Ross Douthat Lays Out the Best-Case Scenario for a Romney Presidency →

Ross argues (my title is a link) that Mitt is positioning himself to follow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s example of “bold, persistent experimentation” if he is elected. In my post “The Magic of Etch-a-Sketch: A Supply-Side Liberal Fantasy,” I effectively argue that–if one is willing to ignore other things Mitt has said–Mitt’s acceptance speech by and large leaves enough wiggle room for him to follow the policies I would recommend. My best guess of what Mitt will actually do can be found in my post Kevin Hassett, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw and John Taylor Need to Answer This Post of Brad DeLong’s Point by Point.

I explain why I intend to be coy about my own leanings as a voter in “What is a Partisan Nonpartisan Blog?” But I don’t mind telling you that I am genuinely undecided at this point. As you will deduce if you read “The Magic of Etch-a-Sketch: A Supply-Side Liberal Fantasy,” in the vector space of important issues, I don’t think one real-world candidate for president dominates the other. At some point in the future I will write a post expanding on the ethical case for gay rights to fill in one missing piece of the puzzle. I have already written on the ethical case for open immigration in my posts “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” and “Adam Ozimek: What ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Tells Us About Immigration.” I take both of those issues very seriously, and they clearly favor Obama. 

The most important issue favoring Mitt is the issue of restraining nuclear proliferation. Mitt’s acceptance speech convinced me he really would deal with Iran more firmly than Barack. I talk about the importance of that in the beginning of my post “Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon.” Restraining nuclear proliferation is also an ethical issue: one of the few issues that can compare in importance to the ethical weight of gay rights and open immigration–and to the ethical weight of war itself. Restraining nuclear proliferation is something we owe our descendants. We can’t afford to let our war-weariness prevent us from doing what needs to be done to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Here, I want you to remember that convincing one’s adversary that one is willing to go to war can sometimes be the best way to avoid both war and outcomes that are worse than war.

On economic policy, my fantasy “The Magic of Etch-a-Sketch: A Supply-Side Liberal Fantasy” aside, things are much murkier, because–as Ross Douthat emphasizes with his FDR analogy–no coherent account of Mitt’s intended economic policies has emerged. If Mitt is elected, I will certainly hope for the best, and will be reassured if he keeps Greg Mankiw close by his side during his presidency (and appears to be listening to Greg carefully), but at this point I trust Barack’s economic policies more. If Barack is reelected, I think he needs to do much more than he has done on the economic front, starting with Federal Lines of Credit, which you can read about in “Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy” and the other posts I list in “Short-Run Fiscal Policy Posts through August 23, 2012.” (I promise to post many other suggestions for whoever is our president come January.) At the upper end of what is reasonably possible, I think Mitt’s economic policies look better than Barack’s. But on the downside there are great dangers in the rejection by many Republicans of the conceptual framework of aggregate supply and aggregate demand in favor of a view of macroeconomics in which only aggregate supply matters. This view by many Republicans could easily have negative effects on macroeconomic policy in a Romney presidency even if Mitt himself believes that aggregate demand matters. 

Let me end by repeating here one of my tweets about my cousin Mitt:

News flash from Clive Crook: Romney NOT a heartless self-serving capitalist monster. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-gops-clever-plan-to-position-rubio-for-2016/261852/ …

In the event, Mitt might be a bad president, but some of the things that have been said about him are just wrong. If you follow Clive’s link above, and this link to the testimonial of my nephew Peter Kimball’s father-in-law Grant Bennett, you will see. (Peter is my brother Chris Kimball’s son. You can see Chris’s relatively negative opinion of Mitt in my post “Big Brother Speaks: Christian Kimball on Mitt Romney.”)

Note: I list my other political posts in the index post “Posts on Politics and Political Economy through September 1, 2012.”

The Magic of Etch-a-Sketch: A Supply-Side Liberal Fantasy

Mitt Romney’s Acceptance Speech at the GOP Convention

I, Mitt Romney, have been reading my cousin Miles’s new blog in the last few days instead of watching the Republican Convention, and I’ve had a political conversion experience. It’s annoying Miles didn’t start sooner. It’s a little late in the game for me to be changing my political philosophy yet again, to Supply-Side Liberalism, but I guess one more political transformation won’t hurt. I am already through the Republican primaries, which gives me room to maneuver. And although my magic Etch-a-Sketch that wipes out everything I have ever said in the past looks like it could give up the ghost of its last bit of magic charm at any time, I think if I use it right now, it will still work once more.  It is also annoying that there are a lot of policies Miles hasn’t even talked about yet, but I’m getting the sense that it’s closer to where I was at when I ran for Senator and for Governor in Massachusetts than where I have been lately, so I’ll fill in the gaps that way.  

The only trouble is, here I am waiting to go out there and give my acceptance speech and there is no time to work up a new speech. Maybe a little creative reinterpretation will do the trick. All right, here goes, I’m shaking the magic Etch-a-Sketch to erase everything I’ve said before, and I’ll figure out as I go along how to reinterpret the words of my acceptance speech to be consistent with Supply-Side Liberalism. OK, no more time, I have to go out there…

Mr. Chairman, delegates. I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America.

I do so with humility, deeply moved by the trust you have placed in me. It is a great honor. It is an even greater responsibility.

Tonight I am asking you to join me to walk together to a better future. By my side, I have chosen a man with a big heart from a small town. He represents the best of America, a man who will always make us proud - my friend and America’s next Vice President, Paul Ryan.

In the days ahead, you will get to know Paul and Janna better. But last night America got to see what I saw in Paul Ryan - a strong and caring leader who is down to earth and confident in the challenge this moment demands.

I love the way he lights up around his kids and how he’s not embarrassed to show the world how much he loves his mom.

But Paul, I still like the playlist on my iPod better than yours.

Not much content there I need to worry about. If I can just win this election, I’ll have four years with Paul at my side to bring him around to my new way of thinking.  

Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president. That president was not the choice of our party but Americans always come together after elections. We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than what divides us.

When that hard fought election was over, when the yard signs came down and the television commercials finally came off the air, Americans were eager to go back to work, to live our lives the way Americans always have - optimistic and positive and confident in the future.

That very optimism is uniquely American.

It is what brought us to America. We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better.

They came not just in pursuit of the riches of this world but for the richness of this life.

Freedom.

Freedom of religion.

Freedom to speak their mind.

Freedom to build a life.

And yes, freedom to build a business. With their own hands.

This is the essence of the American experience.

We Americans have always felt a special kinship with the future.

When every new wave of immigrants looked up and saw the Statue of Liberty, or knelt down and kissed the shores of freedom just ninety miles from Castro’s tyranny, these new Americans surely had many questions. But none doubted that here in America they could build a better life, that in America their children would be more blessed than they.

Boy, what I had in this speech works great, as long as I interpret it in a way that is opposite to what I said about immigration policy before I used my magic Etch a Sketch backstage. What Miles said in “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” works perfectly. Even the Statue of Liberty reference works great now that I am strongly pro-immigration.  

But today, four years from the excitement of the last election, for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future.

It is not what we were promised.

Every family in America wanted this to be a time when they could get ahead a little more, put aside a little more for college, do more for their elderly mom who’s living alone now or give a little more to their church or charity.

Every small business wanted these to be their best years ever, when they could hire more, do more for those who had stuck with them through the hard times, open a new store or sponsor that Little League team.

Every new college graduate thought they’d have a good job by now, a place of their own, and that they could start paying back some of their loans and build for the future.

This is when our nation was supposed to start paying down the national debt and rolling back those massive deficits.

This was the hope and change America voted for.

It’s not just what we wanted. It’s not just what we expected.

It’s what Americans deserved.

You deserved it because during these years, you worked harder than ever before. You deserved it because when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out movie nights and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits. You did it because your family depended on you. You did it because you’re an American and you don’t quit. You did it because it was what you had to do.

But driving home late from that second job, or standing there watching the gas pump hit 50 dollars and still going, when the realtor told you that to sell your house you’d have to take a big loss, in those moments you knew that this just wasn’t right.

But what could you do? Except work harder, do with less, try to stay optimistic. Hug your kids a little longer; maybe spend a little more time praying that tomorrow would be a better day.

I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed. But his promises gave way to disappointment and division. This isn’t something we have to accept. Now is the moment when we CAN do something. With your help we will do something.

Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, “I’m an American. I make my destiny. And we deserve better! My children deserve better! My family deserves better. My country deserves better!”

So here we stand. Americans have a choice. A decision.

I think that text about what has happened during the Obama administration still works. I liked that line “I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed” before and I still like it now. And I still like that line “But his promises gave way to disappointment and division.” As for “division,” President Obama really has been fomenting anger at the rich, when both Miles and I agree that the rich are very important for the economy, as he wrote in “Why Taxes are Bad” and that post that really started to turn me around 180 degrees: “Rich, Poor and Middle Class.” In that post, Miles was wrong about where I was at when I started reading his blog, but now he has convinced me. I am so grateful for that magic Etch-a-Sketch.

