« A crash course on spontaneous order | Main | How fast is the economy growing? »
Does capital taxation hurt an economy?
Following my Econoblog debate with Max Sawicky, Kevin Drum writes:
Basically, I'm on Max's side: I think taxation of capital should be at roughly the same level as taxation of labor income. However, I believe this mostly for reasons of social justice, and it would certainly be handy to have some rigorous economic evidence to back up my noneconomic instincts on this matter. Something juicy and simple for winning lunchtime debates with conservative friends would be best. Unfortunately, Max punts, saying only, "As you know, empirical research seldom settles arguments."
Let me repeat the chosen comparison: capital taxes vs. gasoline taxes and no subsidies for housing. That is a no-brainer. But still you might be interested in the question of capital taxes vs. labor taxes. Here are some points:
1. Supply-siders writing on capital taxation often make exaggerated claims. Even if you like their conclusions, beware.
2. Taxing dividends, corporate income, returns to savings, and capital gains all involve separate albeit related issues. I am willing to consider zero for the lot. Of that list, the corporate income tax is probably the biggest mess. The capital gains tax is the least harmful. The tax on dividends is the least well understood (in perfect markets theory, the level of dividends should not matter at all). By the way, if you are worried about noise traders, a transactions tax is a better way to address this problem than a capital gains tax.
3. The U.S. currently lacks exorbitantly high levels of capital taxation. Joel Slemrod estimates a rate of about fourteen percent, albeit with many complications and qualifications. N.B.: We lower the rate of tax on capital by engaging in crazy-quilt and distortionary adjustments. Nonetheless it is incorrect to argue "we have high rates of capital taxation and are doing fine, better than Europe." Do not confuse real and nominal tax rates.
Take the capital gains tax. Once you consider bequests and options on loss offsets, the effective rate of tax is arguably no more than five percent. But it is still set up in a screwy way. Bruce Bartlett points me to this short piece on real tax burdens on capital.
4. Peter Lindert has good arguments that favorable capital taxation has helped European economies finance their welfare states.
5. Larry Summers did the best empirical work on how abolishing capital income taxation would boost living standards.
6. Encouraging savings will have a big payoff. If you tax capital at zero, in the long run you will have much more of it. This holds in most plausible views of the world. Max's examples aside, the supply curve for savings does not generally slope downwards; nor need you write me about various strange counterexamples from Ramsey models. Sooner or later, more capital will kick in to mean a much higher standard of living.
7. Bruce Bartlett points me to this excellent CBO study. It shows how much capital is taxed unevenly; one virtue of a zero rate is to eliminate many of those distortions in a simple way.
8. Remember those arguments about how more money doesn't make you happier? And we are all in a rat race where we work too hard to win a negative-sum relative status game? I've never bought into them, but it's funny how they suddenly stop coming from the left once the topic is capital vs. labor taxation.
9. The same excellent Slemrod paper (and he is no right-wing supply-side exaggerator) also suggests that the revenue lost from a zero rate on capital would be small. N.B.: The references to this paper are the place to start your reading on this whole topic.
10. Kevin Drum's belief in social justice should not necessarily lead him to look for arguments for taxing capital. Even if we accept his normative views, there is the all-important question of incidence. Taxing capital can hurt labor. If you are truly keen to tax capital, this is a sign of a high time preference rate, not concern for the poor.
11. Some forms of human capital also should receive favorable tax treatment. Vouchers for primary education and state universities are two examples. I am also happy -- in part for equity reasons -- to subsidize human capital acquisition through an Earned Income Tax Credit.
12. What is really the difference between capital and labor? Is it simply measured elasticities? The size of each potential tax base? The greater "future orientation" of capital and the possibility for compound returns? All of the above? How much does your answer depend on whether you view capital as a "fund" or as a "collection of capital goods"?
The bottom line: It all depends on the margin. If your levels of government spending allow you to keep labor rates of taxation below 40 percent, I don't see comparable gains from lowering tax rates on labor. If you have equity concerns, express them through other policy instruments. But if your marginal tax on labor is 65 percent and your tax rate on capital is 15 percent, cut the tax on labor first.
