by publius
Paul Krugman speaketh wisdom:
So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression
after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government. . . . All in all, then, the government has played a crucial stabilizing role
in this economic crisis. Ronald Reagan was wrong: sometimes the private
sector is the problem, and government is the solution.
One of the long-term challenges for progressives is to rehabilitate the idea of government. To achieve this goal, however, the public needs to see all the ways that government benefits them personally. After all, that's why progressives are progressives. We think the way we do because we think government can play (and has played) an extremely valuable role in people's lives. Otherwise, I wouldn't writing this, and you wouldn't be reading it.
The problem, though, is that the benefits of government quickly become invisible. People benefit from government, but don't always realize that political struggles made those benefits possible.
That's why the Laffer quote was so unintentionally revealing. I'm sure Arthur Laffer knows that Medicare is a government program. But the reason why that fact probably slipped his mind for a second is because Medicare has become so interwoven into the fabric of everyday life that it's assumed to be part of the natural order. That's why you hear stories of people saying, "Keep government out of my Medicare."
But that's just one example. Life is full of invisible examples of government benefits we never think about. The free market didn't bring about the weekend, or clean air. It didn't create universal education, and neither did it provide universal health care for the elderly. It didn't desegregate our schools. It couldn't save the banking system — there was a series of interventions that kept it from collapsing and got it back on its feet.
But all these things quickly fade into the background like an invisible platform.
That's why I sometimes wish life had a show/hide function similar to the one in Word that shows or hides formatting. We could click it, and reveal all the ways that political choices have improved our lives.
Of course, government isn't always good — see, e.g., sugar subsidies, spectrum regulation. And markets do many things very, very well. But the demagoguery that the idea of government is receiving in the health coverage debate is completely undeserved.
But it's hard to convince skeptical people otherwise until they are persuaded to change their visceral underlying hostility to the idea of government. Showing them all the benefits they receive can hopefully help on that front.
But my link of Paul Krugman chatting with Charlie Stross about the future (transcript) is so much more interesting. 🙂
(It’s at the bottom of that post with a lot of links; oh, ok, you can go right here if you hate me, and aren’t interested in finding out what the other links are.)
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” —Gerld Ford
The second we signed onto standing armies is the second we got a government that can take everything we have. So you’ll have to excuse me laughing at the Ford quote. Of course the idea of anyone quoting Gerald Ford in and of itself is also hilarious. But back on point, the point of a representative democracy with constitutional limits is to restrict government tyranny. The fact we agree to operate our system the way we do does much more to stop tyranny then any imaginary conservative yearnings for limited government.
In other news, cabs constantly honking their horns keep lions off the streets of New York.
close italics
Oh ho… CharlesWT, you’re claiming there was never gonna be a financial meltdown? Didja wanna back that up with, I don’t know.. anything?
And here I thought I was a progressive because I believed in the progression of mankind and society, instead of conserving it like a, you know, conservative.
The goverment either wasn’t big enough yet to teach Gerald Ford now to spell his name properly — or — it big became so large that it took his “a” away from him.
“But tHe reason why that fact probably slipped his mind fr a second …
Arthur Laughter wins another round from the silly ironic progressives ….
On the other invisible hand, who stole my “n” and my “o”?
The invisible hand, being one-handed, never washes itself and spreads disease and pestilence throughout the land.
The visible hand needs to make a fist and coerce that gun out of the invisible hand.
If I were you, I’d never let the invisible hand put on the invisible glove and palpate your prostate. You might lose your health insurance and never regain it because of a
pre-esisting condition, and then the invisible hand will high-five itself and tell the world what a snap it is to screw so many over.
Th invisible hand is a death panel unto itself and fondles little uninsured little boys and girls and gives the unemployed the back of its invisible hand.
I’d fix the italics, but Typepad won’t let me log in anymore. I’m guessing that Typepad’s new case-sensitive login is to blame, or the current blogowner changed the password.
Any prorgess on switching to a new blogging platform here at ObWi?
we’ve been over this: [/p][/i][/p][/i]
also, anyone with access to the ObWi template could make a simple two line change that would prevent italics from leaking out of a comment: start the comment template with [table][tr][td] and end it with [/td][/tr][/table].
formatting doesn’t extend across table boundaries.
