Paul M. Jones

If the government raises the tax rate on you and all of your friends, and then divides up all the tax revenue and dumps it from a helicopter, what do you get?  Well, none of the money gets wasted, so the tax hike doesn't have a direct income effect (there's a small indirect one I'll ignore here). 

If the tax hike is used for pure redistribution from the "average person" back to the "average person," then the tax hike doesn't make the "average person" poorer: The government is taking money out of everyone's right pocket and slipping it into their left.  

But if the income effect is gone, what's left?  The disincentive to work: The pure substitution effect. 

So here's Prescott's Big Idea: 

If higher taxes are wasted, then a tax hike has a small, ambiguous effect on employment.

If higher taxes are spent wisely, then a tax hike causes a big fall in employment.

Not quite what you expected, was it?  

I wonder if it's true. (Emphasis in original.) Via Tax Rates, Efficient Government, and Jobs: Prescott's Surprise, Garett Jones | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

Interviewed on the BBC in 1994, [Eric Hobsbawm] was asked whether he would have shunned the Communist Party had he known in 1934 that Stalin was butchering innocent human beings by the millions. “Probably not,” he answered -- after all, at the time he believed he was signing up for world revolution. Taken aback by such indifference to carnage, the interviewer pressed the point. Was Hobsbawm saying that if a communist paradise had actually been created, “the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm’s answer: “Yes.”

Imagine that Hobsbawm had fallen in love with Nazism as a youth and spent the rest of his career whitewashing Hitler’s atrocities. Suppose he’d refused for decades to let his Nazi Party membership lapse, and argued that the Holocaust would have been an acceptable price to pay for the realization of a true Thousand-Year Reich. It is inconceivable that he would have been hailed as a brilliant thinker or basked in acclaim; no self-respecting university would have hired him to teach; politicians and pundits would not have lined up to shower him with accolades during his life and tributes after his death.

Yet Hobsbawm was fawned over, lionized in the media, made a tenured professor at a prestigious university, invited to lecture around the world. He was heaped with glories, including the Order of the Companions of Honour -- one of Britain’s highest civilian awards -- and the lucrative Balzan Prize, worth 1 million Swiss francs. His death was given huge play in the British media -- the BBC aired an hour-long tribute and the Guardian led its front page with the news -- and political leaders waxed fulsome. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair called him “a giant … a tireless agitator for a better world.”

Such adoration is sickening. Unrepentant communists merit repugnance, not reverence.

Emphasis mine. Via A true moral giant and a dogmatic leftist creep - Opinion - The Boston Globe.

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. 

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued  quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.

This stands in sharp contrast  to the release of the previous  figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.

Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.

It's science! Via Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it | Mail Online.

Building luxury resorts for the rich helps to refine a technology that can in turn be used to benefit the poor in places such as Bangladesh, where flooding regularly destroys lives and livelihoods.

"So we let the rich pay for the innovation for the poor," he said.

via Dutch architect dreams of future floating cities | Reuters.

“Actual AP Headline: ‘Experts: Global Warming Means More Antarctic Ice,’” as spotted by Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters.

Which sounds remarkably reminiscent of this actual L. A. Times headline from 2010: “Why cleaner air could speed global warming.”

Or this Reuters lede from last year:

"Smoke belching from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur’s cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday."

(Paging the Dr. Stranglove-esque John Holdren who suggested launching rockets full of pollution into the upper atmosphere in the early days of the Obama administration -- you’re wanted in the Moral Equivalent of War Room.)

Given that global warming causes everything, no wonder, as Steve Hayward wrote last year at Power Line, “Climate Change Has Become the ‘Dead Parrot Sketch’ of American Politics.”

But when will Washington’s Joke Warfare against the American public finally come to an end?

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » GLOBAL WARMING: IS THERE NOTHING IT CAN’T DO? “Actual AP Headline: ‘Experts: Global Warming Mean….

They condemn, but their words alone will not prevent future occurrences. I say, execute the shooter in public. That'll be a deterrent.

Malala’s shooting is only the most public example of the Taliban’s brutality and despicable attitudes toward women and girls. There are probably thousands of similarly ugly stories that don’t make international headlines. Nevertheless, it’s heartening to see widespread anti-Taliban sentiment in Pakistan, however long it lasts. The best hope for the country is that the domestic reaction against fanatical barbarism  will discredit radical ideology and shame political and military leaders into acting to defend the pillars of decency and toleration.

via Just About Everyone in Pakistan Condemns Shooting of 14-Year-Old Girl | Via Meadia.