I know it hurts, but all of you non-right-wingers out there should consider a zero rate of taxation on capital. Comments are open.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 2, 2005 at 07:30 AM in Economics | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/3576/3770859
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Does capital taxation hurt an economy?:
» Gatling Blog: Brushing Off the Dust Edition from Restless Mania
It's been awhile, but why not do one? Again, links from all over the spectrum, from all types. Begin! [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 2, 2005 3:26:00 PM
Comments
As a non-right winger my gut instinct is against a zero tax on capital. However, several of the arguments here are presuasive. Certainly increasing the national savings rate would be a good thing.
Yet from a purely practical standpoint we know that under the Bush Admin. tax cuts are not offset by spending cuts. Our current fiscal policy seems to be in enough of a mess that I'm wary of any further tax cuts until the deficit can be reduced. Re:#9, I've admittedly not read the Slemrod paper. Maybe the lost revenues would be less than I'm thinking? I'm skeptical of anything that sounds like a Laffer Curve.
Would taxing capital at zero(or less than current levels) help labor, as #10 seems to imply? The non-right wing skeptic in me wonders if excess capital would simply fuel asset bubbles like housing, rather than being invested in anything that improves the situation for labor.
Posted by: Adam at Dec 2, 2005 7:50:39 AM
There is only one way to look at a problem such as this: general equilibrium. You need to build a big model that has all of the relevant things in it including taxes that look like our taxes and see what happens as tax rates change. I can understand that many people doubt that such a model would capture enough of the complexity of the economy to give a good answer to the question, “What to tax?” but it would certainly be better than trusting somebody’s intuition.
Posted by: Michael H. at Dec 2, 2005 8:05:37 AM
Excess capital?
Let's face it though, in the year 2075 people will asking "How am I supposed to be able to support their family on $150,000.00 per year?" I say let's screw the ungrateful jerks. High capitol taxes!
Seriously, why would anyone be against high levels of growth? Don't future people count when we're being altruistic as well?
Posted by: joshg at Dec 2, 2005 8:17:44 AM
Actually, liberals have a very good reason to support zero capital taxation. In the presence of capital taxation, there is no basis for old-age insurance like social security.
Old-age insurance is supposed to insure against the probability that you will live longer than you expected. Insurance, social or otherwise, guards against low probability events. In this case, the low-probability event is living an unusually long time and starving because you lived longer than you expected. This already tells us, by the way, that the optimal age at which social old-age insurance should kick in is likely to be very, very high; much higher than 65, because living beyond 65 is not a low probability event.
So what would the welfare loss be in the absence of optimal old-age insurance? Well, everybody would have to self-insure for extremely old age, which would mean that everybody would have to save as if they'll live to be 100. This would then force the return on saving (the marginal product of capital, roughly) to be much lower than people's discount rate. People would have to oversave.
Capital taxation, however, creates a wedge between the private return on saving and the social return on saving. People don't realize the full marginal value of their saving. As a result, you have too little saving. Thus, in the presence of capital taxation, the oversaving induced by the lack of otherwise optimal old-age insurance makes up for the undersaving induced by capital taxation! Consuequently, you need zero-to-very low capital taxation to justify even a very modest old-age insurance program.
In addition, if you set your retirement age way below the optimal old-age insurance age, as we currently do with Social Security, you will induce under-saving, because people will not completely save even in order to finance expected high-probability future consumption. This effect will be magnified in the presence of capital taxation, as the private return on saving is already below the social return on saving, and then people save even less in response to expected future old-age consumption subsidies.
Capital taxation, therefore, removes the public good argument for old-age social insurance, and greatly increases the social cost of old-age insurance when the retirement age is set too low, like it is now. As a result, liberals should support lower capital taxation in order to
A) decrease the high social cost of overly generous old-age social insurance
and
B) justify the existence of old-age social insurance in the first place.
Posted by: Keith at Dec 2, 2005 8:49:20 AM
What is the relative impact of taxing capitol vs. not on wealth inequality? Growth is good if it is stable. I worry that large weath inequality coupled with low mobility may lead to social instability. That is not based on anything resembling hard data and sound reasoning, just a general fear of the trend toward aristocracy and the ruling class losing touch with the working class.
Posted by: kmeson at Dec 2, 2005 10:10:26 AM
I appreciate the post but these sweeping policy recommendations are a bit frightening; I feel that volatility in taxation policy may suppress investment (remember rational expectations).