Cleek, you’re speaking a foreign language.
Cleek, you’re speaking a foreign language.
it’s from the small but proud country of Aychtee Emmell.
Thank you for those links, Gary. I like Paul Krugman a little more now, and it fits well with the Frederik Pohl appreciation I was ginning up year or two ago–I had no idea he kept a blog!
K
One thing to note: those “keep the government off my Medicare” stories have two possible interpretations.
One is that they don’t realize Medicare is government-run.
The other is that they do realize this, but fear Medicare funding will be cut to pay for new coverage for the uninsured. This is not true either, but is at theoretically plausible.
Not to give Laffer too much credit, but when I watched the video, I took him to mean that Medicare was an example of the ruinous influence of government, not that Medicare is in danger of being ruined by government influence. i.e. he already thinks Medicare is a failure. Am I alone (at least among lefties) in this interpretation?
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” —Gerald Ford
You know, a very small government can take everything you have. The question of size is almost irrelevant.
If you don’t want a government that can take everything you have, the government you want is one that is transparent, accountable, and responsive.
That’s got nothing to do with size.
On the topic of government “giving you everything you want”, here’s what I want.
I want a modest life-long grant so I can quit my job and spend my days studying drums. I’m a good drummer, I wouldn’t waste the $$$.
I want a travel stipend so I can study all the ways in which the traditional African bell pattern shows up, both in African music and throughout the various cultures that make up the African diaspora. It’s a really interesting topic.
I want my stepson to quit being a knucklehead 20-something and get on top of his health issues.
I want to have met my wife ten years earlier, so that we could have that much more time together.
I want a red 1965 Alfa Giulia Super, mint, with a five-speed manual transmission.
Will the government give me these things? I’d consider giving them quite a lot if they would.
What the government actually takes away from me, all in, is probably 40-45% of my gross income. Plus or minus.
What I get for that includes:
40-45% is a heavy hit. But I have no idea what all of the above, and all of the things I can’t think of off the top of my head, would cost me to buy through private markets.
The other thing my money goes to, which doesn’t benefit me directly, is assistance to the people around me who don’t make as much money as I do. In general, they get food, help with shelter and maybe utilities, and basic medical insurance.
Not “whatever they want”, just the basics to keep them alive and basically healthy.
And yeah, maybe they occasionally splurge and blow my hard-earned cash on a six-pack, a steak, or a gallon of ice cream.
I have everything I need in life, really, I have no problem if someone has a beer or a dish of ice cream on me.
No, the government is not going to take everything you have. They’re not going to tell you what car to drive, what color jacket to wear, who to marry, how many kids to have, or whether to play the alto saxophone.
Yes, the government is going to take some of your money — maybe a lot of your money — and give it to other people. They’re going to do that either to do stuff that needs doing, or they’re going to do that to help folks that need a hand.
Get the f**k over it, please. Please.
Gerald Ford was a decent guy in lots of ways, but the sentiment he expresses in the quote is horsesh*t.
Thanks –
The invisibility problem is a problem of almost all good systemic things. There is a reason why the market is called the inivisible hand. 🙂
“The market” is not referred to as “the invisible hand,” Sebastian. At least not by Adam Smith or by anyone who understands the concept.
Gromit:
Brilliant minds like Laffer’s can hold two thoughts simultaneously, depending on the ends to which they are the means.
Yes, Medicare is a failure because government runs it and Medicare will be ruined if government ever gets its hands on it.
Medicare is whatever the lying unAmerican scum in the Republican Party tell the lying unAmerican scum in the media tell Arthur Laughter’s mother and grandmother it is.
Also, this:
Thanks, Russell.
Good comment.
And if you figure out how to get the Alfa let me know.
The standard GOP/conservative knock on Medicare is that “it’s going broke”, so it’s obviously a failed big-government program. Of course, none of the angry just-plain folks at the town halls want Big Government to cancel this “failed” program.
