joshua Knobe's work on causation, a sample of which is republished here. Knobe found that subjects were more likely to judge a harmful than a helpful action to be intentional, even with all the other details of the situation unchanged. This is surprising, because whether an act is harmful or not seems irrelevant to whether it is intentional. Another famous experiment along these lines, also reprinted here, tested the intuitions of subjects regarding Gettier cases; cases in which a person has a true justified belief, but in which the belief is true only accidentally. The existence of such cases has been taken to be a serious challenge to accounts of knowledge, but Weinberg, Nichols and Stich suggest that they should never have been taken seriously. Their evidence consists in the fact that East Asian subjects are more likely to agree that the agents featured in Gettier cases have knowledge than are Western subjects, as well as more likely than not to attribute knowledge. This suggests, they claim, that when philosophers engage in epistemology, they are not probing the nature of knowledge per se; instead, they are probing the psychologies of a particular group of human beings (Western, white, highly educated and male). Intuition mongering is simply a way of exploring a culturally and geographically specific psychology, and cannot be expected to give us insight into the nature of reality.

Since so much of traditional philosophy turns on the appeal to intuitions, the claim that they are likely to be unreliable as guides to the traditional concerns of philosophers has been very controversial. In their experimental philosophy 'manifesto' which opens this collection, Knobe and Nichols attempt to hose down the fire, by claiming that experimental philosophy does not aim to be imperialistic. Instead, they argue for methodological pluralism. To my mind, this greatly underestimates the threat from experimental philosophy. If the claim that in investigating our intuitions we are doing a kind of ethno-psychology is true, then much of traditional philosophy is in trouble: after reading Weinberg, Nichols and Stich one can't simply go back to doing traditional epistemology.

The choices facing philosophy, in the wake of the experimental philosophy movement, are these: give up reliance on intuition to the extent to which this is possible (either generally or with regard to those areas in which the experiments suggest that intuition-mongering is ethno-psychology, or otherwise suspect) or rebut the experimentalist attack on intuitions. In closing, let me sketch a possible avenue of exploration for those who wish to take this latter tack. In his contribution to this volume, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong notes that many of the experimental results reveal a pattern of conflicting intuitions, depending upon whether the case is described abstractly or concretely (we have seen this pattern in the responses of ordinary people with regard to the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility). Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that this pattern might explain why philosophical puzzles endure. He suggests that the conflicting intuitions might be the product of different reasoning systems, one of which is keyed to abstract presentations and the other concrete. Since we all have both systems, we each feel the pull of both sides of the issue, making it intractable. But because one system is likely to be stronger than the other in each of us, we take sides.

As Sinnott-Armstrong notes, we could break the stalemate if we could adduce non-question-begging grounds for siding with one system or the other. But he sees little hope of that. If his speculation about the nature of the competing systems is correct, he is probably right (Sinnott-Armstrong models the systems on memory systems, one of which seems better at recalling concrete episodes while another seems better at recalling abstract semantic information). But another possibility, one that seems at least as likely to me, is that the competing systems are the systems familiar from dual process theories of the mind. On these theories, one system is fast, automatic, and unconscious, while the other is slow, effortful and conscious. More importantly, the systems have features that often make it rational to discount the output of one and not the other: system 1 is modular, which is to say that is insensitive to a broad range of considerations, inflexible and stereotyped, whereas system 2 is domain-general, flexible and responsive to personal-level beliefs and values. If, as I think is possible, intuitions on one side of some (though perhaps not all) of the debates upon which Sinnott-Armstrong focuses are produced by system 1, while conflicting intuitions are the product of system 2, then we do have good reason to side with one set and disregard the other. Of course, this is simply a hypothesis: assessing it requires both empirical work, to test whether we can assign intuitions in the suggested manner (cognitive load manipulations would be one way to see whether a set of intuitions are produced by system 1), and conceptual work, aimed at testing the claim that we ought rationally to prefer system 2 intuitions to system 1.