Somehow I don't think a gasoline tax will appease the left's desire for "social justice" since it's about the most regressive tax imaginable. But maybe they'll go along with it because of the reduced carbon emissions.
Posted by: Paul N at Dec 2, 2005 10:22:33 AM
Paul N is right. Volatility of the tax code is the great unspoken and undiscussed issue, the plaything for all the rent seekers in Washington and the tax accounting industry. And if you think getting a computer program to do your taxes will help, well, some of them have errors in them, although of course the code is so complicated and changing so much all the time, who would know anyway?
Tyler,
I see now that the discussion between you and Max has been somewhat confused and muddied. You initially said that you were for zero capital taxation. Now you present a more nuanced position. What Summers was critiquing, I believe, although I may need to go back and check on it, is that old bugaboo, the double taxation of dividends, something criticized on efficiency grounds for decades by all kinds of tax economists. Glenn Hubbard made some attack on that as he went out the door, if I remember correctly.
As I stated, I am for pretty radical tax simplification (and then leave it alone). I would be willing to go along with getting rid of the corporate income tax if dividends and realized capital gains were taxed as income in a similar manner to labor income. Given that it is retained earnings that is the major source for financing the growth-enhancing real capital investment, in contrast to the forms of savings that people engage when they buy stocks and bonds (and speculative real estate) that they call "investing," this makes some sense.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Dec 2, 2005 10:38:50 AM
Suppose we start with the Chamley result and assume that an optimal tax would avoid a tax on savings but only tax consumption. Given that we tax all forms of income whether they end up being consumed or saved, what things should we tax? That is an interesting question and you might wonder if it is a bad thing to tax capital income because it might be more likely to be reinvested as more capital instead of being consumed.
If you ask the question: "For people over 65, should they pay tax on their capital income or not?" then the optimal capital tax for them would definitely be positive because they are likely consuming almost all of their capital income. I remember reading that people over 65 control a remarkable proportion of the wealth in the U.S., which makes sense since it is the power of compound interest. So anyone saying that capital taxation should be less than 15% is probably talking nonsense.
One possibility to consider is a life cycle tax. Make capital income tax free until 65 and then make it fully taxable. This sounds both fair and fairly efficient. However, I doubt seniors would ever allow it.
Posted by: Michael H. at Dec 2, 2005 11:02:24 AM
I'm still unclear why it is necessary to have an unbalanced playing field between capital and labor income. Again I propose a hypothetical. Imagine one person who earns $100 interest on a savings account or as a capital gain when he sells some stock. Imagine another person who earns $100 by working some extra hours during the holiday season. The assumption here seems to be that the first person is doing more to contribute to economic growth than the second person therefore should enjoy lower taxes (or no taxes at all).
Yet if this is true then why wouldn't a free market reward the first person properly? Why, if his actions are more productive, is he rewarded by the market with only $100? Why doesn't the market reward him $120 or $150?
Second what evidence is there that the gov't knows how much the reward should be? Certainly there must be a limit! If there isn't then not only should capital gains be taxed at 0% they should be taxed at a negative rate! Why reward the first person with 0% taxes? Why not subsidize him with -100% taxes if his contribution to the economy is so much larger? The question goes on from there, why not -200%, -300% and so on.
So clearly Tyler seems to be implying there is some 'optimal' level of reward for deriving your income from capital rather than labor. Try to push people beyond that and you'll generate a suboptimal position. Yet in almost every other area in economics the primary tool for finding the optimal level of anything is the market. Here, though, it is the government who appears to have to step in just a bit to nudge the rewards slightly more in favor of capital. Why does the market suffer an inherent flaw that causes it to always slightly under reward capital?
Posted by: Boonton at Dec 2, 2005 11:24:06 AM
Many people confuse capital gains tax with tax on capital as a production factor known from the economic theory. No it is not. Capital gains tax is basically a stock market growth tax, while capital as a production factor is already taxed within the corporate profit tax.
Taxing dividends leads to severe distortions, since returns from equity capital are double-taxed while debt capital is treated favorably by most tax regimes. This leads to a capital structure that is biased towards debt increasing the risk of a banking crisis. (Hint: 1997)
Bottom line: capital gains tax is highly distortionary and should be abolished.
Posted by: Pavel at Dec 2, 2005 11:41:14 AM
Sheesh. Never ask Tyler to clarify anything. You just end up with more snow.
