Month: August 2010
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Government is Not the Problem. Bad Government is the Problem.
And the solution to bad government is … good government. A lot of people — maybe even most Americans — think that making government smaller will make it better. But that reminds of the time when I a little kid that I got in trouble for pouring water out of a glass down a heat…
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Must. Make. Gubmint. Smaller.
Hard Pressed, Cities Take Ax to Once-Sacrosanct Firehouses – NYTimes.com. Related posts: Guantanamo Chief Prosecutor on Guantanamo Proofiness! Krugman: “while we were arguing about NAFTA, Sauron was gathering his forces in Mordor” It’s About Bloody Time. Sheesh. Did I Mention Mentioning that It’s the Health Care Costs, Stupid?
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State Taxes and Prosperity, Revisited
Iyer asked in the comments to a recent post on state taxes and prosperity whether the picture would change if we looked at a different period (1996-2006), because 2007/08 was so anomalous. For many data series, it’s very easy (as demonstrated here) to cherry-pick periods that seem to “prove” a given thesis. Far better to…
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Washington 1098: Will the Wealthy Leave the State?
Update: It turns out, millionaires don’t care about income taxes. You’re a Washington business owner making $500,000 a year. You have millions, maybe tens of millions, in the bank. You live in a big, gorgeous house on the water on Mercer Island, with sunset views and your sailboat and powerboat out front. You and your…
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On That New York Mosque
Michael Bloomberg: The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the…
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Do Lower-Taxing States Grow Faster? No.
Following up on yesterday’s post comparing state tax rates and prosperity (answer: higher-taxing states are more prosperous [or vice versa. <g>]), I wondered about the same comparison with prosperity growth. Again I used median household income, because it’s a good measure of widespread prosperity, a.k.a. The American Dream. Here’s the story: In aggregate, there’s no…
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Are Low-Taxing States More Prosperous? No. QTC.
Regular readers will remember my posts comparing prosperous countries — tax rates versus prosperity and prosperity growth — and will remember that they’re largely uncorrelated: lower taxes don’t correlate with faster economic growth. (See Related Links at the bottom of this post for much more.) But what about states? Are low-taxing states more prosperous? I…
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Stockman: How the GOP Destroyed the U.S. Economy | The Big Picture
The headline speaks for itself. The author is one of the smartest financial bloggers in the game, author of Bailout Nation. I can’t resist quoting this: I suspect brain damaged partisans of the left suffer from somewhat different cognitive deficits than brain damaged partisans of the right. I would add that the brain damaged partisans of the…