Now for the Neil Armstrong reference and my bio. I won’t have to change any of that. 

To make that choice, you need to know more about me and about where I will lead our country.

I was born in the middle of the century in the middle of the country, a classic baby boomer. It was a time when Americans were returning from war and eager to work. To be an American was to assume that all things were possible. When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn’t whether we’d get there, it was only when we’d get there.

The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on OUR souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent’s sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.

God bless Neil Armstrong.

Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon. And I don’t doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong’s spirit is still with us: that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.

That bit “when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American” was over-the-top. How did that get in there? Shakespeare, and even Jesus, weren’t Americans! But they did big stuff indeed. At least the open immigration policy I am now committed to will guarantee that a large fraction of all the people in the world who do big things become Americans.    

That’s how I was brought up.

My dad had been born in Mexico and his family had to leave during the Mexican revolution. I grew up with stories of his family being fed by the US Government as war refugees. My dad never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter. And he had big dreams. He convinced my mom, a beautiful young actress, to give up Hollywood to marry him. He moved to Detroit, led a great automobile company and became Governor of the Great State of Michigan. 

My Dad’s generation really was impressive, including my Dad’s first cousin Camilla Eyring Kimball, who married Spencer W. Kimball. And Camilla’s brothers and sisters earned a lot of college degrees when that wasn’t common early in the 20th Century, including Henry Eyring, who became a world-renowned chemist. And boy am I glad Camilla’s husband  Spencer W. Kimball did the hard work of praying to get that revelation from God giving the priesthood to blacks. That was one of the best days in my life when I heard about that. 

We were Mormons and growing up in Michigan; that might have seemed unusual or out of place but I really don’t remember it that way. My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we went to.

Religion is one area where I am not going to go along with Miles. I still believe in Mormonism, which is a lot different from the religious views Miles expressed in “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life.” And I’ll take my sure confidence in an afterlife over Miles’s attempts to console himself in “The Egocentric Illusion” about the absence of an afterlife any day. And I know there are miracles in the world today. What else do you call my magic Etch-a-Sketch? But religion is one area where, in America, it is OK to disagree. And if I take out the religious details, those posts had good positive views in other ways. OK, must keep going:     

My mom and dad gave their kids the greatest gift of all - the gift of unconditional love. They cared deeply about who we would BE, and much less about what we would DO.

Unconditional love is a gift that Ann and I have tried to pass on to our sons and now to our grandchildren. All the laws and legislation in the world will never heal this world like the loving hearts and arms of mothers and fathers. If every child could drift to sleep feeling wrapped in the love of their family - and God’s love – this world would be a far more gentle and better place.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose. 

My mom and dad were true partners, a life lesson that shaped me by everyday example. When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way. I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, “Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?”

I wish she could have been here at the convention and heard leaders like Governor Mary Fallin, Governor Nikki Haley, Governor Susana Martinez, Senator Kelly Ayotte and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

As Governor of Massachusetts, I chose a woman Lt. Governor, a woman chief of staff, half of my cabinet and senior officials were women, and in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies.

I grew up in Detroit in love with cars and wanted to be a car guy, like my dad. But by the time I was out of school, I realized that I had to go out on my own, that if I stayed around Michigan in the same business, I’d never really know if I was getting a break because of my dad. I wanted to go someplace new and prove myself. 

Those weren’t the easiest of days - too many long hours and weekends working, five young sons who seemed to have this need to re-enact a different world war every night. But if you ask Ann and I what we’d give, to break up just one more fight between the boys, or wake up in the morning and discover a pile of kids asleep in our room. Well, every mom and dad knows the answer to that.

Those days were toughest on Ann, of course. She was heroic. Five boys, with our families a long way away. I had to travel a lot for my job then and I’d call and try to offer support. But every mom knows that doesn’t help get the homework done or the kids out the door to school.

I knew that her job as a mom was harder than mine. And I knew without question, that her job as a mom was a lot more important than mine. And as America saw Tuesday night, Ann would have succeeded at anything she wanted to.

Like a lot of families in a new place with no family, we found kinship with a wide circle of friends through our church. When we were new to the community it was welcoming and as the years went by, it was a joy to help others who had just moved to town or just joined our church. We had remarkably vibrant and diverse congregants from all walks of life and many who were new to America. We prayed together, our kids played together and we always stood ready to help each other out in different ways.

And that’s how it is in America. We look to our communities, our faiths, our families for our joy, our support, in good times and bad. It is both how we live our lives and why we live our lives. The strength and power and goodness of America has always been based on the strength and power and goodness of our communities, our families, our faiths.

That is the bedrock of what makes America, America. In our best days, we can feel the vibrancy of America’s communities, large and small.

All of that still sounds great. I like the emphasis on community.  Now I think I pivot to criticism of Obama. Let’s see here…

It’s when we see that new business opening up downtown. It’s when we go to work in the morning and see everybody else on our block doing the same.

It’s when our son or daughter calls from college to talk about which job offer they should take….and you try not to choke up when you hear that the one they like is not far from home.

It’s that good feeling when you have more time to volunteer to coach your kid’s soccer team, or help out on school trips.

But for too many Americans, these good days are harder to come by. How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America? 

Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.

The President hasn’t disappointed you because he wanted to. The President has disappointed America because he hasn’t led America in the right direction. He took office without the basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task. He had almost no experience working in a business. Jobs to him are about government.

On the size of government issue, I think Miles has a political winner in his proposal in “Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon” to call for a constitutional amendment limiting government spending to less than half of GDP. If the Democrats resist it, they’ll be admitting that they plan sometime down the road to run more than half of the economy through government. If the Democrats go along, America will have a crucial constitutional protection against encroaching government in the future–now that would be a legacy. 

I learned the real lessons about how America works from experience.

When I was 37, I helped start a small company. My partners and I had been working for a company that was in the business of helping other businesses.

So some of us had this idea that if we really believed our advice was helping companies, we should invest in companies. We should bet on ourselves and on our advice.

So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn’t get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church’s pension fund to invest, but I didn’t. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors’ money, but I didn’t want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him.

That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples - where I’m pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we’d ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.

These are American success stories. And yet the centerpiece of the President’s entire re-election campaign is attacking success. Is it any wonder that someone who attacks success has led the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression? In America, we celebrate success, we don’t apologize for it.

We weren’t always successful at Bain. But no one ever is in the real world of business.

That’s what this President doesn’t seem to understand. Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving. It is about dreams. Usually, it doesn’t work out exactly as you might have imagined. Steve Jobs was fired at Apple. He came back and changed the world.

It’s the genius of the American free enterprise system - to harness the extraordinary creativity and talent and industry of the American people with a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow’s prosperity rather than trying to redistribute today’s.

Wow, not only is this part of the speech great, after watching the videos Miles assembled in his post “Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday with Videos of Milton,” I realize that I am saying the sort of thing Milton would say if he were here.  

That is why every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction: “you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president.

This president can ask us to be patient.

This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault.

This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right.

But this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office.

That part of my speech was always pretty carefully worded. And it really hasn’t been fair of Obama to blame his predecessor Bush for the Great Recession. It was a collective failure on the part of many people. The kinds of experiments Miles talked about in “Dr. Smith and the Asset Bubble” make it look like human beings are naturally prone to create asset bubbles when they interact in asset markets. And the high leverage in the way we do mortgage finance made a bubble in housing so much worse for the economy. If only someone had listened to Robert Shiller and Andrew Caplin about how to do housing finance before it was too late to avoid the financial crisis. Miles’s post “Reply to Matthew Yglesias: What to Do About a House Price Boom” makes me realize that I need to bring Shiller and Caplin into my administration, if I can persuade them to come on board. There is a lot to think about there, but I have to get back to my speech:

America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith.

But today, the time has come to turn the page.

Today the time has come for us to put the disappointments of the last four years behind us.

To put aside the divisiveness and the recriminations.

To forget about what might have been and to look ahead to what can be.

Now is the time to restore the Promise of America. Many Americans have given up on this president but they haven’t ever thought about giving up. Not on themselves. Not on each other. And not on America.

What is needed in our country today is not complicated or profound. It doesn’t take a special government commission to tell us what America needs.

What America needs is jobs.

Lots of jobs.