Tyler lumps the CG tax with corporate income tax for no good reason. That makes no sense. I'm open to the suggestion that we should abolish tax on businesses (they are mostly using bermuda headquarters anyhow), but if you do that, why not make up for the lost earnings by raising the CG tax? If those businesses benefits by doing business in America, it's only fair that they cough up some profits to keep America up and running, one way or another. Tyler conceded that a CG tax would not be that harmful at all.
As for the "we need to encourage investments to grow our economy" angle, Tyler knows full well that the vast majority of capital investment in this country does not come from individuals, but corporations. Even taking the supply-side point of view that more capital investment = more growth, the CG tax, at least, is moot.
Talking about Europe, the point there is you've got a real inadvertant econ lab there. Some countries have very high CG tax, and others extremely low ones. There's no pattern as to how this affects the economy. I don't think the swedish or U.K. economy is hurting relative to France because their economy starves for capital. True, the U.K. has a savings rate that's scary-low. But that probably has to do with the whole bubble-fueled using-your-house-as-an-ATM craziness that's similar to what's happening in the states.
Posted by: Battlepanda at Dec 2, 2005 11:43:01 AM
"Imagine one person who earns $100 interest on a savings account or as a capital gain when he sells some stock. Imagine another person who earns $100 by working some extra hours during the holiday season. The assumption here seems to be that the first person is doing more to contribute to economic growth than the second person therefore should enjoy lower taxes (or no taxes at all)."
The problem here is that you imagine the $100 interest on a savings account as something that is just available. If your bank isn't investing in productive things, it can't give you $100 interest on a reasonable amount of money. If the return is low, you have to invest lots and lots of money to get the $100 interest. Those productive things are getting taxed.
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at Dec 2, 2005 12:38:31 PM
"Taxing dividends leads to severe distortions, since returns from equity capital are double-taxed while debt capital is treated favorably by most tax regimes. "
The double tax comes from the legal NON-fiction of the corporation being a distinctly different legal entity from the owner of the corporation. Point of order, any business can avoid the double taxation simply be remaining a partnership or sole owner/operator. The decision to opt for corporate status comes because the legal benefits of incorporates outweigh the costs.
Posted by: Boonton at Dec 2, 2005 12:39:50 PM
Sebastion,
I'm not sure I understand your point. Presumably to make $100 in interest on a savings account the bank must obtain that income from money it loans out. Assuming it loans out money for capital goods (such as a home loan or loan to a business), the capital must 'earn' $100 to pay to the bank to pay to the person (actually it must earn a bit more since the bank takes profit for itself).
Yes those 'productive things' that pay the bank $100 that it passes on to you get taxed. So what? The guy who takes a side job to earn that $100 is getting paid from people/businesses who pay taxes. No one says my income tax is double taxation since the customers of the company that pays me pay for the company's projects with after tax dollars!
Posted by: Boonton at Dec 2, 2005 12:50:46 PM
much capital is taxed unevenly; one virtue of a zero rate is to eliminate many of those distortions in a simple way.
This also a "virtue" of a 100% rate.
the corporate income tax is probably the biggest mess
The corporate tax is a "mess" largely because corporations have lobbied successfully for all sorts of special tax privileges, and taking advantage of them is complicated. So now the complaint is that the whole tax should go away because it's too complicated?
What is really the difference between capital and labor?
Less than you are pretending. Isn't much labor income fairly described as return on capital, human and other?
And how can anyone talk about reducing capital taxes to zero without discussing the social consequences?
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Dec 2, 2005 12:53:01 PM
"But if your marginal tax on labor is 65 percent and your tax rate on capital is 15 percent, cut the tax on labor first."
I'm not sure I see how this follows. It sounds like you are saying that the taxes on labor should be cut since they are higher on the margin than capital taxes. Well, okay, but if that's true, then who would argue against it?
Posted by: Brian at Dec 2, 2005 1:11:46 PM
Bernard,
Nice catch!
Brian,
I think Tyler is arguing until the tax on labor is above forty percent, the deleterious effect of raising the capital gains tax on the economy is higher than the deleterious effect of raising the income tax. But reasonable fellow that he is, he will concede that taxing labor at, say, 65%, might have an even more alarming effect on the economy than taxing capital gains at 15%
Posted by: Battlepanda at Dec 2, 2005 1:25:56 PM
I'm surprised to find the support here for elimination of the corporate tax.
