“This tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut wouldn’t have happened if assault weapons were banned!”
“Assault weapons are banned in Connecticut.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“Yeah.”
~ ~ ~
Real world problems are often hard, without easy fixes. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try; just that we have to try hard, and maybe try different things.
Or, as the newspapers put it, “Fed pledges to keep interest rates low.”
The catch is that the Fed is now saying they will maintain their ultra-low interest rates (as low as 0%) as long as unemployment is above 6.5%. The problem with this is that the two are unrelated; low interest rates don’t drive employment. (I know, the theory is that with easy credit available businesses will expand and hire more employees. In fact, they won’t do that because there’s no demand right now, and won’t be until consumers have money in their pockets.)
What this actually does is provide businesses with monetary compensation for not hiring people. “Keep unemployment high,” says the Fed, “and we’ll keep loaning you money at absurdly low rates, which you can use to buy back your stock, drive up the price, and cash in your executive stock options. Cha-ching!”
The commoners who are unemployed or unemployed? Yeah, fuck them.
Woo hoo! New national education system rankings are out and the US is 17th, right between Belgium and Hungary. We trail such educational powerhouses as New Zealand, Ireland, and Poland, but do manage to stay slightly ahead of Slovakia and Russia.
How the Unions ruined Hostess.
Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in 5 years if I took their offer.
Greedy bastards. You would have taken that pay cut, right?
Here’s a good piece on General Petraeus. I sometimes forget that everyone doesn’t know these things. Of course generals are more politicians with carefully crafted public images than genuine military leaders. Also, a ‘troop surge’ is what we used to call ‘reinforcements.’
Col. MacGregor is wrong about one thing, though. Roman generals, at least during the years of the Republic, weren’t battle-hardened professionals. They were politicians, taking a military command so they could start a war and further their civilian political careers. Their ambition and amateurish bumbling got a lot of good troops killed, and lost a lot of battles.
In other words, our Generals aren’t so different from the Romans.
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent.
May such sacrifice in the name of greed and pride and stupidity never be necessary again.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.”–John McCrae
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
. . . .
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.–Siegfried Sassoon
There’s a lot of talk about ‘broadening the tax base.’ That basically means making poor people pay more Federal income taxes.
Here’s a suggestion: Instead of broadening the tax base, how about we broaden the prosperity base. Let’s move more poor people up into the income tax paying brackets, rather than moving the income tax paying brackets down to encompass more poor people.
Same result for the tax base, less human misery. Unless it’s the misery that you’re after?
Clayton M. Christensen has the beginning of an interesting article here. Unfortunately, he trails off at the end with only a few platitudes about solving the problem he’s pointed out.
We can use capital with abandon now, because it’s abundant and cheap. But we can no longer waste education, subsidizing it in fields that offer few jobs. Optimizing return on capital will generate less growth than optimizing return on education.
His point–and it’s a very good one, though not a complete picture of what’s wrong with our economy–is that optimizing capital usage is the wrong approach now. Capital is plentiful; what’s scarce is skilled workers. Expend capital, optimize worker training.
The only suggestions he offers for doing that, though, are to lower taxes on the rich, and some vague complaints about indiscriminate financial aid. I can do better than that, so I will.
Christensen suggests reducing the (already very low) capital gains tax over time, to encourage long term investments.
We should instead make capital gains regressive over time, based upon how long the capital is invested in a company. Taxes on short-term investments should continue to be taxed at personal income rates. But the rate should be reduced the longer the investment is held — so that, for example, tax rates on investments held for five years might be zero — and rates on investments held for eight years might be negative.
He doesn’t say at what level he would start the capital gains tax (currently 15% on investments held for at least one year). I would start it at 30%, then reduce it by three percentiles per year after that, so after holding it for ten years any profits from your investment would be tax-free. That would accomplish Christensen’s stated goal of encouraging long-term investment, while also discouraging short term investment (carrot and stick, rather than just the carrot he offers).
If the government is to be in the business of directing students into degree plans and training programs, I would offer a student loan repayment program for students going into certain fields. Every year, the selected fields would be re-evaluated, based on the projected needs of the economy five years hence.
These things would be a nice supplement to my economic reform plan.
Mitt Romney says ‘redistribution’ of wealth isn’t the American Way. He’s wrong, and he knows it. Over the last twenty years billions of dollars have been redistributed from the middle and working classes to the wealthy. Romney is fine with that. He’s just afraid the peasants trying to get a little of their own back.