The Marginal . . . Revolution???
Alex Tabarrok’s stimulus plan seems like very weak tea. The nub:
The IRS knows how much income that each taxpayer reported last year. So let’s cut everyone’s marginal tax rate based on last year’s income. In other words, suppose that last year Joe earned $66,520 which puts him in a 25% tax bracket. Joe’s tax schedule this year will be exactly the same as last year except for every dollar earned above $66,520 the tax rate drops to 15%. We do this for all taxpayers so that each taxpayer has their own schedule and for each taxpayer there is a decreasing marginal tax rate.
Note that this plan increases the incentive to work and it doesn’t increase the deficit. In fact, the Tabarrok plan increases tax revenues! The key is a marginal tax cut with a different margin for every taxpayer based upon last year’s return.
There are a couple more wrinkles presented as options, but the core is, lower taxes on increases in your income from year to year during recessions. Near as I can tell, the idea is that the lower taxes incent you to work harder, generating more national wealth and economic activity, pulling the economy out of its slump. If that’s really the idea, it’s silly.
First, here’s the thing about recessions: They don’t happen because people don’t feel like workin’. In fact, they create legions of people who would love to be working at all but can’t. For most of those who are still employed, their incomes are at best partially under their control: employer policy on raises, bonuses and overtime hours bulks larger than their immediate intention to earn more. In a recession, employers tighten up on all those things – that’s what makes it a recession.
But set that aside. Take a look at the US personal income-tax brackets. The idea is that someone will exert herself harder because her tax rate on new income is a step less than the tax rate on her old income. e.g. On Earth Prime, some number of $66K/year workers are faced with an opportunity to make $70K this year, on which they would pay $1K extra tax (25% of $4,000). Their actual income increase would be $3,000. On Earth Alex, the same workers with the same opportunity would pay only $600 tax. Their actual income increase would be $3,400. Some number of workers on Earth Prime will leave that $3K On the table because, Hey! It’s only $3,000. What Prof. Tabarrok appears to argue is that this is a material number of people, and that a material number of those same people who spurned $3,000 on Earth Prime will, on Earth Alex, jump at the chance to make $3,400 instead.
I’m not seeing it, folks.
Now, the cynics out there are muttering, “Tax cuts for the rich!” You think Tabarrok’s focus on someone making $66K is a trick, and I’m falling for it. (Or playing along.) But the marginal incentive issue holds at high brackets too. To buy the plan, we have to believe that people who have no interest in making an extra 65 cents will be thrilled to make 67 instead. Such people probably exist. But enough of them to swing the direction of the economy? I’m dubious. Keep in mind that these people are already willing to work for $0.65 on the dollar, because they were in the top tax bracket last year.
UPDATE: Corrected marginal net-income figure in final sentence.
Comment by abb1 —
February 7, 2008 @ 9:39 am
…it doesn’t increase the deficit.
Huh?
Now, the cynics out there are muttering, “Tax cuts for the rich!â€
It’s blatantly regressive – rewarding those who get richer at the expense of those who get poorer.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 7, 2008 @ 9:44 am
Addressing the “Huh?” I think the idea is, you’re collecting the same rate on “old income.” You collect a lower rate on the new income, but a) there’s no reason that government spending should rise in proportion to the new income; b) some of the new income wouldn’t exist in the absence of the tax plan, so the tax revenue from that slice is de novo.
Expanding just a smidge on “a)”, government spending may rise or fall for any number of reasons. It’s just that there’s no reason that rise should track the increase in personal incomes in a vacuum.
Comment by abb1 —
February 7, 2008 @ 10:02 am
“Old income”? Suppose there’s a hierarchical structure with 10 levels. On January 1st the top guy drops dead. The guy under him takes his position, etc.; all in all nine people in the hierarchy get promoted, a college graduate fills at the lowest level. Does it sound like there’s no deficit increase?
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 7, 2008 @ 10:18 am
That’s an amusing hypothetical! In the world where that actually happened much, there could be one. Do I believe that, in aggregate, the effect you identify tells? No, any more than I believe the marginal “stimulus” Tabarrok espies is material.
Comment by quasibill —
February 7, 2008 @ 10:28 am
“That’s an amusing hypothetical! In the world where that actually happened much, there could be one. Do I believe that, in aggregate, the effect you identify tells?”