Getting more jobs is one thing I know how to do now. The problem with the Democrats’ Keynesian stimulus measures was not that they wouldn’t work, but that a big enough stimulus of that sort would explode our national debt. Miles’s idea of Federal Lines of Credit gets stimulus without much ultimate addition to the national debt. All of Miles’s posts on Federal Lines of Credit listed in “Short-Run Fiscal Policy Posts through August 23, 2012” make a pretty good case, so I think I can sell the idea. It is great that no one has any preexisting political opinion about Federal Lines of Credit because the idea is so new. And some of the other ideas for fiscal stimulus besides Federal Lines of Credit aren’t bad either, like the ideas in “Leading States in the Fiscal Two-Step” and “What to Do When the World Desperately Wants to Lend Us Money.” And if we empower the Fed to buy a wide range of assets like the Bank of Japan can, and I appoint members of the Fed who are comfortable with what Miles says in “Balance Sheet Monetary Policy: A Primer” and “Trillions and Trillions: Getting Used to Balance Sheet Monetary Policy” it looks like we can get a huge amount of stimulus from monetary policy, too. From Miles’s post “Wallace Neutrality and Ricardian Neutrality” and some of the other things I saw when I followed some of the link trails, it sounds as if it would help a lot to appoint a few Market Monetarists to the Fed when I get the chance. Ben Bernanke needs to be pulled in that direction more and pulled less in the direction of the monetary policy hawks, as I can see after having followed the link in “Brad DeLong’s Views on Monetary Policy and the Fed’s Internal Politics.” It would be pretty interesting to appoint Brad DeLong to the Fed, but my fellow Republicans will give me enough trouble just for working to give the Fed the authority to buy a wider range of assets, so I had better not try to appoint Brad.  Back to my speech:

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before. Nearly one out of six Americans is living in poverty. Look around you. These are not strangers. These are our brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans.

His policies have not helped create jobs, they have depressed them. And this I can tell you about where President Obama would take America:

His plan to raise taxes on small business won’t add jobs, it will eliminate them;

Reading “Is Taxing Capital OK?” and “Corporations are People, My Friend” made me wish all over again that I could just eliminate the corporate tax altogether, but even if I’m elected president, that will be too hard politically.    

His assault on coal and gas and oil will send energy and manufacturing jobs to China;

I wish this weren’t here in the speech! What am I going to do? Somehow Miles’s Tweets about the need to kill coal got through to me–especially that argument that coal is almost all carbon and so burns to create a huge amount of carbon dioxide. It really puts me in a bind. The magic Etch-a-Sketch wiped out my pro-coal speeches. But here I am again sounding pro-coal. Maybe if I do enough to foster nuclear energy, the fracking revolution in natural gas and research to bring down the cost of solar energy, the market will take care of killing coal for me. Oh, well, even if it is bad policy, I probably needed to sound pro-coal to have a chance in some of those swing states anyway. My conversion to Supply-Side Liberalism didn’t make me a political saint. 

His trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk;

His $716 billion cut to Medicare to finance Obamacare will both hurt today’s seniors, and depress innovation - and jobs - in medicine.

I still like having a strong military, though thinking of the military as a jobs program is a little odd. I guess that statement was OK. On the $716 billion cut to Medicare, I wonder if now that he’s my running mate, the Etch-a-Sketch magic extended far enough to wipe out Paul’s previous statements about cutting Medicare?  

And his trillion-dollar deficits will slow our economy, restrain employment, and cause wages to stall.

Oh rats! That sentence sounds like bad economics to me now. Doesn’t it work mostly the other way? Low aggregate demand leading to deficits? At least most people will just hear this sentence as “deficits are bad,” which–other than technical slippage between “deficits” and “long-run effect on the national debt”–is basically true when there are plenty of ways to stimulate aggregate demand without a big increase in the national debt.   

To the majority of Americans who now believe that the future will not be better than the past, I can guarantee you this: if Barack Obama is re-elected, you will be right.

It is not great to have the “Obama will be bad” statement after those weak sentences, but I do think that, since my conversion to Supply-Side Liberalism, I will be better than Obama. 

I am running for president to help create a better future. A future where everyone who wants a job can find one. Where no senior fears for the security of their retirement. An America where every parent knows that their child will get an education that leads them to a good job and a bright horizon.

And unlike the President, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has 5 steps.

The main thing I am going to do in the short run for jobs is Federal Lines of Credit and empowering the Fed and appointing some Market Monetarists to the Fed, rather than the 5 steps I have written into the speech. But I don’t see any reason why I can’t create 12 million new jobs with those tools. Let me think of the 5 steps I have written into the speech as long-run economic policy.  

First, by 2020, North America will be energy independent by taking full advantage of our oil and coal and gas and nuclear and renewables.

As I was thinking before, I can do a lot to foster the fracking revolution in natural gas production, the next generation of safer, largely waste-free nuclear reactors and research for cheaper and cheaper solar power. I hope that kills coal, or I am going to feel a little guilty.  

Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance.

I am glad I have this in my speech. Better schools are a great way to help the poor, and school choice is a great way to get better schools, as Miles said when he flagged Adam Ozimek’s post in “Adam Ozimek: School Choice in the Long Run.” For the public schools that lots of kids will still be going to, I like Miles’s ideas in Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School–not just lengthening the school year, but making sure that with high school graduation students can have the credentials for a wide range of jobs. The affront to freedom and harm to the poor from the excessive licensing requirements that Miles talks about in “When the Government Says ‘You May Not Have a Job’” really make me angry. And those restrictions are terrible for economic growth too.

Third, we will make trade work for America by forging new trade agreements. And when nations cheat in trade, there will be unmistakable consequences.

Freer trade will help a lot. And there is something odd about China buying so much of our national debt. Is that really even a good idea for them?  

Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.

What happens to the national debt really is an issue. Having ways to stimulate the economy without ultimately adding much to the national debt will help immensely there. 

And fifth, we will champion SMALL businesses, America’s engine of job growth. That means reducing taxes on business, not raising them. It means simplifying and modernizing the regulations that hurt small business the most.

Regulations are like a hidden tax. Even if someone could persuade me that big corporations need more regulation (and I’m not stupid, I understand the “too-big-to-fail” problem), I would still think we can do with less regulation for small businesses.  

And it means that we must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare.

Here I am just fine.  Miles’s proposal in “Evan Soltas on Medical Reform Federalism: In Canada” to take the money from abolishing the tax exemption from employer-provided health insurance and give it to the states as block grants to provide universal coverage somehow in each state is just the ticket. We’ll have a lot of different experiments in the different states. I thought my health care reform plan in Massachusetts worked pretty well, but not so well that it should have been rolled out as a one-size-fits-all national program in Obamacare without any further experimentation. Here I can have a principled opposition to Obamacare based on humility. I had a great health care plan, but Obama made the mistake of not allowing other plans their day in court with a state-level real-world test. The posts Miles indexed in “Health Economics Posts through August 26, 2012” provide plenty of ideas to try that Miles shamelessly borrowed from other smart people.  

Today, women are more likely than men to start a business. They need a president who respects and understands what they do.

And let me make this very clear - unlike President Obama, I will not raise taxes on the middle class.

Whew, on this one, I think I can just squeak by through claiming (over furious objections by some in my own party, I’ll bet) that Miles’s great proposal in “No Tax Increase Without Recompense” isn’t really a tax increase, since the extra taxes imposed can be fully cancelled out by the tax credit for public contributions to decentralized nonprofit efforts to make America better. That dodge will make impossible arithmetic possible, as the need for government spending is reduced by those decentralized efforts. I’ll have to work up to this one to get it past my fellow Republicans in Congress, but the political capital I’ll get from all the jobs created by the extra aggregate demand from Federal Lines of Credit will go a long way toward making that possible. I am not sure 10% of income over $75,000 a year per person will be enough given all of the things that need to be done, but whatever it takes, I’ll try to push it through Congress.     

As president, I will protect the sanctity of life. I will honor the institution of marriage. And I will guarantee America’s first liberty: the freedom of religion. 

I am glad my speech was written to talk about abortion policy in code here, using “sanctity of life.” With my magic Etch-a-Sketch wiping out all my previous statements, maybe I can go back to where I was when I was running for office in Massachusetts. And I can’t think of a better way to “honor the institution of marriage” than to do everything possible to foster marriage rights for gays. It’s good to be on the right side of that issue again. Thank you, Etch-a-Sketch! I think I’ll wait until after the election to go there, though. There are some Republicans who would stay home on election day if I came out for gay marriage between now and then. And who could be against freedom of religion? And as far as the coded meaning goes, medical reform Federalism will probably solve the issue the Catholic Church had with Obamacare.    

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise…is to help you and your family.

I have been worrying a lot about global warming ever since reading what Miles had to say about that at the beginning of “Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon,” but I think this attack on Obama is totally appropriate just as an attack on his grandiosity. (Come to think of it, Miles shows some of the same kind of grandiosity, but I’ll forgive him for that in view of the number of ideas I’ll be stealing.) That line “MY promise…is to help you and your family” is better than I thought, in view of that paper of Miles and his coauthors that I stumbled on that found that in personal choices, people value “the well-being of you and your family” more than anything else.

I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.

Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden. But on another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear threat.

In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran. We’re still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning. 

I know Miles agrees with me about the importance of keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons from what he said at the very beginning of “Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon.” In any case, this is something I feel strongly about.   