As a liberal believer in free markets I have been comming to that conclusion
for a slightly different reason. The corporate tax provides corporations a
major incentive to pay for lobying efforts in Washington that not only is bad
economics but contributes to the corruption of our political system. Eliminating
the corporate tax would address several problems -- note I said address not necessarily
solve.
Since some 73% of nonresidential fixed investment is by corporations it would also
provide a direct stimulous to investment. But only 11% -- the rest is from nonprofits --
of capital spending stems from institutions subject to the individual income tax, so even if the argument that a cut in individual taxes generates more investment the bang for the buck is still
extremely small. This is why when you try to model capital spending profits always
dominate the equation and individual income tax rates play essentially no role.
The entire debate about individual income taxes and investment seem to be based on
a model of the economy as it was in 1850 rather then in 2000.
Posted by: spencer at Dec 2, 2005 1:35:09 PM
I'd like to see some real numbers.
The effective capital tax rate today is 15% if what was written above is true. The effective labor tax rate today I'm guessing is 40% including withholdings and everything else at all levels of government. I'd also guess that all the state sales taxes together make an effective consumption tax of 5%?
From a foggy memory I think labor income is twice as big nationally as capital income annually, so zeroing capital taxation can be replaced by increasing labor taxation 7.5% to 47.5%.
If there are no lasser effects, it is possible to zero labor taxes with capital taxation of 95%. Just hypothetical based on the relative sizes of the tax base.
The tax rates can be set equal if capital and labor are effectively taxed at about 31% each, which would mean to double the capital tax and decrease the labor tax by a quarter.
So with these numbers in hand:
Cowen is arguing that 0%/47.5% is preferable to either the current 15%/40% or 31%/31%.
At 0%/47.5% people who do not work for a living pay no taxes at all. That seems like a perverse incentive structure. It also seems unbearably unfair and difficult to maintain in a democracy. As a liberal, nothing would make me happier than if somehow the Republicans were to get this, because this would be a perfect invitation to rebuild the tax system from scratch with labor income, capital income and inheritance income all taxed at equal rates.
Decreasing the tax on labor by a quarter may well lead to more labor being supplied to the economy. Leaving one quarter of the labor tax bill in the hands of consumers who work for a living will result both in greater private consumption and some amount of greater private saving.
I'd take 31%/31% over 0%/47.5% any day. I do not think there is a clear argument that 0%/47.5% necessarily leads to faster growth rates than the alternatives.
Oh also about point 8 where liberals don't talk about money not making you happier. I'm not sure the major liberal blogs have ever even mentioned that study so it is not that interesting that they "stop" when discussing capital taxation. I'd like to see an example of a liberal who has stopped making an argument related to happiness when it is time to discuss the optimal level of capital taxation.
Posted by: deb mcadams at Dec 2, 2005 2:56:47 PM
It seems to me that several people here are talking past each other. The argument being made for 0 taxation on capital isn't an argument about fairness, it is an argument about growth and utility. We should be very skeptical of enacting a policy that harms growth on the grounds that we feel we are helping people in the short term, or even because we perceive that there is some sort of social justice angle to the policy we prefer. The goal is to make more people better off over the long run.
Certainly, we can argue about whether taxing capital vs. labor actually harms growth, but we need to keep that argument separate from a more idological one about social preferences.
Posted by: Jason Ligon at Dec 2, 2005 3:08:55 PM
How embarrassing to leave a long post whose arguments are better made earlier in a thread.
Boonton at 11:24:06 made the definitive argument that 31%/31% is preferable to 15%/40%, 0%/47.5% or even -10%/52.5% (and I obviously hadn't thought of the third one).
Sebastian Holsclaw at 11:38 entirely missed the argument which is that if labor and capital are taxed equally, the market can decide which activities deserve to be rewarded more. Believers in market efficiency should find this argument decisive.
Posted by: Deb McAdams at Dec 2, 2005 3:17:56 PM
To rewrite what Boonton wrote earlier
If a person buys a savings bond that rewards him $100 and goes to work extra hours to earn a reward of $100, a government that treats capital and labor neutrally would leave that person with $69 after taxes for the savings bond and $69 after taxes for the extra hours of work.
Today's government leaves that person with $85 after taxes for the savings bond and $60 after taxes for the work.