The major reason it doesn’t is because the Fed is constantly printing large amounts of new money. If we presume a no to low (less than 2%) increase in the money stock year to year, then Tabarrok’s plan will at most generate an extra 2% in tax revenue. If it is zero monetary growth, Tabarrok’s plan decreases tax revenue. (Not that I believe that is a bad thing, as long as it is not done regressively, like Tabarrok does). Instead, the people who will see increased revenue are, by and large, the working poor to lower middle class, who keep the vast majority of their savings in cash, so they’ll realize increased buying power with their savings.
And since the Fed’s process for increasing monetary base is inherently regressive (who gets preferential access to that money first? What happens to the value of cash savings when the Fed prints new money?), Tabarrok’s plan is not only economic hogwash (as you point out), but horribly, doubly, regressive.
Comment by abb1 —
February 7, 2008 @ 10:56 am
In this world where I live people get promoted from accountant to senior accountant all the time, but never – ever – demoted from accountant to junior accountant.
Comment by IOZ —
February 7, 2008 @ 10:58 am
The first commenter at MR gets it:
Mr. 66 Grand is gonna be lucky if he gets his 3% CoL adjust in this extrashitty year. It seems to me that in addition to all the other glaringly obvious problems with this “plan,” there’s the fact that it lives on the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 7, 2008 @ 11:02 am
IOZ: Yeah. I thought I said that though, in my para beginning “Here’s the thing about recessions . . . ” (Note to self: Clarity!)
abb1: Yes, but junior accountants becoming seniors because the former senior has dropped out of the economy completely is the other necessary component of your deficit increase. Death, retirement and maternity leave would all cause this effect, I’ll grant you. But even this economy actually creates new jobs, so I think that effect gets swamped.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 7, 2008 @ 11:22 am
We do this for all taxpayers so that each taxpayer has their own schedule and for each taxpayer there is a decreasing marginal tax rate.
If a plan this complicated were implemented by the IRS, what could possibly go wrong?
Comment by IOZ —
February 7, 2008 @ 11:34 am
I know, I know, but I wanted to say Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Comment by abb1 —
February 7, 2008 @ 11:43 am
Oh I see, so those few losers who will be (theoretically) aroused by this plan and go moonlighting – they are not supposed to get that midnight taxi-driving gig by pushing some other loser into unemployment, they are supposed to actually create a whole bunch of new jobs. This is how the plan compensates for the certain drop in tax revenues in the realm of 100 million or so already existing careers. Makes sense now.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 7, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Dude, you totally lost me.
Comment by William Newman —
February 7, 2008 @ 12:15 pm
Jim Henley’s original “They don’t happen because people don’t feel like workin’. In fact, they create legions of people who would love to be working at all but can’t.”
I don’t think it’s quite as simple and unconditional as that for most people in the US. It’s not impossible for it to be, but then we wouldn’t call it just another “recession,” we’d call it GDII. I’ve been in recessions, and had trouble finding (skilled, software-ish), and been in touch with people looking for work all the way down to entry-level unskilled stuff. A large fraction of us/them are fundamentally looking for work at an after-everything return we’ll accept. (By “after everything” I mean not just sizable costs like taxes, but also very large costs like having to take the bus 3 hours each way to work, or having to live as a long-haul trucker.)
Has the proportion of healthy people who are desperate to take literally any job “at all,” but can’t, been high in any reasonably recent recession? High enough to keep Tabarrok’s scheme from having something like the effect he describes? As far as I know, conventional statistical measures are broadly consistent with my anecdotes. But if statistics contradict me, I am happy to let the statistics win (and remind myself that there are many ways to slice life in the US and I can never see them all).
Like Tabarrok, I’d be very curious to see what the actual response to this policy tweak would be. How people strongly we should expect people to respond to tradeoffs like that is not well understood (and is controversial, since it feeds into our understanding of the effect of other policy proposals).
Thoreau: “If a plan this complicated were implemented by the IRS, what could possibly go wrong?” Indeed. Although in fact things don’t need to be particular complicated before I wonder about that.
Comment by abb1 —
February 7, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
What am I missing in this “doesn’t increase the deficit” business? You already admitted that for a typical career line – individual getting promoted and then retiring – it does increase the deficit. Then you said: “that effect gets swamped” – how?
