JayB

Yeah - this is something that well intentioned people can disagree about, so feel free to continue disagreeing, but please consider the following arguments. 1. We already have a negative income tax via the EIC on top of the existing minimum wage laws, so - despite having the minimum wage in place, we've already decided that incomes below a certain threshold in certain households qualify for tax refund checks that exceed their income tax payments. Some of this money undoubtedly makes it back into the hands of corporations via the purchases that the recipients of the EIC make - but that's individual consumers playing favorites and giving their money to corporations, not Uncle Sam. 2. Something like ~3% of the working population actually makes the minimum wage, and the vast majority transition to higher paying jobs relatively soon after entering the workforce. This isn't because the folks paying them get nicer, it's because they get more skills and experience over time, and are able to parlay those into jobs that pay more than the minimum wage. Not getting a job in the first place is much much more damaging to people than spending the first phase of your working life working for low wages. 3. Employers only hire people when the employees make more money for them than they have to pay them in wages. In order to pay higher wages, employers have to either raise prices or raise output. Both are difficult, and the specific operational changes that employers have to make to increase their output are often complicated, costly to implement, and take time. If the cost of employing someone increases more rapidly than a particular employer can increase their output or prices - then that person is out of a job. That's not a concern for your average engineer, but if you're a high-school dropout with relatively few skills and a limited education there are lots of jobs where the total value of the output that you create puts you very close to that line. 4. Once you get to a high enough wage level - everyone concedes that it'd be to high for employers to pay and stay in business. This is easy to see when the number is $200 per hour - but the logic is no different at the minimum wage level. 5. The minimum wage that employers pay the unemployed - the real minimum wage - is zero. Most people will be better off with a combination of non-zero wages coupled with skills, contacts, and all of the other intangibles that come with getting paid than they will making nothing for doing nothing. More arguments here if you managed to make it through the above: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MinimumWages.html

Happy news! Congrats and best wishes.

pretty sure sarah palin needs no help in that regard i'm all for civility in politcs, but jesus christ, not calling a true asshole an asshole just muddies the water... Pearls from Bachman. Derision is an appropriate response to such nonsense. ''Normalization (of gayness) through desensitization. Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders, is take a picture of 'The Lion King' for instance, and a teacher might say, 'Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?' The message is: I'm better at what I do, because I'm gay.'' ''If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.'' ''And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it.'' "Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.'' Agree that there's lots of crazy there - but neither Germany, Denmark, Sweden, or Switzerland have statutory minimum wages. They do have a process that accomplishes more or less the same thing for most workers, but in the case of Germany they've used the "Mini-jobs" that came out of the Hartz reforms to promote workforce participation at total pay levels that would have been impossible before these labor market reforms, and is an important part of the structural reforms that have driven down unemployment in Germany since ~2000. Anyone who generates less income for any employer than the employer is required to pay him is effectively unemployable. The less skilled and educated you are the more likely it is that you'll fall below that line. It'd be much more effective and compassionate to eliminate the minimum wage and use transfer mechanisms like the EIC to bring people's total incomes up to whatever standard the country decides is fair. Locking people out of the labor force prevents them from ever setting foot on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. This is much more detrimental to their long-term well being than having them work for whatever they employer is willing to pay them + whatever transfer payments the government kicks in to add to their total income. I'm always surprised by the depth of progressive opposition to eliminating the minimum wage in exchange for conditional transfer payments. I've literally had this discussion with someone who was working as an unpaid intern (wage = zero) who said that the skills and connections they were accumulating made it worthwhile, and made it much more likely that they'd get a job with a good salary afterwards. When asked to explain the difference between someone working for nothing for the chance to pick up skills and connections that might get them a better job later, and someone working for less than the minimum wage with the same objectives outside of a formal internship (even with the EIC) - this person insisted that that should remain illegal. Fascinating. Kind of like talking with a prostitute who's sermonizing on behalf of mandatory chastity laws for other people. The only thing sillier would be spending 15 minutes typing out this post...

A bit late in the season, but don't rule out the Olympics.

There's nothing magical about geographic boundaries. If trade between countries destroys jobs, so does trade between states, counties, cities, and individuals. Unions are smart enough to recognize that it doesn't matter where the competition comes from, as long as people can whatever they're making for a lower price - they're toast. Doesn't matter if it's across town or across the globe. Which is why they do everything they can to either prevent people from buying from someone else, or hamstring their competitors with enough penalties to neutralize any price advantage that their competitors have.