The most stable country in the history of mankind, and probably the most boring, by the way, is Switzerland. It's not even a city-state environment; it's a municipal state. Most decisions are made at the local level, which allows for distributed errors that don't adversely affect the wider system. Meanwhile, people want a united Europe, more alignment, and look at the problems. The solution is right in the middle of Europe -- Switzerland. It's not united! It doesn't have a Brussels! It doesn't need one.

...

We need smaller, more decentralized government. On paper, it might appear much more efficient to be large -- to have economies of scale. But in reality, it's much more efficient to be small. An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

...

The U.S. government should have no deficit. There's way too much debt. It is inexcusable when you have the highest standards of living in the nation's history! When you get rich, you should have less debt. There's a vicious element to borrowing when you're very rich, and having a deficit is an extremely dangerous game.

via Epiphanies from Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Foreign Policy.

I just came across this rather chilling interview Ed Yong did with scientific investigator Uri Simonsohn back in July.  Simonsohn has bee looking for evidence of fraud in social science research--and finding a really disturbing amount of it. "I don’t know how systemic the crime is." Simohnson told Yong.  "What’s systemic is the lack of defences. Social psychology -- and science in general -- doesn’t have sufficient mechanisms for preventing fraud. I doubt that fabrication is any worse in psychology than in other fields. But I’m worried by how easy it was for me to come across these people."  

Read the whole thing. Short version: there are a lot of studies that cannot be replicated, but they still pass as "science." Bushwah. Via Searching for Fraud - The Daily Beast.

Update: From the comments; disturbing if true:

I have a good friend that is a PHD in BioMed. He went through engineering with me and then stuck around to get a couple of masters in mechanical and chemical engineering before jumping into BioMed. His observation is that close to 80% of all medical studies are flawed, half due to poor statistical controls and half due to fraud. Several years ago he caught a new superstar PHD committing fraud by dramatically manipulating his results to fit the curve. Despite the overwhelming evidence the PHD was still offered tenure because his "results" brought in funding and publications.

The average female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength... An Army study of 124 men and 186 women done in 1988 found that women are more than twice as likely to suffer leg injuries and nearly five times as likely to suffer fractures as men.

The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about the physical differences between men and women that can be summarized as follows:

Women's aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.

In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.

The same report also cited a West Point study from the early 90s which discovered that, in terms of fitness, the upper quintile of female cadets achieved scores equal to the lowest quintile of their male counterparts.

via In From the Cold: Too Many White Guys.

In all the argument over whether conservatives were taking "you didn't build that" out of context, few on the left acknowledged that he was trying to say what Warren had said to such acclaim from the Democratic base. Even in context, the argument that accomplishment in business is collective is deeply offensive to most people in business, at least when they are not camouflaging themselves at a college town cocktail party. Since many liberals are genuinely baffled about why this should be so, I shall try to explain. Suffice it to say that the reasons are legion.

The very argument is disingenuous. Neither mainstream Republicans nor the Tea Party activists who drove the 2010 election are against public roads, public education, police departments, firefighters (Warren) or, even, technology spin-offs from necessary spending on national defense (Obama, re the Internet). There has been a broad national consensus around each of these for between 100 and 200 years (I am sure we all remember that Eli Whitney's invention of interchangeable parts was in the context of defense spending). To suggest otherwise is to erect and demolish a straw man ...

Even if, as a liberal might respond, there are many other examples of government spending that helps "successful" people (in Obama's expression) or factory builders (in Warren's), the argument is still a straw man. The argument today is not between minimal government and Communism. Today government at all levels accounts for 39% of GDP, up from 33% or so during the now halcyon Clinton years. That range defines the mainstream debate -- most Republicans would be thrilled to return government's share of GDP to Clinton-era levels, and most Democrats would be outraged. The range might expand to 46% or so at the high end if one includes the 80-100 Democrats in the House who would fully nationalize health care, and falls to perhaps 30% at the bottom if one includes the most conservative Tea Partiers who would privatize Social Security. But that is the widest possible scope of the disagreement, and under no circumstances does it contemplate that we should do away with roads, police, teachers, firefighters, or national defense. To suggest otherwise, as Warren and Obama have done, is so transparently dishonest that it can only be explained as an attack on "successful" people for political advantage. They noticed.

All emphasis mine. Via TigerHawk.