Cowen is arguing that the government should leave the person with $52.5 dollars after taxes for the work and $100 dollars for the savings bond.
Why should the government alter the payoffs so that the savings bond is worth twice as much as the hours he spent working? Cowen argues that by altering the payoffs that way the economy will grow faster. (Curiously he links to a scholars google search of summers capital taxation to support this - which of the links in ths search supports his claim? who knows)
Boonton's argument is that if the economy gets more benefit from the investment in a savings bond than it does from the hours working, why does the savings bond not pay more on its own?
That is a very strong argument. Where do the advocates of ending capital taxation see a market failure? If there is no market failure that causes the economy to consistently over-reward labor, than there is no argument for "fixing" that failure by taxing labor and not capital.
It looks to me like the liberals are going to win this argument.
Posted by: Deb McAdams at Dec 2, 2005 3:58:10 PM
"If there is no market failure that causes the economy to consistently over-reward labor, than there is no argument for "fixing" that failure by taxing labor and not capital."
I think the argument would be that the abysmal savings rate is evidence that incentives to save are not correctly aligned.
Posted by: Jason Ligon at Dec 2, 2005 4:49:50 PM
Jason,
I do not think it is totally unreasonable to treat these two topics - growth and fairness - together. This is not a discussion about how to stimulate growth in some economic model. There is difference between models and reality. Tyler and others are advocating a specific policy, on the grounds that it would stimulate growth. But before advocating a policy because it may achieve objective X, it is necessary to consider the other consequences of that policy. Increasing total measured GDP is not a goal that should be pursued at the expense of all else. In addition, it is certainly plausible that the social effects of the policy will affect its economic results.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Dec 2, 2005 4:58:50 PM
I just sent this to Arnold Kling in response to his call http://www.techcentralstation.com/092903A.html for a 40% tax on all consumption, elimination of all entitlements, and a$7,000 stipend per person.
It is the observation of numbers like those in your "bleeding heart libertarianism" column that make me want to abolish Democracy. The superiority of such a system is SO BLOODY OBVIOUS. However, a few caveats are needed.
1) Count benefits paid by a business as spending. (or simply abolish the concept of a "business" in the absence of any tax need for such a concept.
2) Something has to be done to manage immigration, making immigration viable without drawing in a huge fraction of the world's poor. One obvious option is to make the deductible zero for everyone not born in the US and have free immigration.
3) Defining spending can be difficult. Are interest payments "spending"? People who own real property derive rents from them, is that spending? Charitable donations? Local taxes? Are you proposing eliminating federalism entirely? If not, local taxes should probably count as spending, spending on public goods associated with living in a particular locality.
4) Some taxes, such as taxes on congestion, CO2 emissions, and a variety goods which impose externalities, are arguably goods in and of themselves. Let's retain these taxes, and also some luxury taxes, as much luxury consumption creates status externalities.
5) Paying for msc governmental functions plus the cost of living is not feasible for $20,000/year. Let's make the taxes in category 4 high enough to raise the deductible somewhat (if possible from $7,000 to the official 1 person poverty level of $9,570?). Also, eliminate harmful gvmt functions like the drug war to raise some more money. If this isn't enough, raise the consumption tax to a clean 50%. This would still be cheap compared to paying for a near-future welfare state and compared to pre-Reagan marginal tax rates or European tax rates. Finally, allow local governments to redistribute as they wish, including supplementing stipends with "Henry George" style land taxes and implementing "welfare" functions if they think doing so is efficient.
6) Some people will rapidly go into debt and soon will owe their deductible as interest. Make bankruptcy as simple as possible and let the lender beware of bad credit risks.
7) This will eliminate a huge number of pernicious jobs, at least at first, driving the price of labor down, but it will also eliminate the incentive to work in many people. How can we estimate the net effect on the price of labor? If the cost of labor falls too far, will pressures to admit immigrants with no stipends lead to major externalities (a-la Europe)? Would a simple solution be "non-stipend holders are deported with the first felony conviction and executed with the second?"
Finally, the big one. How (and where) on Earth can we get something like this implemented?
On the plus side, eliminating food tariffs would drive the cost of food WAY down for many families, as would the decoupling of government services and funding from location, which would allow a massive rural migration.
Posted by: michael vassar at Dec 2, 2005 5:19:57 PM