1. jobs are created when a demand exists for a service or a good and someone steps up to meet (or even create) that demand 2. i don't see that lowering taxes moderately destroys jobs, nor that raising them moderately does so either - at some point it makes sense that the risk of losing an investment in a business outweighs the likely actual profit from a successful payout, which clearly taxes eat into - but at some point, a failure for the government to provide services (basic ones like maintaining roads and bridges but also complex ones like banking and securities regulation) also endangers the success of an enterprise, too, right? like: you can't get the goods to market b/c the bridge fell into the river or you can't sell the house you built b/c banks played crazy fucking games w/ the cash while the g-man was greasing his pole in the men's room so now nobody can borrow money to pay you so now you gotta lay off all the carpenters on your crew. so, in theory, low taxes could fuck jobs, right? especially when the political system is simultaneously pushed to not provide the service the taxes were there for in the first place? Sounds right to me on both counts. I think you can also add in persistently large deficits that make people concerned about the solvency of the government and become much more risk averse than they would otherwise. I think the main place where we differ on the second count is that I think that the government should limit what it does to things that only it can do, and it should maximize efficiency (crank out the most services that only it can provide at the lowest price that doesn't compromise the delivery of the said service). The low hanging fruit that we'd probably agree on is saving money by getting the government out of the business of policing things that people do to themselves or that consenting adults do to each other without directly harming anyone else. The flip side of the tax coin is that when the costs of providing the services grows at a rate faster than the underlying economy, and tax collections increase accordingly - eventually people figure out that they can get a better deal somewhere else and leave, decide it's not worth the trouble and leave, or lose the capacity to pay for the services the government is providing and stay in business. Or government will simply cut capacity without doing anything to change its basic cost structure - which means less services, and gets us back to the scenario you outlined above. Different path to the same destination. You can see this dynamic writ large in the US by following the re-distribution of both population and production away from the Northeast and Midwest and towards the South and West over the past few decades.

I am glad, I am not the only one with such opinion. The funny thing is how many people who supported deregulation were dry-tooled in the process (I mean not even spit for extra friction) and still keep repeating the same old drivel. Just the same unproven drivel, that lower taxes create jobs. No they don't- they destroy jobs. 1. How are jobs created and maintained, in your opinion? 2. How does lowering taxes destroy them in your opinion?

Interest rate distortions...hmmm. As opposed to, say, systemic fraud in the loan-securitization market as we sliced, diced and obscured our way through the four principle forms of consumer debt in an orgy conducted of originators, SPV's, trusts, rating agencies, insurers, etc. And let's not lay any blame on derivatives-gone-wild. Did interest rates play an supporting role? Sure, but top-to-bottom fraud and greed across the board was doing the driving from where I sit. And curious how now, on the way down, the foreclosure system has turned into a cesspool of fraud riddled with the exact same criminals who were originating loans on the way up. There were a lot of distortions alright, but interest rates may have been the least of them... There are lots of variables to consider, and its certainly worth considering the role of each. I presume that you are aware of the connection between the price of a given debt-financed asset, and the cost of borrowing the money to purchase the said asset. When interest rates go down, the price of the asset typically goes up in a manner that's proportionate to the interest rate reduction. Take that away in the early 2000's you've still got greed, you've still got the same regulatory framework, you've still got all of the other ingredients but it's not clear that you've got the massive asset price inflation in the property market that drove the price of homes up many times faster than the rate of income growth would support. If you take a look at loan origination volumes by year, it's clear that subprime lending only started to kick into high gear after prices had become so high that very few people could qualify under the traditional loan programs. Combine a public in the grips of a speculative mania around housing and desperate for credit with a vast universe of very large investors desperate for yield in a low-rate environment, and many of the factors that you've cited and we're off to the races. How effective would any of the above (greed, etc) have been in an environment where mortgage lending and borrowing decisions were constrained by the supply of real, loanable funds (e.g. money people had set aside by deferring consumption) and real income growth?

Q: What do Bruce Willis and Charlie Sheen have in common? A: They were both big in the 80s and now Ashton Kutcher is filling in their old slots... sickie

That's definitely useful information to think about. Let's assume that Matt wanted to have the whole thing done by the books, he's paying out of pocket, and you'd have to attach you name to the project and assume whatever financial/professional liability came along with doing so? Ravine on one side, big tree 80 feet away, and he wants a bridge made of suspended cables and slats to span the gap between the two. If impossible to guestimate based on that information, how about a ballpark figure that you'd give someone who called in over the phone, with the understanding that you wouldn't be able to give them a firm price until you saw the said tree and ravine.