I think there is a sense in which I myself might say “keep your government hands off my Medicare”. To the extent that “government” means “the political party currently in power”, I certainly don’t want programs like Medicare and Social Security being run differently depending on whether Republicans or Democrats are in office.
It’s too much to expect consistency from the unhinged shouters at the town halls, but it would be nice if in fact Social Security and Medicare came to be thought of consistently as NOT part of “government spending”. They are managed by government, but they are in fact mutual insurance pools funded by their ultimate beneficiaries. If you want to call them “government spending”, abolish FICA and pay benefits out of general revenues.
–TP
Eric: The way that TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, and most other hosted blogging services work is they have templates for all the various parts of the blog that get reused. So for instance, the sidebar links might be one template, the top banner another, and there’s a template for the contents of blog posts and a separate one for how each comment is laid out–and sometimes for individual parts of the comments, like the header or footer, or the user content.
These templates contain chunks of HTML, the plain-text code in which web sites are written. So when it comes time to render the comments, it pulls up the comment template and spits it out over and over again on the page, plugging in the actual data for each comment where it’s appropriate.
The <i>italics</i> tags are a type of HTML tag used for formatting. Tables are exactly what you’d expect them to be if you’ve used a spreadsheet: a rectangular structure on the page organized into cells. These cells are used to organize the layout of most web sites. The effect of formatting tags like <i> ends at the boundaries between tables.
Right now the source of your last comment looks like this:
Ignore the 6a00d834515c2369e20120a4e4515f970b–that’s the ID code unique to each comment. The important part is this:
While taking care not to change the variables in the template that stand for the stuff that’s different every time (date, comment text, name) you need to change it to this:
I suspect that any number of longtime regulars here–myself and cleek included–could make that change in about ten seconds if we had access to the templates. I can’t speak for him, but I’d be willing to.
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
Just for clarity, Gerald Ford was quoting Thomas Jefferson.
Regardless of the current arguments over the size of government, this is a cautionary note not to be completely ignored.
Ford may have thought he was quoting Jefferson, but if so he was probably mistaken.
“Medicare is whatever the lying unAmerican scum in the Republican Party tell the lying unAmerican scum in the media tell Arthur Laughter’s mother and grandmother it is.”
Is this really necessary? Is it really required to make a point?
Well technically the invisible hand is just evolution where productive traits are selected for, and unproductive traits are selected against, in economic transactions mediated by the market. This evolution provides an enormous benefit which is normally unrecognized, much as government benefits can go unrecognized. Hence publius’ joke about invisible hand vs. invisible hand…
I know, jokes are less funny when they have to be explained.
“You know, a very small government can take everything you have.”
Ask Somalis.
“Is it really required to make a point?”
John Thullen is never really required to make a point. He’s a local institution.
Or locked up in one. It’s hard to be clear.
“I suspect that any number of longtime regulars here–myself and cleek included–could make that change in about ten seconds if we had access to the templates.”
A number of us, including those of us who know only enough HTML to speak a few phrases, have been pointing out for several years — since Moe left — that you can’t run a blog in HTML without having at least advisors to consult who know HTML.
This is why ObWi’s functions have been broken for years. I’ve simply never understood why this has been allowed to continue when a continuous supply of volunteers repeatedly volunteers to help out. Someone has to take charge and be in charge of maintaining the working aspects of a blog, including the sidebar, blogroll, spam, answering the email, maintaining the HTML, and all the boring nitty-gritty maintenance details.
Preferably there should also be as much transparency as is reasonable in how and why things are done the way they are done. These are all things ObWi could work to improve.
If people are actively made aware of specific measures being worked on to fix broken things, rather than vague assurances that something will happen, but it never does, they’ll be a lot happier. Regular updates are A Good Thing.
(The way that all us commenters have known about what’s going on to fix ObWi, or follow-through on the stated goal of moving to another platform, for several years now is that every few months someone would say “we’re working on it,” and that’s it, is not a positive example, I regret to say, of a good way of doing things.)
You have a lot of folks willing to volunteer to help out, if someone will just take charge of coordinating them.
But first we have to know who will be doing that.