Comment by Gene Callahan —
February 7, 2008 @ 12:58 pm
“Their actual income increase would be $3,000. On Earth Alex, the same workers with the same opportunity would pay only $600 tax. Their actual income increase would be $3,400. Some number of workers on Earth Prime will leave that $3K On the table because, Hey! It’s only $3,000. What Prof. Tabarrok appears to argue is that this is a material number of people, and that a material number of those same people who spurned $3,000 on Earth Prime will, on Earth Alex, jump at the chance to make $3,400 instead.”
The key word is “substantial.” the principle of marginalism tells us that, if there are enough workers distributed evenly along a work/leisure trade-off curve, then the $400 will certainly be the difference for some of them. Those workers leave the $3000 on the table not because “It’s only $3000″ but because they prefer the leisure time to the money.
Example:
1) Jim, will you drive to Brooklyn this weekend and give me a lift to the store? I’ll pay $10 plus expenses.
2) im, will you drive to Brooklyn this weekend and give me a lift to the store? I’ll pay $1,000,000 plus expenses.
I suspect you would decline 1) but take me up on 2). (Bill Gates might decline both, but accept a billion.)
Like you, I expect that the $400 would not tip the balance for too many people, but I’m going on here to note that Tabarrok’s case is theoretically sound but perhaps empirically mis-estimated.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
February 7, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
PS — Sorry to have called you “im.”
Comment by Andrew Edwards —
February 7, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
Do you think that Alex Tabarrok believes that the only reason Alex Tabarrok doesn’t make 2% (or 200%) more money is that he’s not willing to work 2.5%(or 250%) harder?
Will Alex Tabarrok really (really) consider his marginal tax rate when deciding whether to stay at the office an extra half hour tonight?
If so, is that generalizable? If not, does that tell us anything about the taxation:work relationship?
Comment by William Newman —
February 7, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
“Will Alex Tabarrok really (really) consider his marginal tax rate when deciding whether to stay at the office an extra half hour tonight?”
Alex Tabarrok might consider his marginal tax rate when deciding whether to be Director of Research for http://www.independent.org/aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=505
Or, given temporary bounces in marginal rates, he might reweight shorter-term stuff like speaking engagements.
I think “incentives matter” is a pretty robust principle. It’s true that as IOZ’s quoted commenter pointed it out, it is associated with the Laffer Curve Of Evil. Nonetheless, it’s healthy to retain an ordinary amount of skepticism about demonstrations that incentives won’t matter. And in a crowd where I’d ordinarily assume a knowing cynical attitude about money paid to academics (at the very least, cynicism about money paid by organizations one dislikes), letting this go by seems like a subnormal amount of skepticism.
Comment by Tony P. —
February 7, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
“Incentives” do matter, up to a point: offering a billion-dollar prize for a perpetual motion machine won’t get you a perpetual motion machine — though it would surely motivate a lot of wasted effort.
“Marginal” effects also matter — otherwise a 25-basis-point change in interest rates would never be a news story.
So, it’s at least theoretically possible that Tabarrok’s hare-brained scheme would “stimulate the economy” to some extent. More likely, though, it would stimulate non-productive game-playing with tax returns — the economic equivalent of pretending your Rube Goldberg contraption is a perpetual motion machine.
– TP
Comment by estamm —
February 8, 2008 @ 7:30 am
This plan is a GREAT incentive for CEO’s to struggle by their first year at at comparny for, say, a mere $Million. Then, when they get bumped to the normal $100million a year the following year, they only have to pay 15% on the next $99million. What a great incentive for finding even MORE tax loopholes for the rich.
The class war is over. The rich won.
Comment by abb1 —
February 8, 2008 @ 8:32 am
Nah. In fact 15% is what they pay most of the time anyhow, ’cause most of their income is generated by their ISOs.
Comment by joe —
February 8, 2008 @ 9:34 am
I think “incentives matter†is a pretty robust principle.
I think “impereceptible changes in incentives matter to an imperceptable degree” is even more robust.
$400 on a $66,000 salary is 0.06% of his gross income.
Comment by Jim S. —
February 8, 2008 @ 10:38 am
Bring back the 90% top federal income tax rate! Bring back soak-the-rich!