It'd be interesting to see what would happen to the state/muni bond market if the dividends that they paid were no longer exempt from most taxes, and what affect that would have on state and local budgets, etc, etc, etc. The tax exemptions for state and local bonds constitute a significant subsidy from the federal government to state and local governments, since the massive stream of dividends they generate aren't subject to federal income taxes. Add in the fact that they'd have to start competing with commercial bonds for buyers on their straight coupon yield instead of their after-tax yield and I'm guessing yields would go up at least a full percent over what they'd be otherwise, if not more. I'm for eliminating all tax exemptions in exchange for lower marginal rates for a bunch of reasons, but it's not entirely clear to me that all of the changes that result from the elimination of this and other tax loopholes that the wealthy use to lower their tax bill would generate changes that progressive folks would be entirely happy with.

Would one of those flying-fox thingies that people use to cross bridges be feasible and/or any less technically demanding? If it were me I'd probably just build the thing and add a separate static line and pulley system that would protect users in the even of a catastrophic failure. BTW - what's a back of the envelope price for a bridge (design, construction, and materials) like Matt envisions that would satisfy all of the necessary engineering requirements? $20-30K? Seems like it could easily run triple the price of the said tree-house.

i'll stay away from The Google to give you the satisfaction of telling me i'm running on the assumption that, regardless of the party in power, the various imps and demons that control the bells n' whistles of the economy will be doing so in order to serve the wealthy - the fed head seems to be the coke-slut that climbs into bed w/ whoever has the blow, for example 1. Rhymes with Tall Lugeman. 2. Not sure if that's their intention - quite often I suspect that it's the opposite - but that seems to be the way things work out in practice.

spare me what you think you know, just stick to the facts like studies showing that non-discretionary items have outpaced wage growth. and I mean studies, not propaganda by the latest Koch think tank, mkay? You are aware of the fact that things like interest rates, money supply, inflation, etc have a connection with the prices of things like "non discretionary" spending, correct? There's a connection there that predates the existence of the Koch brothers, but I'll leave that aside for the moment. The major unstated premise of Warren's claim, and yours by proxy, is that spending on classes of goods and services that fall into the "non-discretionary" category is entirely non discretionary. That's quite a silly claim, and it's strange that you'd persist in defending it. If all people could eat were a homogeneous nutrient paste, the only clothing available was Kim-Jong Il style jumpsuits in a single size and color, and the only housing available were completely identical units in a Breshnev era housing block and all of them were priced and distributed on a strict per-capita basis by a central rationing authority - then the spending would be truly non-discretionary. I know for certain that you can choose to rent a smaller, older place instead of borrowing multiples of your income to buy a large home in an expensive neighborhood. Etc, etc, etc, *10^999999999999999. Boring.

Repeating drivel ad-infinitum doesn't make it true even if blaming stupidity and lust for consumer items proves to be effective demagoguery. Despite my numerous attempts at getting you to do so, you still have to answer adequately EWarren's study of middle class spending showing that large increases in prices of non-discretionary items like health care, housing in good school districts, local regressive taxes, child care, 2nd car for 2nd wage earner , etc account for spending outpacing income (and we won't even discuss the 30+ year long race to the bottom wage that you keep cheering). The above is not the sort of post that would be made by anyone that understands the role that interest rates play in shaping how much people save and borrow, and what to use the money they save and borrow to invest in. The people who are convinced that flooding the economy with cheap money will be good for the economy are quite a bit more reckless and irresponsible than the people that respond to cheap credit by borrowing to fund more consumption than they can actually afford.

but weren't the same guys who said cutting taxes would create jobs also sayign that super low interest rates were good, that it would end the recession before that and keep everybody buying shit and thereby keep everybody employed? Definitely some overlap there, but not 100%. Guess the author of the quote below: "The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." It's possible to get tax policy basically right (we're a long ways from that), and totally negate any benefits from the said tax policy by distorting the interest rates.

I like(d) Huntsman. I also liked Mitch Daniels and Gary Johnson much better than Romney or Perry. Slim pickings in this country if you aren't a protectionist or a creationist. I personally wish that the creationists and the protectionists would unite in a single party (maybe if Pat Buchannan and John Edwards have a love child) and people who are socially and economically (classically) liberal could vote for without holding their noses would be a significant improvement. Really don't think that government has any business telling you what to do with your body or your money as long as it involves interactions between consenting adults that don't directly harm anyone else.

If Michelle Bachmann is correct, it's probably because they were vaccinated against HPV...