And the way you do it on a large blog, where you can’t hire and pay someone to work on it full time or even largely part time, is that you coordinate the efforts of a volunteer community. You put their skills together and crowdsource. You use what knowledge there already is that is out there in how to maintain a healthy environment for a large blog discussion community. ObWi’s main asset, frankly, is its community. It needs active maintenance. Having working HTML is part of a system of not having lots of visibly broken windows in the project.
Perhaps the very first step would be a “Maintaining ObWi In The New Era” thread for discussion of such issues?
Of course, then we move on to the armed vigilante groups, and shooting the homeless.
No, wait, those are the practices we want to discourage. See, you’ve got to know which things have and haven’t worked and where.
Actually, Marty, it may be a wonderful maxim, but it has no real applicability IMO. Any government which has the exclusivety on the use of force can take everything away, and considering the current weapon systems out there, unless we start letting private citizens own tanks, war planes, and everything else a modern army needs, well the world has changed, and any modern functioning western government already has it.
If you want we can gnash our teeth and wail, tear at our hair over these changes – but the fundamental fact is that any government that wants to be able to project power and defend itself in a non-developing/non-third world environment is capable of taking anything that it wants.
The question is then, where do we go from that acceptance?
“And if you figure out how to get the Alfa let me know.”
I’d like one of these, please. So far as I know, no one is using them for anything useful, anyway.
To be sure, speaking of maintenance, upkeep would be a bitch. But it would keep me off the streets, and out of trouble. Aside from an occasional torpedo launch or two.
No, it is and always was a cute but banal oversimplification of a very complex subject. It’s about as meaningful as saying, “A truck large enough to ship interstate goods is large enough to kill anyone it hits.” Well, no sh1t. But in the real world, as long as the truck is competently driven by a sober licensed driver on well-maintained roads that are patrolled by public safety officers who do their best to ensure everyone obeys the rules of the road, that tends not to happen.
Similarly, while it is broadly true that the more power government has to make our lives better, the greater its potential for abuse, the answer to that is not to abdicate government solutions for improving the lives of its citizens, but rather to enact sensible precautions and regulations that inhibit and punish those transgressions, expand transparency and oversight, and maintain the checks and balances in our system of government.
Incidentally, it’s the government that maintains those roads, licenses those drivers, defines the laws of the road, and trains and pays those officers to patrol them. I don’t know about you, but I like the government involved in doing all of that just fine. In fact, I could think of a few more things I’d be happy to pay a little bit more in taxes in order to support.
“Actually, Marty, it may be a wonderful maxim, but it has no real applicability IMO.”
I think we do a reasonably good job of it. I set aside the current size argument because that is historically relative.
I think the idea is to be vigilant, which I think the American people are. Almost every major expansion of government is created with lots of discussion. Sure the constant little things add up, but each sizable step gets reviewed pretty well.
On the website front, I don’t think we’re allowed access to the underlying html under our Typepad plan. I did have this access at Blogger. I haven’t looked for a while, but I know the former practice was that we didn’t see it. (We can see the underlying html for posts).
As for the move, we’re still working on that. Getting the comments bumped up to 100 was the most urgent thing. But WordPress designs are in the works (with other potential developments…:)
A red Alfa Giulia Super.
I will gladly pledge my undying obeisance to any government that promises to hand these out.
Give me liberty, or death, or an Alfa Guilia Super.
Of course, I live in New England, and it would be reduced to a pile of rust after about two winters. That would, indeed, be a sin.
So it’s probably better that we government expansion to broadening the public health insurance options.
Thus far and no further!
Uh… you may want to get some second opinions about which WorpPress features you want integrated, if that’s what you’re considering.
Balloon Juice “upgraded” to some fancy WP features a while back. It added such coolness as the ability to edit your own comments, a WYSIWIG editor, and an as-you-type preview. Nifty.
Unfortunately, the WYSIWIG editor is a complete piece of crap. Instead of simply stripping out dangerous or questionable HTML, it tries to interpret the HTML itself with its own internal engine–and it does an unequivocally terrible job of it, butchering blockquotes and formatting and new lines with great regularity. Worse, the auto-preview won’t always show you the way your comment will be butchered, so you sometimes can’t tell until you’ve already posted it. And if your finger happens to stutter on the < or > key, the auto-preview code will lock up your whole browser.