Regardless of how that issue turns out, the experimental philosophy movement is certainly one of the most exciting developments in contemporary philosophy, and this volume is the perfect introduction to its methods, concerns and key thinkers.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

John McCain's Health Care plan

Economist Brad Delong on John McCain's health care plan

The biggest economic bad news is that health care costs keep rising. The total bill charged by insurers for employer and employee averages $12,100 for a family of four--twice the level of seven years ago, and comfortably more than the full-time earnings of a minimum-wage worker. On top of this come the taxes for government health care programs. The American health care bill is over $7,600 per person per year.

This matters for American businesses. Businesses pay for health insurance coverage for 165 million non-elderly Americans, for the high-wage jobs that make use of the educations, skills, and high potential productivity of American workers come with benefits. This creates a direct link between rising health care costs and slower economic growth. When health costs rise, the costs of employing workers in high-wage high-benefit jobs rise as well. Businesses find that they cannot afford to expand employment as rapidly as they would otherwise: higher health care costs make maintaining their old workforce and expanding it via new hires very expensive. They economize. They hire fewer workers. They offer lower wages. Workers resist. The result is slow employment growth and higher unemployment until workers recognize that the scarcity of good jobs and the higher risk of unemployment teaches them they have little bargaining power--a process that takes years. Meanwhile workers who ought to be in high-skill high-wage high-productivity jobs with benefits find themselves in low-skill low-wage low-productivity jobs without benefits instead. This is a waste. Workers who could hold down high-productivity jobs don't, and so don't get the wages that they deserve. Firms who could employ high-skill workers don't, and so don't get the profits that they deserve.

Successful economic growth requires a more efficient, lower cost health care sector. John McCain and Barack Obama propose diametrically-opposed plans for trying to get the health care system to where we all want it to be.

John McCain proposes a root-canal surgery approach. The problem, he and his health-care advisors believe, is that good jobs are linked to health-care benefits. Break that link--remove the expectation that good high-productivity jobs come with benefits--and the health care sector will no longer be a major drag on the American economy as it goes its own way, whatever that way might be. Hence John McCain proposes, relative to the current system, to penalize employers that offer high-value employer-sponsored coverage and subsidize individuals who get health insurance outside the employment relationship.

We see two problems with McCain's approach: the journey and the destination. The journey: The McCain plan works in the long-run by making employer-sponsored coverage more expensive in the short- and the medium-run. It thus attempts a cure by giving American business a worse case of the rapidly-rising health-cost disease from which it currently suffers. Rapidly rising health costs are a drag on high-wage high-profit high-productivity employment now, and they will be a much worse drag on high-wage high-profit high-productivity employment under the McCain plan--at least until we come out the other side and enter a world in which it is no longer expected that high-productivity jobs come with benefits.

The destination: The biggest problem in health care today is that insurers are rewarded not for keeping their customers healthy but for figuring out which customers are likely to get sick first--and then dumping them onto other insurers or onto the government. At present, this problem is restrained by the institution of employer-sponsored insurance: bid for an employer's contract and ERISA requires that you take any of their workers who want to purchase your plan. The destination of McCain's plan is a place where insurers have much more freedom to spend money, administrators' time, and computer power separating the healthy sheep from the costly and sick goats--but the profits to doing this for one insurer are not savings for the system because the sick and uncovered do show up at the emergency room eventually and are more expensive to treat when they get there. We believe that when the McCain plan does move us to a world in which the expectational link between high-productivity jobs and benefits is broken we will then have a system that works even less well than our current one.

Barack Obama, by contrast, offers a much more conservative approach to the problem of health care reform. Instead of using tax penalties and incentives to break the existing system and create a whole new set of untried health care financing institutions, Barack Obama proposes to build on those components of our current system that do work--and to make them work better.

But I've talked for More than Long Enough

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

off to school... via 285 to marta... to five pionts station...

To school I go... school to school me. Its 12:03... i'm hungry... I'm not done with my readings...

get some, get some, get some, get some--go again..

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Social Security redux

Social Security zombies

No matter how many times you try to kill the mythical Social Security crisis, it just keeps coming back.