President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus, even as he has relaxed sanctions on Castro’s Cuba. He abandoned our friends in Poland by walking away from our missile defense commitments, but is eager to give Russia’s President Putin the flexibility he desires, after the election. Under my administration, our friends will see more loyalty, and Mr. Putin will see a little less flexibility and more backbone.

We will honor America’s democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan. And under my presidency we will return to it once again.

I don’t see any problem with what I had in my speech here. But Jonathan Rauch’s talk that Miles flagged in “Jonathan Rauch on Democracy, Capitalism and Liberal Science” gives me the idea that I can send a strong pro-freedom message by awarding Jonathan Rauch the Presidential Medal of Freedom if I can just get elected.   

You might have asked yourself if these last years are really the America we want, the America won for us by the greatest generation.

Does the America we want borrow a trillion dollars from China? No.

Does it fail to find the jobs that are needed for 23 million people and for half the kids graduating from college? No.

Are its schools lagging behind the rest of the developed world? No.

And does the America we want succumb to resentment and division? We know the answer. 

The America we all know has been a story of the many becoming one, uniting to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness.

Everywhere I go in America, there are monuments that list those who have given their lives for America. There is no mention of their race, their party affiliation, or what they did for a living. They lived and died under a single flag, fighting for a single purpose. They pledged allegiance to the UNITED States of America.

That America, that united America, can unleash an economy that will put Americans back to work, that will once again lead the world with innovation and productivity, and that will restore every father and mother’s confidence that their children’s future is brighter even than the past.

That America, that united America, will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it.

That America, that united America, will uphold the constellation of rights that were endowed by our Creator, and codified in our Constitution.

That united America will care for the poor and the sick, will honor and respect the elderly, and will give a helping hand to those in need.

No problem in that passage. It is going to be easier to afford that strong military with the public contribution program I am stealing from Miles’s post “No Tax Increase Without Recompense,” though I may have to adjust the rate from what he said. And that public contribution program will do a lot more to take care of the poor and the sick and to honor the elderly than we do now. I just need to be careful not to cut back on direct government programs until we are really confident that the decentralized efforts from the public contribution program are taking care of things in specific areas. Miles’s reminders in his post “Will Mitt’s Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side Liberal?” of the Book of Mormon’s teachings about the duty to help the poor stiffen my resolve on that front.

That America is the best within each of us. That America we want for our children.

If I am elected President of these United States, I will work with all my energy and soul to restore that America, to lift our eyes to a better future. That future is our destiny. That future is out there. It is waiting for us. Our children deserve it, our nation depends upon it, the peace and freedom of the world require it. And with your help we will deliver it. Let us begin that future together tonight.

Bill Dickens on Helping the Poor

Image from Revolution in Media

In my post “Rich, Poor and Middle-Class” I wrote 

I am deeply concerned about the poor, because they are truly suffering, even with what safety net exists. Helping them is one of our highest ethical obligations. I am deeply concerned about the honest rich—not so much for themselves, though their welfare counts too—but because they provide goods and services that make our lives better, because they provide jobs, because they help ensure that we can get good returns for our retirement saving, and because we already depend on them so much for tax revenue. But for the middle-class, who count heavily because they make up the bulk of our society, I have a stern message. We are paying too high a price when we tax the middle class in order to give benefits to the middle-class—and taxing the rich to give benefits to the middle-class would only make things worse. The primary job of the government in relation to the middle-class has to be to help them help themselves, through education, through loans, through libertarian paternalism, and by stopping the dishonest rich from preying on the middle-class through deceit and chicanery. 

In his correspondence with Bryan Caplan, Bill Dickens gives a good picture of what government efforts to help the poor currently look like. The distinction between the suffering of the poor and the struggling of the middle class is clear in Bill’s description. Bill is arguing against Bryan’s desire to reduce support for the poor.  He argues persuasively that since the Clinton-era Welfare Reforms, government efforts to help the poor have been appropriate.

Note that because of the nature of the argument with Bryan, Bill does not address here the question of whether more should be done to help the poor.  There are two terms in what Bill writes that may need some explanation: “memes” and “leaky bucket.” Here is a link for “memes.” I didn’t find a good link for “leaky bucket." "Leaky bucket” is a metaphor economists use for the idea that a government policy intended to help the poor often has unintended side effects: (1) the poor acting in ways that make it more likely that they will get help and (2) those who are better off acting in ways that make it more likely that they won’t be asked to help.  

Since Bill’s argument is long, let me give you some of the highlights of what Bill writes to Bryan:

So this is the crux of it. You subscribe to two central right-wing memes: government coddles the poor and won’t make them face the tough choices everyone else does, and welfare recipients are overwhelmingly lazy and undeserving. Anyone with firsthand experience dealing with a wide range of the poor or those receiving government assistant (with the later being only a small subset of the former) knows these two things to be false.

Overwhelmingly those on public assistance were full of regret and/or a sense of hopelessness that they are fated to their condition. They know they should have worked harder in school, they know they should be working to support their family, they know it would be better if their children’s father was there to help support their kids. There is no shortage of hectoring from society, welfare caseworkers, family members, and the media. Consider that even before the passage of TANF most women on welfare worked at least some during every year (on or off the books). Most welfare mothers are not drug abusers or alcoholics (when they have been tested only a tiny fraction fail). A lot had their children with a husband or boyfriend they had hoped to marry. A lot of the AFDC caseload cycled on and off welfare as people made repeated attempts to return to work (attempts that were often stymied by lack of adequate child care - one of the most common reasons for returning to welfare was being fired by a low wage employer for missing work when child care arrangements fell through).

Over and over when I talk to people about government income support programs I’m told that they have no objection to giving money to the truly needy, but that they don’t like supporting lazy bums who don’t like to work. When I tell them that overwhelmingly government support goes to families (usually single women) with children they don’t believe me.

Now let’s consider the case of a bucket that was probably too leaky and needed to be replaced. As you know I was converted by my experience with Clinton’s welfare reform task force to the belief that AFDC needed to be time limited. Over and over I heard young women tell me that they didn’t think much about having a baby because that is what people in their world did. “You get to be 16, you get yourself a baby and you get yourself a check and an apartment.” AFDC as a career choice was a serious problem back then. But even as we went around preparing the welfare reform we heard over-and-over again that the word was out that welfare was going away and you were going to have to do something else now. Starting in the early 90s - long before TANF actually limited benefits to 2 years - AFDC caseloads started dropping and ultimately dropped enormously. 

People know they make bad decisions. They often know when they are making them that they are bad. Telling them that they are being stupid isn’t news to them. Find ways to change the system to help them make better decisions and I’m all with you. Take money away from children because their mothers and fathers made bad choices I’m very disappointed. Overlook all the people who are receiving aid not because of bad choices, but bad luck and I’m more than disappointed - I’m angry.

… I’m not “outraged” by people who don’t want to pay taxes to support the government transfer system. A few of them may be selfish and/or racist jerks. There are few enough of them that I could care less. I believe that most people with that view are misinformed about who gets government transfers, how the programs are administered, the amount of the benefits, and how much of their taxes go to such programs. I think the vast majority of people, if they knew the facts, would not object to paying taxes for the system.

To me, given what I know, what Bill says has the ring of truth to it. But I would be interested in any evidence anyone has that contradicts what Bill says, especially anything that contradicts the passages I have quoted.

Jonathan Rauch on Democracy, Capitalism and Liberal Science

Jonathan Rauch’s keynote address at the 2010 Campus Freedom Network Conference

Jonathan Rauch gave a talk at a Campus Freedom Network Conference summarizing the argument in his book “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought.” In addition to the link under the picture of Jonathan above, here is a link to a nice piece by Greg Lukianoff flagging the video: 

Jonathan Rauch on Why Free Speech is Even More Important than You Thought.

I loved Jonathan’s talk. I was struck by the similarities between Jonathan’s arguments for academic freedom in this video and Milton Friedman’s arguments for capitalism in the videos I marshalled in Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday with Videos of Milton.

The key elements of what Jonathan calls “liberal science” are its decentralization (no one in particular is in charge) and its rules. The discipline of criticism is just as necessary for ideas floated in the academy as the discipline of the market is for enterprises. However painful systems of trial and error are, if we interfere with the systems of trial and error, we will be saddled with errors.

Although in this video Jonathan is talking mainly about liberal science and only in passing about capitalism, the parallels made me appreciate the strength of Milton’s arguments even more than I had. And Milton’s arguments in turn, by the parallels, strengthen Jonathan’s case for liberal science. Finally, the arguments for both liberal science and capitalism strengthen the case for democracy; and the arguments for democracy strengthen the case for both liberal science and capitalism.