The spam filter at BJ is also a running joke with the locals, about as incompetently designed as the editor. Whoever built the filter decided to trap the word “C1alis” for obvious reasons–and didn’t bother to check whether or not that string was part of a larger word when consigning comments to the spam bin. Nothing all that common, mind you–words like specialist and socialist don’t come up that often on political blogs, after all.
I don’t know if these are standard with WordPress, or if John actually paid someone money to build that garbage. If the former, I’d steer far clear of these features. If the latter, well… the guy really ought to ask for his money back.
I think the idea is to be vigilant, which I think the American people are.
I agree with this, and also agree that there’s no harm in holding government feet to the fire as a matter of course.
If the government we lived under was truly and profoundly corrupt, as opposed to merely prone to opportunistic venality, the last thing I’d want to do would be to entrust them with anything to do with public health.
Opportunistic venality is something we can deal with at the whack-a-mole level.
Shorter me: I don’t discount the harm that can come from government corruption or overreach, I just don’t agree that it’s what’s on the table in this case.
I haven’t had a problem with Blogger or Blogspot in many years, and it’s free, and highly flexible, and transparent, I point out for the nth time.
I want a modest life-long grant so I can quit my job and spend my days studying drums. I’m a good drummer, I wouldn’t waste the $$$.
Speaking of this, if I might go off-topic momentarily, how did the Bethlehem, PA (if I remember correctly) gig go a few weeks ago, russell? I was considering making the <1.5hr trek up there. I'd suggest you let everyone know when and where you're going to be playing (especially me, when you're relatively close to Philly) so those interested can see you.
Actually, I’d prefer the Spyder.
The current health care proposals are very large bills and seems to most people to be big changes in American life. This is creating anxiety.
The anxiety is confusing to health care supporters. So imagine the worst system we could produce. Long waits, bad medicine, and so on. Now imagine that you can’t escape it, because there is only one single-payer system.
In fact, countries all over the world have some degree of health centralization without the imagined horrors and “Serfdom” that is so feared by some. The British NHS isn’t the only model.
I simply cannot get around to reading the health care bills. But I don’t get the impression the Democrats have worked this out carefully and competently. What is happening is a predictable political free-for-all and auction. It isn’t building confidence.
I think the US could build a much-improved health care system with universal coverage. The main problems to be solved are the working poor who have no coverage, the high cost, and large, duplicated bureaucracies. I think if these were tackled as separate issues first, maybe as separate bills, they would have much better chances of passing. People could understand them one at a time.
how did the Bethlehem, PA (if I remember correctly) gig go a few weeks ago, russell?
We had a blast, and thanks for asking. The band sounded good, folks enjoyed it, I love working with the bass player, and the world’s cutest fiddler was on the gig.
Plus, there were more kinds of pig meat available then I’ve ever seen in one place before.
There was even a pool at the hotel.
Did you know that people in Bethlehem eat deep fried pickles?
Actually, I’d prefer the Spyder.
Every citizen should be allowed to select their own complimentary roadster.
Let freedom ring!
russell:
I would be stunned if you were giving as much as 40-45% of your actual gross income (not adjusted, but actual) to the government in the form of taxes. Even when you factor in sales taxes, payroll taxes, and property taxes, you have to work pretty hard to exceed 30%, and extremely hard to exceed 35%. I’ve straddled the boundary between the top quintile and the second quintile for a while now, and by my estimates, the most pessimistic figure I can come up with was 35%, and that required a lot of unrealistic actions, including counting both the employer and employee portions of the payroll taxes, and assuming that every take-home penny I made was spent on things that were subject to sales tax.
Did you know that people in Bethlehem eat deep fried pickles?
Common in the south as well. And good.
Every citizen should be allowed to select their own complimentary roadster
Here’s mine. And here’s the kicker, my dad had one of these in cherry red with red leather interior for most of my childhood and then…he sold it for peanuts against my strenuous objections. Grrr.
Some day I will get one just to be redeemed(shakes fist in direction of father).