David Ignatius:

Pelosi describes with relish her strategy for trouncing Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security — which was to blast it mercilessly, without offering an alternative. The implicit message is that negotiation and compromise are for losers. The reality that Social Security is facing bankruptcy seems not to interest either Pelosi or Reid.

The Congressional Budget Office:

CBO’s projections indicate that future Social Security beneficiaries will receive larger benefits in retirement—and will have paid higher payroll taxes—than current beneficiaries do, even after adjustments have been made for inflation and even if the scheduled payments are reduced because the trust funds are exhausted.
Oh, and CBO projects that the trust funds will last until 2049.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Brad Delong... reading list for Jim

History of Political Economy: A New Course I Am Not Going to Teach This Year--or the Year After
By Brad DeLong

Sigh:

Classics:

Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests
David Hume, "On the Balance of Trade"
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Paul Krugman, Ricardo's Difficult Idea http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm
David Ricardo, On Foreign Trade (chapter 7 of Principles of Political Economy and Taxation)
David Ricardo, An Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (selections)
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital
Karl Marx, Capital (selections)
Late Classics:

Alfred Marshall, Principles of Political Economy (selections)
Max Weber, The National State and Economic Policy
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion
Neoclassics:

Polanyi, The Great Transformation (selections)
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform
John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Friedman
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent
Moderns (Africa):

Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa
James Scott, Seeing Like a State
Rene Dumont, False Start in Africa
Margaret Macmillan et al., When Economic Reform Goes Wrong: Cashews in Mozambique
Daron Acemoglu et al., An African Success Story: Botswana



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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Social Security

Part of the reason the public is misinformed about social security... "its not going to be around when we need it..." is the media does not do its job.

Outsource to Dean Baker:
The Washington Post War On Social Security Continues

The Post yet again is complaining that politicians who are unwilling to deal with a Social Security shortfall that is first projected to hit in 2049, when John McCain will be 113 years old. To try to makes it case sound more compelling it refers to the date 2018 when the Social Security trustees project that tax revenues will first be inadequate to meet benefit payments.

Of course 2018 is completely irrelevant to the finances of the program. At that point the program is projected to have accumulated more than $5 trillion in government bonds. But the Post wants to scare readers to advance their Social Security agenda so they trot out 2018 as though it is a date that anyone needs to worry about.

The positive side of this story is that Social Security's finances look much better than the Post's. If it keeps making up scare stories about Social Security, perhaps the date of its demise will be hastened.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

economics blogging...

If you haven't already read The Conservative Nanny State by Dean Baker you probably should.

In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. It’s time for the rules to change. Sound economic policy should harness the market in ways that produce desirable social outcomes – decent wages, good jobs and affordable health care.

Its creative commons so you can download the whole book for free...

I might try to do a chap. by chap analysis one of these days... I have a long list of one of these days... I doubt I shall get to all of them before i'm dead... sigh...

If Dean asks.. tell him Jim Nichols sent you.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Social Security...

Here is the Congressional Budget Offices report on Social Security.

Its not going to run out of money...
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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

wine blogging...

I'm on glass number two of Clos Du Bois 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon

It has a deep flavor to it. The bitterness doesn't hit till after you've swallowed it.

Talking wine is strange... its like post modern philosophy. You just make shit up... and all these intellectuals nod their head as if you've said something.

Good wine though...

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Social Security

Citizen Jay comments:

Citizen Jay said...
"I believe that when we Americans look deep into ourselves and ask us what we want our government--because it is our government: it is our agent to do what we want with our money..."

Why not eliminate a percentage of social security taxation, if not altogether? Why should the money go to government? Why can the money not be placed in a retirement account untouched by government? Why could the money not be placed into Roth IRA accounts, or a percentage of the amount currently taxed as social security?

That is a very sad statement. Social Security keeps millions of elderly people above the poverty line. If anyone made this country great... if anything about what we currently have is good. We can thank those who came before. To say that government should not protect those who have given so much to us... is just a view of government I find appalling.