Comment by William Newman —
February 8, 2008 @ 11:17 am
“I think ‘impereceptible changes in incentives matter to an imperceptable degree’ is even more robust.”
Actually, sometimes funny little things can happen right around the zero-incentives break. E.g., a behavioral economics experiment about Hershey’s Kisses and Lindt Truffles went around the blogosphere recently. But mostly I agree that the quantitative principle, small-inputs give small outputs, tends to be robust too.
I have not been arguing that the incentives are large enough to give measurable responses: I haven’t thought about this enough to have a strong opinion about that. I have only been arguing against the idea that the incentives can obviously be seen not to work because they are running up against obvious hard qualitative limits. E.g., Tabarrok is forgetting the basics of his academic specialty because a recession is known to be fundamentally about people absolutely frozen out of the labor market. Or Tabarrok is demonstrating spectacular lack of common sense, because his everyday experience should remind him how people in salaried positions are frozen out of meaningful ways to respond to such incentives. With a moment’s consideration, those look to me less like thoughtful objections than reflexive waving of surplus loyalty banners from the Keynesian stimulus war, the minimum wage war, the marginal income tax rate war, the unemployment insurance war, the AFDC war, and probably other policy wars that don’t occur to me at the moment.
Comment by wtfwjd? —
February 8, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
“Incent” is not a real word. Sorry. Pet peeve.
Comment by Barry —
February 8, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
GMU is a brothel, not a legitimate econ department. It was set up by a guy named Koch, funder of other ‘think tanks’. Tabarrok also got his Ph.D. from that same university, which makes it odd that he’d be faculty there.
In the end, the simplest explanation is that he’s a GMU prostie, deserving of no more respect than an AEI prostie or a Hoover/Heritage/Manhattan Institute prostie.
Comment by grendelkhan —
February 8, 2008 @ 2:57 pm
The problem isn’t, and has never been, that people just don’t want to earn money. People are plenty motivated to earn money; witness the rising productivity in this country over the last few decades.
The problem is, as pointed out in the post, that people are stretched to their limits and don’t have any way to earn more. More of us work, we work longer hours, and we’re taking money out of our houses to meet expenses.
And, of course, that whole thing about this being a transparent excuse to cut taxes on people who don’t fucking well need their taxes cut.
Comment by Barry —
February 8, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
grendelkhan —
“And, of course, that whole thing about this being a transparent excuse to cut taxes on people who don’t fucking well need their taxes cut. ”
I spotted *that* long before I even thought about marginal effects. Tabarrok’s plan basically goes ‘if you earn more, you keep more; if you earn less, then f*ck you’.
Comment by William Newman —
February 8, 2008 @ 5:26 pm
“GMU is a brothel, not a legitimate econ department. It was set up by a guy named Koch”
I dunno about that. If they can hold their own in academic journals, the charge “not a legitimate econ department” seems pretty lame, and if they can’t, then why resort to the funding argument? But shifting to a funding slime attack that I might grant you, it might be easy to argue the Independent Institute is a pretty shoddy place to take money from. See
http://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Stan-Liebowitz/dp/0945999844
If the remarks there about undisclosed Microsoft funding aren’t a gross distortion (that II has never gotten around to replying to?), that seems pretty sad.
If that story is substantially true, I wouldn’t be particularly opposed if the II decided to ceremonially raze itself to the ground in a fire kindled with their mailing lists, and to do some sort of exorcism on the ashheap afterwards. I do like various of their positions, but less funding from a place with a less troubled history could be more helpful overall. On the other hand, I believe “the cure for bad speech is good speech” and I’ve thought about the practical implications. Even if I wish they’d clean up their funding disclosure act, various things they criticize seem to have pretty serious sincerity issues too. It seems to me a bit like the yellow press era. If I’m right, then when I hear scorn for the sources of ideas one hates, I wonder whether it’d be more helpful to question both sources of ideas one hates and sources of ideas one adores.