Common in the south as well. And good.
indeed.
sliced thin on a slicer, battered in a light thin batter, then deep fried.
they can’t be beat, if you’re drinkin beer. and i typically am.
“Every citizen should be allowed to select their own complimentary roadster.”
With voice command and response, a simple task!
14 deep-fried foods.
I would be stunned if you were giving as much as 40-45% of your actual gross income (not adjusted, but actual) to the government in the form of taxes.
You could be right, it was kind of an off-the-top-of-head calculation.
Complicating factors in my case are that my wife and my combined income puts us in the low 90’s percentile-wise, and my wife works for herself, so she pays the full boat on FICA.
I was figuring about a 1/3 for the feds, plus state & local and sales taxes and fees on top of that.
We do get the mortgage deduction, and houses cost a lot here, so I’ll bet your guess is actually closer than my original one.
Either way, I think it would cost me a hell of a lot more to buy all of the services that the government in all of its various forms provides to me through private sources.
And yes, I recognize that the private sector participates in all or nearly all of the things I listed. I think that’s great. But few if any of them would have come about without the instigation and incentives provided by government.
And if we get thru the flu season without mass death, it will probably be because of the CDC vaccine effort.
How do you fry Coca-cola? Is it just mixed into the batter? That doesn’t seem to meet the requirements.
“How do you fry Coca-cola? Is it just mixed into the batter? That doesn’t seem to meet the requirements.”
I gather you didn’t notice that the document I linked to provided links for each entry. The answer to your question is here.
I’d definitely try some; the bravery comes in trying the fried Cicadas.
Bernard:
A detailed description is here, one click away from Gary’s link.
russell:
I understand and fully agree with the points you were trying to make. However, a huge pet peeve of mine is that Americans tend to overestimate — often grossly — how much they pay in taxes. And that tendency to overestimate is frequently exploited by the anti-tax crowd. It has quickly approached the top of my hot-button-issues list.
So my counter-point was that we need to be EXTREMELY careful when throwing around estimates like that, and we need to correct others when we see them doing it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe off in the distance I see some windmills at which I must tilt….
However, a huge pet peeve of mine is that Americans tend to overestimate — often grossly — how much they pay in taxes.
anecdata: nobody i’ve ever talked to (who wasn’t an accountant) knows what a “marginal tax rate” is.
What russel said.
Also, ’65 Mustang hardtop. Or convertable, if you throw in a garage to keep the New England snow off.
What the government actually takes away from me, all in, is probably 40-45% of my gross income…. 40-45% is a heavy hit.
My hit is comparable to that, and it’s not the size of the hit that bothers me so much as the fact that I appear to get a lot less of the things that I would like than people in other countries with that sort of hit get:
It’s not the price tag I object to, it’s that so many other countries seem to provide so much more for the same price tag.
Well technically the invisible hand is just evolution where productive traits are selected for, and unproductive traits are selected against, in economic transactions mediated by the market.
You believe in that Darwinist tripe!?!?
[…]
Smith is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which holds that when greedy people trade for their own advantage in unfettered private markets, they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the greatest good for all. The invisible hand remains a powerful narrative, but after the recent economic wreckage, skepticism about it has grown. My prediction is that it will eventually be supplanted by a version of Darwin’s more general narrative — one that grants the invisible hand its due, but also strips it of the sweeping powers that many now ascribe to it.
[…]
The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin?
[…]
Adam Smith’s contention was that the pursuit of self-interest, constrained by appropriate social institutions, would be much more effective at producing societal wellbeing than actions which purported to aim at that wellbeing directly. And “appropriate” does not involve the overriding of constraining incentives. That is why so much of The Wealth of Nations is taken up with analysis and criticism of the social institutions of Smith’s day. Frank predicts that, 100 years from now, economists will point to Darwin as the owner of the shoulders they are standing on, not Smith. Let me make a competing prediction: that 100 years from now economists will look back and wonder how so many of their predecessors could have been so superficial in their appreciation of Adam Smith and, as a result, could have so completely misunderstood the economic events they lived through.