Postscript: Speaking of decentralization, some government functions (such as taking care of the poor) might be better served if they could be decentralized to nonprofit organizations. In particular, such decentralization allows a trial and error process to work its magic as donations shift away from the least effective nonprofits to more effective nonprofits. Because people love freedom, such decentralization of certain government functions has other advantages as well, as I argue in my post “No Tax Increase Without Recompense.” In that post, I propose a way to make sure such nonprofit efforts are adequately funded.

Family Income Growth by Quintile Since 1950 →

Overall per capita GDP growth does not tell the whole story. The incomes of those in the top income categories and those in lower income categories have evolved in very different ways. Jordan Weissman lays out a graph that is very good at summarizing what has happened to the real incomes of different groups since 1950.

What is a Partisan Nonpartisan Blog?

I have thought for a while that I should have a post explaining the meaning of my header’s subtitle: “A Partisan Nonpartisan Blog.” Here is the interpretation:

“Partisan” means I am passionate about policy and cultural issues.

“Nonpartisan” means I don’t belong to any pre-existing “team,” whether Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, Green, etc.

My experience in blogging and tweeting during the presidential election contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney has clarified for me what that means in practice. In November, I will step into a voting booth and make a choice. But I don’t want advance intimations of that choice to cloud my treatment of each issue. Although I have to set priorities about what I write about, if I do write about an issue, my commitment is to try as hard as humanly possible to give you my unvarnished opinion on that issue–even if, according to an exaggerated sense of my own importance, expressing my unvarnished opinion on an issue would hurt the chances of the candidate I think I am more likely to vote for by a tiny amount. (Here, I can only barely stand to do without the word economists use for a tiny amount: “epsilon,” drawn from calculus.) If I ever waver from that commitment, I will think hard about choosing a new subtitle for my header.

If you ever think the priorities I am setting for what I write about are skewed, please use the “Ask Me Anything” button on my sidebar or make a comment to a post to nudge me toward dealing with the issues you think I should be dealing with. On issues, posing questions for me will have a big effect. But to avoid distraction from a focus on the issues, I will be slow to answer questions about which candidate I support when I think that different, reasonable weightings of the importance of various issues could lead to different candidate preferences–even for someone who has the same views on the issues that I do.

In a fractal recapitulation of the “team-loyalty versus unvarnished opinion on each issue” conflict, fidelity to the truth can sometimes hurt the overall thread of one’s argument on an issue. Here, fidelity to the truth has to come first. Let me list the legitimate excuses: (a) there is no duty to mention facts that seem to run against one’s argument that are actually unimportant and could easily be answered; (b) for clarity it is permissible to defer dealing with even important, widely-known facts until a commenter sets up the Q part of the Q&A; and (c) human language always deals in approximations, especially in short-form essays. But for a blogger who hopes to have the trust of readers, it is never OK to say something one knows to be false and misleading, even in the service of what one might think is a higher Truth. Or to make a slogan out of the wisdom of my best friend Kim Leavitt:

“We are in trouble if we let our devotion to Truth get in the way of our devotion to truth.”

All humans are fallible, so I may slip at some point. But I shudder at the thought.

Adam Ozimek: School Choice in the Long Run →

Many programs to help the poor create incentives not to earn too much, which discourages hard work. By contrast, improved schooling raises the incentives to work hard at a career because the range of job choices is so much greater after better schooling. So I have long thought of school reform as an ideal avenue for helping the poor. And since monopolies and near-monopolies tend to perform poorly, I have long been a passionate advocate of school choice. In “School Choice in the Long Run,” Adam Ozimek provides a subtle discussion of evidence for the benefits of school choice.

Update: In a related post, Matthew DiCarlo provides a good discussion of why attrition “Student Attrition is a Core Feature of School Choice, Not a Bug.”  

No Tax Increase Without Recompense

“Spirit”–an iconic painting symbolizing the American Revolution

The slogan “No taxation without representation” played a key role in the American Revolution. There is great wisdom in this slogan. First of all, it recognizes that taxation is necessary. Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

May the Constitution of the United States of America continue to long endure! And may we someday be free of death and taxes. But freedom from death and taxes will not come in my lifetime. Indeed, in his piece 

“The Reality of Trying to Shrink Government,”

Larry Summers makes a persuasive case that anything like our current expectations for what government should do cannot be funded without substantial government revenue increases in the future. The reason is that one of the largest tasks our government has taken on is helping older Americans. As the ratio of older Americans to younger Americans increases that task becomes more difficult.

Japan and most nations in Europe are already ahead of us in being subject to the heavy burdens governments face from an aging population.

This is an important factor in the debt crises they face.

There is one way for America (and the other rich nations) to escape the fiscal difficulties of taking care of an aging population. That escape hatch is dramatically more open immigration, which I urge as a matter of basic ethics in “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” and “Adam Ozimek: What ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Tells Us About Immigration.’”

But for the rest of this post, I will consider what we need to do in tax policy if American politicians, for whatever reason, stubbornly refuse to live up to the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty. In the better case of dramatically more open immigration, what I say below should still be helpful in the context of lower overall tax rates than if current quite-restrictive immigration policies continue.

The second dimension of wisdom in the slogan

“No taxation without representation”

is the idea that, if taxes are necessary, we should at least demand something in return for our taxes–something beyond the government spending itself. Members of the English parliament used the need of kings for tax revenue to establish this principle of asking for something in return for taxes using the earlier slogan “redress of grievances before supply." 

Polycarp ably explains on the Straight Dope website:

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the title for its presiding officer, as noted, by paralleling the English institution, where there was a Speaker of the House of Commons. And this name came about for historical reasons: back in the early days, when the law was the king’s commands, the Lords and Commons were convened to (1) approve taxes for the benefit of the realm, e.g., defense, the idea being taxes people had a voice in were less resented than those levied by the king alone, and (2) advise the king on the people’s needs and wants, so that he was informed on conditions throughout the realm. To ensure their concerns got listened to, they adopted a policy of "redress of grievances before supply”, i.e., “deal with our complaints before we vote you any money.” They would draft up bills of grievances outlining what was wrong and suggesting what the king might do about it, which eventually took the form of draft legislation prepared for the king to approve. (This is why a not-yet-passed law is a “bill”) The person who would bring the result of the Commons’ deliberations before the King in formal address was its presiding officer, the person who would speak to HM for it – and hence its Speaker.

In my post “Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich,” I wrote:

…human beings want many things, including many intangibles. It is my belief that we can do much better at harnessing these other desires for the common good than we have.

In particular, if we give people something in return for their taxes that increases with the amount of taxes they pay, then their motivation to avoid taxes will not be as strong. Scott Adams himself wrote in “How to Tax the Rich” about 

…how the rich can feel good while the rest of society is rifling through their pockets.

I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.

To encapsulate the idea that–especially if current policy is being altered–the government should give people something in return for their taxes other than just the government spending, let me propose two slogans with the same basic meaning. The formal version is 

No tax increase without recompense.

The colloquial version is 

No tax hike without something to like!

I hasten to say that–especially when leaving aside the benefits of the government spending itself–it would be overoptimistic to hope that the “something to like” will be enough to make those being taxed more heavily actually feel better off. The aim is to lessen the sting and lessen the motivation to avoid the tax.

It might seem utopian to think that these twin slogans could carry any weight in the political sphere. But the Republican Party–stiffened in its resolve by the amazingly effective Grover Norquist–has come surprisingly close in the last few years to enforcing a rule of no tax increases at all at the Federal level. So I do not think it unreasonable to hope to enforce a rule of “No tax increase without recompense.”  On the other side, to those who think that Grover Norquist’s rule of no tax increases at all is too powerful to disobey, let me say that budget constraints are powerful things.

Holding things together in anything like the way to which we are accustomed is likely to be impossible without substantial revenue increases in the future. And any substantial need for revenue increases will hit close to home: there are not enough superrich; so a tax hike that makes a big difference on the revenue front is likely to hit the many who are moderately rich–such as economists, doctors and lawyers–not just the few who are very rich. Therefore, as a matter of self-interest, as well as out of public-spiritedness, I believe it is of great importance to come up with good proposals for tax hikes with something to like. Combining a tax increase with some kind of recompense is crucial both to avoid any hint of class warfare that could fray the social fabric and to keep tax distortions as small as possible. Here, I will make a specific proposal that is so ready to hand that many others have suggested something similar. But the details matter, and I will present my own version. 

Even many economists who otherwise want to simplify the tax code have recognized the special status of the charitable deduction. Greg Mankiw wrote in the New York Times:

THERE are certain tax expenditures that I like. My personal favorite is the deduction for charitable giving. It encourages philanthropy and, thus, private rather than governmental solutions to society’s problems.

The substantive merit of the tax deduction for charitable contributions is also an important point in Matt Yglesias’s post “Tax Reform is Hard and It’s Not Just Politics.”  In my proposal, I want to steer a course between partially balancing out a tax increase by expanding the current tax deduction for charitable contributions and partially balancing out a tax increase by following the proposal Tom Grey gives in his comment to “Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich”:

How about 100% tax credits for …

donating directly to a Federal Gov'tProgram.