So you're in favor of a tax code with fewer deductions? Same here. Isn't that what came out of Bowles-Simpson and Regan-O'Neil. Would you support lower marginal rates in exchange for fewer loopholes?

Thank god the "Smoke Crack and Worship Satan" autosig is back. 1. How did the tax breaks wreck the economy, in your opinion? 2. What qualifies as rich? 3. What percentage of the total tax burden should the rich bear relative to their income and the total tax burden? Useful data: http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/graphics.cfm the basic question goes unanswered: if tax cuts lead to job creation, why did unemployment go in the crapper and stay there for 3 years despite no real change in taxes? i'm hardly an economic historian, but it seems like big tax cuts did go hand-in-hand with an orgy of real-estate speculation which did eventual resulted in the meltdown of '08 that still hasn't worked itself out today. Distortions to the tax code were important, but don't overlook the significance of interest rate distortions. Interest rates are an extremely important factor in determining what kind of things people invest in. When central banks drive the interest rate below it's natural level, it fools societies into thinking that they're richer than they actually are and they spend more on consumption goods than they would otherwise, instead of investing it in something productive. An interest-rate distortion fueled borrowing binge that goes into financing a bunch of McMansions, luxury condos, SUV's, vacations, and fancy home furnishings and other unproductive assets and ends in a big hangover when the bill comes due is perfectly consistent with a long period of economic contraction and joblessness afterwards.* Toss in tax subsidies that favor a borrowing a ton of money to consume more and the boom-bust effect is even worse. Even if you had a tax code that maximized savings, investment, and production instead of borrowing and consumption (we've got the mostly the opposite), it'd still be possible for interest rate distortions to negate some or all of the growth effects arising from changes in tax policy. Consume less than you produce and plow the savings into investments that enhance productivity and you get richer. Consume more than you produce and cover the difference with borrowing and you get poorer. True for individuals and families, true for tribes, chiefdoms, nations, and big gaggles of nations with a common currency. *Doesn't seem like your baliwick to wander off into the theoretical weeds but what we've been through matches Austrian Business Cycle Theory Pretty Well, but if you're interested follow the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory

Thank god the "Smoke Crack and Worship Satan" autosig is back. 1. How did the tax breaks wreck the economy, in your opinion? 2. What qualifies as rich? 3. What percentage of the total tax burden should the rich bear relative to their income and the total tax burden? Useful data: http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/graphics.cfm

Meh. Reminds me of Wolfgang Pauli's response to a proposition in physics that was the so far off the mark that it was off the map. "That's not right. It's not even wrong." Given his audience, it's not surprising that he can call Hayek a monetarist and a technocrat without his readers doing a double take. What's more puzzling is the claim that the rise of Hayek and Friedman brought about the demise of the planned economy. This gets it precisely backwards. It was the demise of the planned economy that brought about the rise of Hayek and Friedman. If, in England for example, Attlee's post-war planning regimen hadn't imploded big-time, and England hadn't generally been circling the drain for three decades prior to the "Winter of Discontent" no one would have remembered who the guy was, nor would anyone have voted for a party who proposed to upset the happy, prosperous, ascendant apple cart that was 1970's England by invoking Hayek's arguments against a system that had worked so well in practice. It's also strange to see someone treat liberalism, in *England* of all places, like the intellectual equivalent of an invasive species that managed to skitter across the beach at some point in the 1950's, and socialist dirigisme as the native stock that got wiped out by the voracious transplant. Very interesting all of the same, in a meta kind of way.

There's been a mathematical crisis at the heart of the transfer mechanisms used to fund the welfare state ever since people started living longer and having dramatically fewer children. For the past forty years even actuaries with traumatic brain injuries have looked at the data and been able to conclude that gap between inbound payments and outbound spending would grow too large to finance at some point, even under assumptions of healthy, uninterupted economic growth. Take away the latter and you arrive at that point sooner, but the destination has always been the same. Once you get there - it's too late to do much other than default and try to get by on what you can actually afford to pay for. Everybody Loves Malthus. When it's convenient, of course. Malthus was a notorious sandbagger. Totally under-rated the 5.11 on SEWS.

There's been a mathematical crisis at the heart of the transfer mechanisms used to fund the welfare state ever since people started living longer and having dramatically fewer children. For the past forty years even actuaries with traumatic brain injuries have looked at the data and been able to conclude that gap between inbound payments and outbound spending would grow too large to finance at some point, even under assumptions of healthy, uninterupted economic growth. Take away the latter and you arrive at that point sooner, but the destination has always been the same. Once you get there - it's too late to do much other than default and try to get by on what you can actually afford to pay for.