E.g., skim some version of the “famous debunking of the QWERTY keyboard myth” which is mentioned on the same Amazon review page I linked to above. I think the original version is an academic journal article called “Fable of the Keys,” which is available online at http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html . Then any good bookstore is likely to have Warsh’s _Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations_. Read the endorsements inside the front cover, and skim the passages in the book indexed under QWERTY. Reconcile the book’s version of events with the existence of the Fable article. Avoid invoking the hypothesis that even among journalists, and even among academics not in departments set up by a guy named Koch, QWERTY is so handy as political ammo that it rises above the ordinary standards of journalistic or economic facts.
Comment by William Newman —
February 8, 2008 @ 6:49 pm
“I spotted *that* long before I even thought about marginal effects. Tabarrok’s plan basically goes ‘if you earn more, you keep more; if you earn less, then f*ck you’.”
Remember, though, the stated goal of the policy proposal Tabarrok was tweaking isn’t distribution to the most needy. It is supposed to be to distribute the money in such a way that (roughly) it increases activity in the US economy. If a priority of the policy proposal had been just to transfer money to the most needy, then the pre-Tabarrok “if you didn’t inherit US citizenship, then f*ck you” proposal would be a very perverse way to go about it.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
February 9, 2008 @ 9:27 am
Barry wrote: “GMU is a brothel, not a legitimate econ department.”
GMU has two Nobel Prize winners in the econ department. They have recently recruited staff from Princeton and Harvard, among other places. Their PhDs get jobs at good universities across the country.
EconPhD ranks the department 133 out of 321 programs worldwide (and there are many more programs it doesn’t bother to rank):
http://www.econphd.net/rank/rallec.htm
In public economics GMU ranks 30th in the world:
http://www.econphd.net/rank/rpublc.htm
In the history of thought, 52nd:
http://www.econphd.net/rank/rthght.htm
This guy doesn’t rank experimental economics, but GMU would be close to the top.
LSE was founded by socialists to promote socialism. It ranks 12th in the world. I.e., who cares about the founding?
As someone who actually does things like attend and present at major economic conferences every year, and doesn’t just believe any rumor I hear on a leftist blog, I can confidently say that you have no idea what you are talking about, Barry.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
February 9, 2008 @ 9:30 am
Oh, and EconPhD ranks by journal publications.
But maybe the Koch’s own the journals too, Barry?
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 9, 2008 @ 9:31 am
Barry stands foursquare against The Kochtopus!
“Barry and Karen de Koste, sittin’ in a tree . . . ” !
Comment by Andromeda —
February 9, 2008 @ 11:31 am
Did seriously no one in this entire thread comment about the perversities of basing a whole rate schedule on a single year’s earnings? (Except for the comment about CEOs gaming the system by setting their base-year package, I guess.) Did I skim too fast and miss it? I mean, there are so many effects that can mess with your one-year earnings, that have very little to do with your general productivity…I mean, what if you’re a programmer and that one year is during the dot-com crash? What if you went on maternity leave, or (like me) generally prefer to work full-time but happen to be working part-time for a couple years while the kid is young? (Or, in the other direction, what if your company had a successful IPO or gave out really generous Christmas bonuses, but you don’t generally earn that much?)
Maybe on a population-wide scale any randomly chosen year is a fair representation of earnings, but for any given individual, the likelihood that it’s unfair seems so high.
Throw in, too, that you would generally expect people to earn more over time, just as an effect of age (at least up to a point). Seems like this tax affects people very differently depending on their demographics — a fantastic deal for recent college grads who were almost certain to see significantly enhanced earnings over the next decade anyway, a terrible deal for people about to retire…
You’d have to have some way to deal with these issues but it would have to be fantastically complicated.
Perhaps it is secretly a plan put forth, not by Tabarrok, but by Henley, to convince us few remaining holdouts who do our own taxes not to
. Because, really, the spirit quails at the thought of this plan’s 1040-FU.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 9, 2008 @ 11:40 am
Hey Andromeda: I actually wouldn’t benefit by getting you to go to a tax service – I’m not that kind of finance guy.
If you click through to Alex’s original link, you can see the wrinkles I left out for illustrative purposes, including the idea of income-averaging over three years and only giving the tax windfall to earnings beyond an expected “growth factor.” I left that stuff out because it seemed extraneous to the general principle, which is to apply a supply-side tax code remedy to a demand-side phenomenon.
Alex, thanks for stopping by. Your comment seems to restate the effects your plan is supposed to have, but it doesn’t seem to answer the chief objection, which is that it won’t have these effects.