Thus, the rich who wantmore Social Security, donate their taxes to that cause.  Or those who want more defense.

I’m pretty sure the rich would donate more taxes if they could choose where their money goes (despite the obvious ease of gov’t budget-makers just reducing the amount of other gov’t spend ).

Heck, such 100% tax credits could, and should, be available for all real taxpayers (not legal fiction corporations).

A key inspiration for my proposal is a trio of tax credits in Michigan State tax law, the public contribution credit, community foundation credit and homeless shelter/food bank credit. Although these credits are severely limited in size, up to that limit they mean that, together with the benefits of the Federal deduction, a taxpayer can get back over 70% of his or her contribution. But the set of organizations eligible for these three Michigan state tax credits is much narrower than the set of organizations eligible for the Federal tax deduction for charitable contributions. My interpretation of the intent of the law is that these three tax credits are meant to encourage people to give in ways that reduce the amount of direct government spending needed by the State of Michigan. For my proposal, let me define a “public contribution” as follows:

A public contribution is a donation to a nonprofit organization meeting high quality standards that engages in activities that (a) could be legitimate, high-priority activities of Federal or State governments and (b) can to an important extent substitute for spending these governments would otherwise be likely to do.

My proposal is to raise marginal tax rates above about $75,000 per person–or $150,000 per couple–by 10% (a dime on every extra dollar), but offer a 100% tax credit for public contributions up to the entire amount of the tax surcharge.

The reason I am not proposing a simple expansion of the current charitable deduction is that I want to make sure that the program helps ease government budget problems in a big way. (Note that, in addition to substituting to an important extent for government spending, these public contributions would crowd out some fraction of regular charitable deductions and increase government revenue in that way.) On the other side, though Tom Grey’s proposal of choosing which government program to support is great for a portion of existing taxes (as I think he intended it) I don’t think it goes far enough for a tax increase. 

Now let me paint the picture of the kinds of effects I think this program of public contributions (the  tax surcharge plus 100% public contribution credit up to the amount of the tax surcharge) would have:

1. Many creative people, with more money to work with, would think of brilliant new ways to help the poor, as well as continuing and expanding tried-and-true ways of helping the poor. 
2. Scientific and medical research would be much better funded than currently.
3. Foreign aid going to ordinary people, not dictators, would dramatically increase. 
4. It would be possible to fund better and cheaper ways to take care of older Americans in their own homes and delay any need for them to go into nursing homes. 
5. Needs that the government is slow in meeting could be addressed more quickly.

The substitute-for-government-spending test in the proposed law is not meant to prevent the total amount of public contributions for some things from going above what the government would do under the current system. Its purpose is simply to make it possible for the government to cut back on some types of spending to an important degree. Although religious congregations would not be directly eligible for public contributions because of the legitimate-activity-of-government test, many already have associated nonprofit organizations that could be eligible. And a large fraction of religious donations are from people who earn less than $75,000 per year. Support of arts enjoyed mainly by the rich, such as opera, might not meet the high-priority test, although the fine arts would still be eligible for the usual deduction for charitable donations. Setting the public contribution goal at 10% of annual income above $75,000 per person should be enough to ensure that nonprofit activities eligible for the public contribution credit are much better funded despite any crowding out or relabeling of existing contributions. There would probably be some reduction in funding for activities not considered important enough to qualify as public contributions–which would occasion much debate about exactly where to set the boundary between “public contributions” and regular charitable contributions–but setting priorities is not a bad thing. 

On the part of the relatively high-income taxpayers who are subject to the combination of tax surcharge and 100% public contribution credit, many would look at the unchanged amount they actually pay the government in the end, after the tax credit, and not think of it as a net tax increase at all. Being required to devote 10% of income above $75,000 per person to public contributions would take some getting used to, but after a while, I think many people would have fun with it. Parents could teach their kids about their social responsibilities by discussing as a family where to devote the family’s public contributions. People might become involved in volunteer work in the same organizations to which they had directed their public contributions. There is joy in giving, and by providing a choice of which organization to give to, my hope is that the joy of giving would be only partially muted by the requirement of giving to some appropriate organization. 

James Madison wrote in the Federalist # 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Since we are not angels, most of us need very strong encouragement to give as much to public causes as the health of our Republic requires. Since those who govern us are not angels, it is best that many of the details be left to each of us to decide individually. To the extent possible, let’s have the government specialize in those important tasks that for one reason or another are not as emotionally rewarding for individuals to donate to and let individuals make decisions about those tasks that are.

People love freedom. Tax increases cannot help harming freedom to some extent. On the cost side, a program of public contributions like the one outlined above comes close to minimizing the harm to freedom from a tax increase. And the benefit side is substantial. In addition to the benefits of steering far away from national bankruptcy, it is hard for me not to think it would be a better world, with greater soft power than ever for the United States of America, if we adopted a program of public contributions like the one I have outlined. 

For more on this idea, see "How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector as a Partial Alternative to Government: A Reader’s Guide"

Occupy Wall Street Video →

A Principles of Macroeconomics Post

This is a great 6-minute video giving a sense of what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and its spinoffs are all about.

For the other side, I would love to identify a video this good that is sympathetic to the “Tea Party” movement. Also, there must be good short videos about the financial crisis and the Great Recession themselves–the financial crisis and Great Recession that were the impetus for both the “Occupy Wall Street” and “Tea Party” movements.   

Scott Adams's Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich

Scott Adams with his creation “Dilbert"

With all the pleasure he has given millions with his Dilbert comics and all of his other incisive Wall Street Journal essays, it is a high standard indeed to say that one particular Wall Street Journal essay is Scott Adam’s finest hour, but I think this is it: “How to Tax the Rich.” Let me know in the comments what other wonderful things there are out there by Scott that can vie for the honor of Scott’s finest hour.  

Even after allowing for comic license, I think I can say that Scott himself is conscious of the value of his own idea, as can be seen from these two passages:

Whenever I feel as if I’m on a path toward certain doom, which happens every time I pay attention to the news, I like to imagine that some lonely genius will come up with a clever solution to save the world. Imagination is a wonderful thing. I don’t have much control over the big realities, such as the economy, but I’m an expert at programming my own delusions.

Try to imagine that the idea that saves the country is an entirely new one. It’s too much of a stretch to imagine that a stale idea would suddenly become acceptable. In fact, that’s the dividing line between imagination and insanity. Only crazy people imagine that bad ideas can suddenly become good if you keep trying them. So let’s assume that our imagined solution is a brand new idea. That feels less crazy and more optimistic. Another advantage is that no one has an entrenched view about an idea that has never been heard.

For those of you with healthy egos—and that would be every reader of The Wall Street Journal—you can make this fantasy extra delicious by imagining that you are the person who comes up with the idea that saves the world. I’ll show you how to imagine that.

Scott’s overall idea is based on a fundamental fact that Giorgio Primiceri pointed out when I talked to him about taxing the rich at CREI in Barcelona in June: because each dollar is worth less and less the richer one is, a wide variety of other things end up mattering more for rich people than money. (On the principle that each dollar is worth less for the rich than for the poor in interpersonal comparisons, see my post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” But the point here is different: here it is about the value of a dollar compared to other things the rich person wants.) One should be careful: sometimes, one of the things that propels someone toward riches is having a greater desire for the things that money can buy than the average person (relative to, say, a desire for leisure time). But still, at some level of riches, the attractions of the things that extra money could directly purchase start to pale in comparison to other things, even for someone who truly loves the things that money can buy.   

Scott writes:

If we accept that the rich can be taxed at a different rate than everyone else, we can also imagine that there could be other differences in how the rich are taxed. That’s the part we can tinker with, and that’s where the bad version comes in. In a minute, I’ll float some bad ideas about how the rich can feel good while the rest of society is rifling through their pockets.

I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.

The trouble with our tax system as it stands–and this has nothing to do with its arithmetic–is that instead our tax system does just about everything possible to make paying taxes a horrible, aversive, demeaning experience for the rich, even apart from the money they surrender.

Although few of us make it into the top 1%, my fellow economists and I definitely count among the moderately rich. Certainly folks as rich as we economists are–or as many other highly-paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers are–need to be taxed relatively heavily in order to get enough revenue to fund the government at anything close to its current level. And we are. With the voice of my late colleague Tom Juster in my head reminding me of the joys of helping the poor through paying my taxes, I don’t personally need one, but I find it remarkable that I have yet to receive a thank you note for paying my taxes.  When I fill out my taxes, I notice that even receipts for $25 donations have thank you notes attached. But for the tens of thousands of dollars I give each year to help keep our wonderful Republic afloat, nothing. Can’t we do a little more as a nation to honor our taxpayers individually? If the First Spouse is willing, how about a thank-you note for every taxpayer signed by the President of the United States and the often much-more-popular First Spouse? (To save on postage, it could be mailed along with the annual Social Security report people get sometime close to their birthdays, for example.) And how about a dinner at the White House honoring the top 100 taxpayers in the country? Not the 100 richest people in the country, but the top 100 taxpayers. One might object that they would just use the opportunity to lobby for lower taxes, but if they did, they wouldn’t get invited the next year. If we honored the top 100 taxpayers like that, maybe they wouldn’t feel like fools for paying their taxes instead of finding some way to evade them like many of their friends and acquaintances.  