Frank and Stein
anecdata: nobody i’ve ever talked to (who wasn’t an accountant) knows what a “marginal tax rate” is.
cleek, “talked to” better not include blog comments here, because I know what a marginal tax rate is, and I’ll punch you out if you think I don’t. Well, I can’t punch you out on a blog, but I would if I could. Well, I would if I knew I could and you weren’t bigger than me or anything and I wasn’t afraid to try to punch you out because you might turn around and beat me up or something. Well, look, the point is that I know what a marginal tax rate is, okay? Anyway, I think you forgot the word “anyone” in your comment, so there.
However, a huge pet peeve of mine is that Americans tend to overestimate — often grossly — how much they pay in taxes.
Did some homework this evening, and here’s what I found.
The effective income tax rate my wife and I have paid on our combined household income for the past 5 years has ranged from 13-14.5%.
FICA for me is flat at 7.65% up to whatever the limit is in any given year. For my wife it’s 15.3% but hers is somewhat discounted because she can deduct half of that from her taxable income. My gross is about twice hers, call our net FICA/SECA hit about 8-9%.
MA state tax is flat at 5.3% on your taxable income. That probably nets out to about 3-3.5% for us.
Our main town tax is our property tax. Our income fluctuates because my wife works for herself, but our property tax bill ranges within a point or so of about 2.5% of our gross.
Sales tax, miscellaneous excise taxes and fees, blah blah blah, throw in another 1%.
We’re somewhere around 28-30%, all in.
So I was off by a pretty large margin.
We’re pretty high income earners — lower 90’s percentile-wise. We live in a very high-cost real estate market, and we bought our house about 7 years ago, for just about what it’s worth now, so our mortgage and household expenses soak up a lot of what would otherwise be discretionary income. Net/net, we live what most folks would recognize as a fairly ordinary middle to modestly upper middle class lifestyle.
For our ~30% we get national defense, police, fire department, schools, public universities, roads, public parks, all of the public health and safety agencies noted upthread, a bare-bones social safety net, and some basic health insurance and supplementary income when we get old enough to qualify for it. That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.
Water, sewer, and electric are not included in the tax bill in our state and town, but they’re provided either directly by government sponsored agencies or under through private firms under contract to the government, and they’re all reasonably priced.
Seriously, if another 5% from me, personally, and people like me is going to make it possible for every freaking person in this country to have a basic level of health insurance, I’d call that short money.
As things go, the government is among the least of my problems. Whenever I rub up against the government, it’s generally because they’re doing something I need done.
I have no idea what it would cost me to live in a world where all of those things were only available through private markets. Based on what we pay for private-market equivalents of some of those services — supplementary life and long-term care insurance, private mail delivery via Fedex for my wife’s business, etc. — my guess is that they would cost a hell of a lot more, enough so that lots of folks would simply not have access to them.
The government doesn’t give me everything I want, and it doesn’t take everything I have. It takes a big chunk, and gives back a big chunk. There are things I pay for that I dislike intensely, but in terms of hands-on, day in and day out services, the government at pretty much all levels generally gives me pretty good value.
So, I’m fine with it.
When people talk about “illegal takings” and “confiscatory tax rates” and “compromising my liberty”, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Or, I know what they intend, but I don’t recognize it in my real life, and generally don’t really recognize it in theirs.
When people talk about “socialism”, I know exactly what they’re talking about, and I wish we had more of it, because it gets the basic stuff freaking done.
Can we clone russell?
I swear, at least half the time that russell posts a comment, I end up thinking “that’s exactly what I wish I’d said”, more or less.
russell apparently wants more of Joseph Stalin, Nazism and the French. (I kid, of course.)
An Onion classic that doesn’t quoted enough. Money quote:
That’s right, bitches: Nazi Russia.