If you stated it just for philosophical quandry... I once again see the pathology of philosophers who like to debate ideas for the sake of debate... yet ignore the fact that others are pertutating those ideas in an attempt to undermine government and our economy.

The idea that government shouldn't touch these peoples money speaks to two flaws. One the idea that its "peoples" money is wrong. The people would have no economy, no jobs, no money without that which the government provides. So the concept itself is incoherent.

Two: the idea that government is not in the business of protecting people is a very sad position. The conservative revolution has had a huge impact in promoting this view. Government is there to protect and empower people... without government we would have nothing. A Hobbesian all against all.

He goes on to state:

You and I will not see a dime of social security come retirement age. I want the people to have direct control over their money (and it's use towards the long-term future).

Factually not true. Its right wing propagandha... you've been watching too much fox news.


The Crisis that isn't

Barack Obama has been running for president full-time for nearly a year. While he has impressed millions of people across the country and managed to garner substantial support for his candidacy, he is still mired in second place in the polls. Second place does not win nominations, so with time running out, Obama is getting a bit desperate.

This is the only way to understand his attack on Hillary Clinton for not having a plan to close Social Security’s projected shortfall. As Senator Clinton rightly pointed out, the projected problems with Social Security are distant and relatively minor. There is no reason that she needs to develop a plan for plugging a hole that is not projected to arise until 2046, almost thirty years after the latest date that she can leave the White House.

Obama’s own plan called for raising the income cap on the payroll tax, which would be a modest tax increase on upper middle income workers, and a very substantial tax increase on the highest paid workers. Proposing tax increases is not generally a smart way to win elections, but Obama clearly hoped to be rewarded with positive news stories and editorials, and praise for his courage from the print and broadcast pundits. His plan did earn him some praise from these quarters, but not enough to raise him from his distant second place standing in the polls.

While Obama’s attack can be dismissed as simply bad political judgment, the deeper issue is that attacking Social Security has so much resonance with the media elite. This group has been blatantly ignoring and/or misrepresenting the facts in its attacks on Social Security for almost two decades. They have used their power over the news to force politicians to respond to their agenda, praising those who advance their Social Security crisis story and damning those who try to keep the projections in perspective.

Politicians who refuse to say what we should do with Social Security are not dodging a tough issue, they are simply being realistic. We don’t know what the world will look like in 2040, 2050, and 2060. Under very plausible assumptions, Social Security will remain fully solvent right through these decades with no changes whatsoever. However, even if the program needs to be changed to maintain solvency, none of us has great insight as to how those who have not yet entered the workforce will opt to divide their lives between work and retirement.

If it is necessary to make up a Social Security shortfall, will people in 2050 prefer to retire later, get lower benefits, or pay higher taxes? We don’t have any real basis for answering this question. Furthermore, the people alive in 2050 will not care how we did answer the question. The country will almost certainly reshape the Social Security program at least once before 2050 regardless of what we might choose to write into law in the next few years.

Social Security is an issue where good policy is also good politics. The best thing that progressive politicians can do for the program is to use their megaphone to counter the scare stories. After hearing a steady drum beat of stories about Social Security’s pending bankruptcy, tens of millions of people question whether they will ever see the benefits they have earned. These people must be assured that the program faces no major financial threats, only political threats from those who want to cut and/or privatize Social Security.

It is unfortunate that much of the elite media must be included on the list of Social Security’s opponents. This makes the necessary public education effort far harder than would otherwise be the case. On the other hand, the influence of the elite media is dwindling rapidly. Newspaper readership is plummeting, as is the audience of the network newscasts. People are increasingly turning to the Internet for their information and finding a much broader range of sources.

The Internet was crucial in defeating President Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security in 2005 and it will undoubtedly play an extremely important role in combating any future efforts at privatization. As the importance of the Internet grows and the traditional media shrinks, time is clearly on the side of those who want to protect Social Security.

It is unfortunate that Senator Obama fell in with the bad guys on this one. If he wants to gain ground on Clinton he will have to find a more legitimate issue.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com