A thank you note for every taxpayer and a dinner at the White House honoring the top 100 taxpayers are just two of many possible specific ideas for enlisting the full range of people’s motivations in an effort to make paying taxes something that people won’t try quite as hard to avoid. I promise to work hard to come up with more ideas in future posts, and encourage other bloggers to do the same. In trying to come up with ideas along these lines, I rest easy in the confidence that Scott is covering my flank with much wilder proposals. He explains his approach as follows, picking up after a passage I quoted earlier:

For those of you with healthy egos—and that would be every reader of The Wall Street Journal—you can make this fantasy extra delicious by imagining that you are the person who comes up with the idea that saves the world. I’ll show you how to imagine that.

I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is. I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It’s called “the bad version.” When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can’t yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.

I’ll leave you to read for yourself the specific ideas Scott proposes in “How to Tax the Rich.” They are sure to inspire each of you with the thought “I can do better than that.”

Standard economic models of taxation (such as the one in my post “The Flat Tax, the Head Tax, and the Size of Government: A Tax Parable”) simplify by focusing only on a small list of desires (say consumption purchased in the market, leisure and public goods). But human beings want many things, including many intangibles. It is my belief that we can do much better at harnessing these other desires for the common good than we have. Once upon a time, many Communists made the mistake of thinking that even for the typical individual other motivations could be made to supersede the desires for the things money can buy. Unfortunately, the only desire they found that was reliably stronger was the desire to avoid being shot, sent to Siberia, or the like. But surely we can construct a better society if we recognize the other desires people have at the strength those desires actually have.

Let me end by giving two routine examples of how much people will do for motivations other than money. First, I once received an email from a professor I had known at Harvard, asking why Kim Clark would step down from his position as Dean of Harvard Business School to take a position as President of Brigham Young University-Idaho (the Mormon Church’s second most important university, coming after the better-known Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah). The question arose because in the normal pecking order of academic leadership positions, President of BYU-Idaho is a big step down from Dean of Harvard Business School, and the move probably reduced Kim Clark’s lifetime earning power significantly. My answer was fairly simple: religious motivations that motivated Kim Clark as a believing Mormon.   

Second, although I have already cited it in my post “Copyright,” I love Eli Dourado’s post “Why I Should Blog More” so much, I am going to quote from it here as well. Eli writes:

People still think that the public goods problem is a problem. The naïve view of public goods is often at odds with reality, however. This is especially so when one considers the things we might care most about: our jobs and relationships. In modern society, better jobs and relationships are often the reward for the production of positive externalities. As it turns out, people like to work and socialize with those who create value for others.

This effect is pretty strong. Can you name a person who ended up poor and unhappy because they devoted too many resources to the voluntary production of public goods of actual value to the rest of society? I can’t, at least not off the top of my head.

My standard advice for those few younger people who ask me for it is simply to produce a lot of external value. Don’t worry about being compensated for it right away. If you succeed in producing things that are of value to others, they will want you around, and you will have plenty of rewarding opportunities you would not have had otherwise.

If we could arrange things so that paying taxes to indirectly support public goods could somehow result in the kinds of delayed benefits Eli traces as resulting from directly producing public goods, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about tax distortions.

Matt Yglesias on How the "Stimulus Bill" was About a Lot More Than Stimulus →

Rahm Emanuel (as can be seen in this 13-second video) famously said

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.

Here, Matt Yglesias reviews a new book by Michael Grunwald documenting the ways in which the Obama administration used the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus Bill”) to accomplish many of its other legislative priorities in addition to trying to stimulate the economy. Though many of those other legislative priorities were arguably in the right direction, I think the commingling of stimulus with other efforts having a more partisan coloring accounts for some of the Republican hatred of the Stimulus Bill. This is a good example of the political economy issues I discuss in my post “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football.”

Josh Barro on a Central Issue of Political Economy: Poor vs. Old →

I wanted to link to Josh Barro’s piece because it illustrates how the tradeoff between government support for the poor and government support for the old is showing up in the current political campaign.

The political triumph of the old over the poor is an instance of “Director’s Law.” In my post “Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday With Videos of Milton” I quote Milton’s definition of Aaron Director’s Law:

Director’s Law is, that almost invariably, government programs benefit the middle income class, at the expense of the very poor and the very rich. 

Robert J. Samuelson touches on the related tension between government support for the young and government support for the old in his article “The Withering of the Affluent Society.”

Vipul Naik and Garett Jones on the Robustness of This Unbelievable American System →

In my post “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” I wrote:

We didn’t build this unbelievable American system, and it is not our private property. We don’t have a moral right to exclude other human beings—human beings like us—from the benefits of this unbelievable American system. As stewards of this unbelievable American system, we need to regulate the pace of arrival so that the system itself is not overwhelmed and destroyed, but unless this unbelievable American system itself is threatened, let us open our doors wide to others who have not had the good fortune to be born Americans.    

(“This unbelievable American system” is Barack’s phrase.) Vipul Naik and Garett Jones argue, as I would argue as well, that it is not that easy to overwhelm “this unbelievable American system” with new arrivals.

Evan Soltas on Medical Reform Federalism—in Canada →

In my post “Health Economics” I propose (in effect, if not in so many words) that in place of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) states be allowed to experiment with different ways to provide universal access to medical care. On Twitter (as storified in “Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Balancing the Budget in the Long Run”), I have sharpened that proposal to what can be translated out of Twitter shorthand to this:

Let’s abolish the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance, with all of the money that would have been spent on this tax exemption going instead to block grants for each state to use for its own plan to provide universal access to medical care for its residents.

Evan Soltas argues here that a somewhat decentralized approach in this spirit has worked well in Canada, for at least a part of its medical spending.

Larry Summers on the Reality of Trying to Shrink Government →

A Principles of Macroeconomics Post

This is a crystal clear description of how hard it is to avoid the need for substantial government revenue increases in the future–even as a percentage of GDP. The reality Larry Summers describes is why I am so focused on the dilemma I talk about in my first post, “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?”   

Gavyn Davies on the Political Debate about Economic Uncertainty →

This is a good introduction to the political debate about the role of economic uncertainty in our current economic troubles, plus a good discussion of Keynes’s views about uncertainty.

Persuasion

Jane Austen’s book Persuasion–unrelated to the post, but a good book

I had a wide-ranging question and answer session with the Ann Arbor Science and Skeptics group yesterday about this blog. The one theme I emphasized throughout the Q&A was how good it feels to be unabashedly normative in the sense of making recommendations and making moral arguments as well as technical arguments. Even the concept of a moral argument is interesting. How can one get beyond solipsistic relativism such as the following? 

You have your opinions and I have mine, and all opinions are equally worthy, so we can’t really have a discussion.

Coming to that question as a math guy, I have always thought that persuasion needs to start with the axioms of the person I am trying to persuade. As a blogger, I have to guess the axioms–core beliefs that are fundamental in the sense that they cannot be deduced from other beliefs–of a large number of people all at once. And to the extent that people come from different places, I have to write posts that alternately work from the axioms of different parts of my audience. In order to do my job as a blogger better, I would love to hear about your axioms in the comments.  

Postscript: In the Q&A session at Ann Arbor Science and Skeptics, I realized that there are two areas of nonpartisan activism I would like to recommend:

1. If you agree with what I said in my post “When the Government Says ‘You May Not Have a Job,’” resisting the creep of excessive licensing restrictions on jobs is an area where a little activist effort could go a long way. I suspect that at many of the state-house hearings behind decisions to impose additional licensing restrictions, only the politicians and paid lobbyists are in attendance. Having groups of public-spirited Supply-Side Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians and Progressives who see what is at stake for the poor and for freedom send representatives to these hearings could make a big difference.
2. Many people may not realize the extent to which political polarization in the House of Representatives arises from partisan and pro-incumbent redistricting. When electoral districts are designed to be either safe Republican or safe Democratic districts, then the main fear for a politician seeking reelection is losing in the primary. That typically pulls members of the House of Representatives toward the extremes. Nonpartisan redistricting is a way to have more districts be competitive in the general election and so make those running for Congress worry more about the general election relative to how much they worry about the primary. I believe this would pull politicians toward to center and toward a greater willingness to work with those in the other party. Getting change to happen in this area will be hard, but there are groups already working on this. I believe the long-run value to our Republic of nonpartisan redistricting would be substantial.