I’m not going to do a detailed analysis of my taxes, but I know off the top of my head that my effective federal tax rate is less than one percent. I put a lot toward retirement (pre-tax), have three kids, fairly significant mortgage interest, state taxes that are relatively high, and (this is the kicker) seriously high property taxes. Almost 10% of my employment income goes to property taxes. All in all, I’d guess roughly 2% sum-total for federal and state, 10% for property (meaning real estate) taxes, and 2% for sales taxes. I’m good with what I’m getting for my taxes. I’d gladly pay even more if I could have portable health insurance at rates similar to my employment-based insurance. And, yeah, I’d buy some beer or ice cream for some less well-off people if it costs me a few more tax dollars.
russell:
We’re somewhere around 28-30%, all in.
So I was off by a pretty large margin.
See, that’s what I’m talking about! What’s interesting (and depressing) is that the people who are generally the worst off are those around the 80th or 85th percentile. If you go in either direction from that point, your overall rate of taxation tends to go down. A guy in the 95th percentile generally pays a noticeably lower effective rate than a guy at the 85th percentile.
But kudos to you for actually following up on an obscure commenter’s peeve-driven rant. 🙂 Now keep spreading the gospel!
(And again, I agree with just about everything you wrote.)
“You believe in that Darwinist tripe”
Sure. The funny thing is that there are lots of people who understand it in economics, and lots of people who understand it in biology, but surprisingly few who understand it in both.
russell apparently wants more of Joseph Stalin, Nazism and the French.
You can keep Stalin and Nazism, but I’m open to swearing my fealty to our new French overlords if it the cheese, wine, and bread come with.
And, of course, Anouk Aimee.
Sadly, their cars, although quite often beautiful, are crap.
Who dares to insult the 2CV? 😉
Maybe no one you asked. In person. I, for example, am quite aware of what “marginal tax rate” means, and quite a few of my fellow engineers are similarly gifted with that awareness.
I’d also guessed that most other regular commenters here at OW are so gifted; most of them not accountants.
Maybe you’re just hanging with a bad crowd.
Unfortunately, the WYSIWIG editor is a complete piece of crap… butchering blockquotes and formatting and new lines with great regularity.
In fairness, I think the old system had the same problem. The ability to edit comments is new, but the inability to use HTML to format text the way you want it is not.
I respectfully disagree with Mr. (or is it Prof. w/e) Krugman. Beyond my prima facie objection to big anything (government, business, et cetera) only about a fifth (that’s a high estimate) of the stimulus money has actually gone into action, most of that being tax cuts, which are not usually considered a part of big government. Even if TARP financial bailouts were to be given credit, the government made a killing off of the “toxic” assets that were supposed to be harming corporations. So, at least to me (correct if I’m wrong) big government may have actually harmed the financial recovery.
“That’s right, bitches: Nazi Russia.”
Well, there was this.
IANABiologist, but my limited understanding of modern understanding of evolution is that it’s a heck of a lot more complicated as regards group benefits versus individual benefits than that article would have it, fwiw. I’m rather doubtful there are all that many people out there who are, in fact, reasonably expert both in economics and evolutionary theory.
Was exchange an early agent of human evolution or is it merely an artifact of modern civilisation? Spanning two million years of human evolution, this book explores the impact of economics on human evolution and natural history. The theory of evolution by natural selection has always relied in part on progress in areas of science outside biology. By applying economic principles at the borderlines of biology, Haim Ofek shows how some of the outstanding issues in human evolution, such as the increase in human brain size and the expansion of the environmental niche humans occupied, can be answered. He identifies distinct economic forces at work, beginning with the transition from the feed-as-you-go strategy of primates, through hunter-gathering and the domestication of fire to the development of agriculture.
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution (Google Books)
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution — Introduction (.pdf)
Well technically the invisible hand is just evolution where productive traits are selected for, and unproductive traits are selected against, in economic transactions mediated by the market.
I don’t think this is quite accurate. It sounds more like social Darwinism than what Smith had in mind, or what is thought of as the invisible hand in economics.
There is no selection involved, no failure of species to adapt, etc. The invisible hand idea merely says that people acting in their economic self-interest leads to an efficient allocation of resources. Of course, thsi needs to be hedged around with all sorts of assumptions to really hold true.
What the invisible hand is not about is the idea that some businesses fail, for example. They do, of course, sometimes from failure to adapt, sometimes from simple stupidity, or other reasons, but that wasn’t Smith’s point in using the phrase.