Comment by Barry —
February 9, 2008 @ 5:08 pm
You’re actually right, Gene – most of my opinion is formed by my occasional forays into MR’s pages. Where I’m rarely impressed, and frequently disgusted. Remember that this thread originated in a scheme which would have been considered unworthy of an econ major, let alone a Ph.d. Let alone a professor in a top department. And it’s not that this wasn’t an idea not carefully worked on and proofed by colleagues before being sent out for peer review and further proofing/development; it’s an idea better suited to a Randite who took Econ 101 from a right-winger, and things it’s how the world actually works. It’s worse than wrong; it’s stupid.
If I wanted to be snide, I’d simply say that if a Republican politician wishes a creationist biologist as one’s science advisor, he won’t go to a top bio department. If he wanted a really, really bad economics advisor, he’d have his pick from a number of top econ departments.
Comment by Barry —
February 9, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
Actually, here’s a challenge – if I’m wrong here, I’ll not only apologize here, but e-mail Alex an apology:
Back in 1999-2001, when Krugman was one of the few public voices vociferously denouncing Bush’s tax cuts and economics proposals, did anybody from GMU’s outstanding department *publicly support Krugman*?
Not some criticism which boils down to ‘we’d like it much, much more right-wing’, or ‘it doesn’t bring us the libertarian minimalist state – and a pony!’, but somebody at GMU saying ‘Krugman is (choke, cough, gag) correct; the people who are supporting Bush’s programs are both wrong and dishonest’.
In short, criticism from the *left* of Bush’s proposals.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
February 9, 2008 @ 7:42 pm
Barry, GMU would definitely be known as a “free market” econ department. But so would, say, Chicago, known as one of the top programs in the world. It’s one thing to say they have a bias against policies you favor — I bet they do! — but it’s just not justified to say they are not a legit department. I’ve been a regular attendee and presenter at the Southern Economic Association meetings for six years now, and am presenting at the Easterns this year. GMU is regarded as a perfectly sound, middle-tier department — not up with MIT, Chicago, NYU, or Harvard, but well in the top half of US PhD programs. The department has a real diversity of viewpoints, and is near the top of the rankings in its few specialties.
The fact is, economics is a science still in a state of flux, and there are serious disagreements about the fundamentals still being entertained. It’s just not correct to attribute divergent views to prostitution!
Comment by Alex Tabarrok —
February 10, 2008 @ 12:21 am
Barry,
“I favor a much smaller government but I do not favor the Bush tax cut….Today it is evident that we have two political parties: the Tax and Spenders and the No-Tax and Spenders. Neither party is fiscally conservative. Is there no room at the inn for an honest conservative?”
That was me in a widely distributed op-ed denouncing the Bush tax cuts in 2003.
I look forward to your apology.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1143
Best
Alex
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 10, 2008 @ 9:14 am
Having read the whole thing, I think it qualifies. Barry may argue that it doesn’t mention Paul Krugman by name and it comes in 2003, not 2001. To which I would respond: 1) Insisting that Krugman be personally credited in any editorial opposing the Bush tax cuts is mere cult of personality; 2) Writers’ schedules aren’t your schedules. They have the receptive markets they have when they have them, and the focus of their attention is impinged on by any number of internal and external factors.
So I think Barry should indeed apologize. BTW, I distinctly remember some folks around reason magazine arguing against the Bush tax cuts as a mere “tax shift” if there were no spending cuts too. Julian Sanchez was one, I think. But Alex’s piece makes the moral case that the logic behind the cuts was dishonest and unworthy, and I don’t remember if the other libertarian criticisms did that or not.
I should also say that Alex here was ahead of my own ethical evolution on tax policy questions by months. At some point, it sank in to me that if I opposed a war started for dishonest reasons (WMD! OMG Saddam tortures!) I couldn’t also support a tax policy based on dishonest logic (”starve the beast”). I think it wasn’t until 2004 that I internalized this connection. So Alex, who I’m pretty sure was always as antiwar as I was, was ahead of me there.
Comment by Barry —
February 11, 2008 @ 11:31 am
I accept Jim’s judgement. The apology has just been sent. Jim, please pass it along to Gene; I can’t find his e-mail on his blog.