Postpostscript: I wanted to thank the large number of people who sent birthday congratulations for me. I tried not to tell anyone online my birthday, but Facebook did it for me. I turned 52 on August 17. It is amazing to think there are as many years behind me as there are weeks in a year. I really appreciate hearing so many kind wishes and kind words from you all.  

Update, 2013: On August 17, 2013, I turned 53. I was born in 1960. 1960 was a high birth-rate year, but it was one of the last high-birth-rate years in the baby boom. I have always felt younger than the baby boomers described in popular culture. 

Ezra Klein’s Graph

When the Government Says ‘You May Not Have a Job’

A Street Vendor in Florida

In one of the videos I flag in my post “Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday with Videos of Milton,” Milton defines Aaron Director’s law: 

Director’s Law is, that almost invariably, government programs benefit the middle income class, at the expense of the very poor and the very rich.

But sometimes, the rich and the middle class both gang up on the poor. This is nowhere more in evidence than in the area of occupational licensing. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Chip Mellor writes:

More than 100 low-income and moderate-income occupations require licenses somewhere in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. They range from the understandable (school bus driver, emergency medical technician) to the ridiculous: interior designer, makeup artist, florist.

These licenses don’t come cheap. On average, they force aspiring workers to spend nine months in education or training, pass one exam and pay more than $200 in fees (as documented in the Institute of Justice study “License to Work”). One-third of the licenses take more than a year to earn. Rather than working, these individuals spend time and money jumping through hoops for the government’s permission to work.

Once an occupational licensing regime is set up, one factor making the system hard to change is that those who “paid their dues” to get the license resent the idea that others could do what they do without a license. But even before an occupational licensing regime is set up, an important impetus is often those within a field who resent the idea that others who do lower quality work should be allowed to tarnish the reputation of a field. There is a problem here. It is often a low level of skills that puts someone in the position of being poor. Therefore, to say that no one should be allowed to put up a shingle to do cheap, low-quality work is often to say that a poor person should not be allowed to work. But somehow, the poor who look so sympathetic in other contexts start looking like “riffraff” when they are the competition.

How can we square free entry into occupations with high quality for those who want high quality? In my post “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School,” I suggest that 

… the stratification into different quality levels should be handled by the market as much as possible (and by government fiat as little as possible), with continually improved web-based ratings mechanisms.

Nevertheless, if political forces are insistent that something must be done by government, there is all the difference in the world between government regulation of labels and government regulation of substance. For example, under current Michigan law, you are not allowed to call yourself a “massage therapist” without a relatively high level of training. But you are allowed to do the same work as a massage therapist without special training as long as you call yourself a “body worker.” Although there is little doubt that this kind of regulation can be an aid to schemes to “keep the riffraff out,”  where the forces of competition are otherwise strong it can be argued that this kind of regulation provides extra information to consumers without actually blocking any freely-agreed-upon economic activity.    

To the extent that even the urge toward substantive occupational licensing cannot be resisted because of at least superficially plausible arguments about health and safety, it might be possible to get a better balance by imposing some kind of global budget constraint on licensing requirements that forces regulation to focus on those requirements that have the least specious justifications. Again from my post “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School,” in the context of arguing for a longer school year, I write:

Others argue that health and safety and basic competence really do require training even for many jobs that sound easy, such as cutting hair or cutting nails. 

What I want to do is to restrain the tendency to go overboard on occupational licensing while allowing genuinely necessary competencies to be transmitted by requiring states to ensure that their schools high school tracks that would make it reasonably possible to be meet the legal qualifications for any of at least 60% of all licensed occupations, with each student able to be qualified with his or her high school diploma for at least 10% of all licensed occupations. Then the graduates might actually be able to get a job. This requirement for getting the Federal education grant could be met by any combination of reducing licensing requirements and increasing effective training that each state chose. I am sure that states would game the rule, so that the overall effect would be less than what this sounds on the surface, but it would be better than the way things are now, where students graduating from high school are kept out of many of the more desirable occupations by occupational licensing restrictions.  

Although occupational licensing is a major way in which the government says “You may not have a job” to the poor, sometimes the restrictions on economic activity by the poor are even more blatant. Here again from 

Chip Mellor in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Sometimes the hoops can’t be squeezed through, as Silvio Membreno of Miami has learned. Mr. Membreno seeks to do what countless immigrants have done before him: Come to America and provide for his young family as a street vendor, then grow that business into something bigger and better. Without much need for investment capital or formal education, street vendors can be their own bosses while climbing the economic ladder.

But the Nicaraguan immigrant’s dreams are being dashed by the city of Hialeah, the Miami suburb where he works. Hialeah city officials make it impossible to be an effective street vendor.

They bar vendors from selling within a football field of brick-and-mortar stores that sell the “same or similar merchandise.” They force vendors, unless in the middle of a transaction, to remain in constant motion when they would much rather stay put, sell and be safe. Vendors are even prohibited from displaying their merchandise anywhere on public or private property, even if they have the permission of the property owner. In a country with a long history of street vendors, local governments nationwide are increasingly quashing this traditional form of bootstraps entrepreneurship.

What I don’t want you to miss is the injustice of telling someone he or she may not work if the only job he or she can find is one that creates too much competition for groups who are politically more powerful.

Kevin Hassett, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw and John Taylor Need to Answer This Post of Brad DeLong's Point by Point →

This is an important challenge by Brad DeLong to what Kevin, Glenn, Greg and John have said in defense of Mitt’s economic policy statements. They need to answer Brad. 

I have a cameo in Brad’s post. He writes:

Some economists–Miles Kimball comes to mind–think that the ultimate Romney plan will turn out to be something sensible, but that Romney cannot say what it is because doing so would disrupt the con Romney is currently running on the Republican base. Miles may be right. I fear he is overoptimistic.

I do think that Mitt is more sensible than he makes himself sound, but if I can manage to avoid a Bayesian arithmetic error, the current Intrade probabilities of 43.0% for Mitt becoming president together with the 27.7% Intrade probability of the Presidency, the Senate and the House all being controlled by Republicans imply that, conditional on Mitt being elected, there is something like a 27.7%/43.0% = .644 = 64.4% chance that Mitt will face two houses of Congress both controlled by Republicans. I think Mitt will make many serious mistakes if he is working with a Republican Senate and a Republican House of Representatives. 

Mitt’s performance as president will be much better if he faces either a Senate or a House of Representatives in Democratic control. Then the reality of working with a divided government will cause many unwise campaign promises to fall by the wayside. The more Mitt is forced by circumstances to improvise, the more his underlying good sense will come out. But unfortunately, Mitt, if he is elected, may well lack the strong Democratic checks and balances he needs to be as good a president as he could be.

More optimistically, it may well be that in the next two years between the presidential election and the midterm election we have reason to be grateful for how difficult it is to avoid filibusters in the Senate.  

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Giving Credit: This post was inspired by ProGrowthLiberal’s post at Econospeak: “Team Romney Responds to Paul Krugman but not to Brad DeLong. ProGrowthLiberal say this:

Greg Mankiw lets us know that John Taylor has responded to a brief critique from Paul Krugman. John tells us that “Paul Krugman is Wrong”. Odd that neither Greg nor John addressed the savage review from Brad DeLong. It would have been impossible to miss Brad’s critique since Paul not only linked to it but based much of what he wrote on Brad’s review. So what are we to make of this omission from Team Romney? Do they agree with everything Brad said? Or are they just not willing to have an open and honest debate on the issues?

I noticed ProGrowthLiberal’s post because Mark Thoma flagged it on his Economist’s View site–which serves a crucial aggregator role for independent economics blogs in addition to carrying Mark Thoma’s own posts.  

Technical Note: Tumblr link posts such as this one are intended to emphasize what they are pointing to: in this case, Brad’s post. So the title of my post is a link to Brad’s. To find the address of one of my link posts, you can always use the "All posts by date” button on the sidebar.  In this case, the address is 

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/29630504620/kevin-hassett-glenn-hubbard-greg-mankiw-and-john

Style Guide Note: In order to emphasize the equality of all human beings, in posts appearing on supplysideliberal.com, I lean toward referring to public figures as well as others by their first names. (Of course, I only follow that rule as long as it does not get in the way of clarity or conflict too much with other stylistic considerations. I am less consistent in using first names in tweets, since there, readers don’t have as much chance to get used to it.)  

Conflict of Interest Notice: Mitt is a relative, though not that close. His father George Romney (the former Governor of Michigan) was my grandmother Camilla Eyring Kimball’s first cousin. I am named after our common ancestor Miles Park Romney.

Other Posts Inspired by the Presidential Campaign

Mitt:

• “Rich, Poor and Middle-Class”
• “Corporations are People, My Friend”
• “Big Brother Speaks: Christian Kimball on Mitt Romney”

Paul (Ryan):

• “The Paul Ryan Tweets”
• “Matthew O'Brien on Paul Ryan’s Monetary Policy Views”

Barack:

• “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition”