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Assorted links
1. The courageous Bruce Bartlett, on taxes.
2. Harvard University Press will publish one thousand digital books.
3. Countercyclical assets: remaindered books.
4. Skidelsky on Keynes and on books on Keynes.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 17, 2009 at 01:28 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Courageous? More like confused ...
So, because Democrats want an endless torrent of unbelievable spending, that means that Republicans think that "deficits don't matter"? What?
He wants us to have a VAT like Europe ... great. That's clearly led to economic vigor.
He's a "realist" when it comes to joining the tax and spend bandwagon, but he doesn't mind being pie in the sky about wanting to get rid of corporate tax.
Posted by: holmegm at Jul 17, 2009 2:37:21 PM
a VAT? really? The European VAT is very regressive: Low incomes pay it fully, and high income independent workers, like lawyers and doctors with private practices, use their businesses to dodge large amounts of VAT : Every euro they pay in VAT that could be considered as business expense is taken away from the VAT they are supposed to collect every trimester, giving them, in essence, VAT-less purchases.
And of course, every euro saved is a euro the VAT won't get to touch. It's the very deceptively named 'Fair Tax', but even more lopsided against low incomes.
Posted by: hibikir at Jul 17, 2009 2:37:55 PM
They fear it would become a money machine and it would help the government grow. I agreed with that for a long time. But the problem now is that we need a money machine! We have all this spending in the pipeline. It's not a question of whether we'll create new programs. It's whether we'll fund the ones that are already there.
It's not an either-or situation. A new gusher of tax revenue would both enable the funding of existing programs and the creation of new ones. At present, it appears the only thing holding up the major expansions in the scope of government that the Obama admin has queued up is public fear of massive deficits. It's becoming clear that the Obama admin will spend as much and run as big a deficit as it can politically get away with in order to ram through programs before the window of opportunity closes. I really don't want to make that easier -- and a VAT would definitely have that effect.
Posted by: Slocum at Jul 17, 2009 2:50:36 PM
And thinking about this from another perspective, suppose we had a VAT right now and we wanted to stimulated consumption. Reducing the VAT rate temporarily would be a wonderful way to stimulate consumption. Suppose you had a 10 percent VAT and we said we weren't going to collect it for the next 10 months. People would buy like crazy. They'd buy toilet paper, they'd buy anything they could get their hands on that they knew they'd need in the future. We're depriving ourselves of a great stimulant tool by ignoring this.
(emphasis added)
Seriously? This is the reason to support a huge new tax? So that when we need a stimulus we can cut it?
Reading that makes me ill.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Jul 17, 2009 3:02:04 PM
Slocum:
>A new gusher of tax revenue would both enable
>the funding of existing programs and the creation of new
>ones.
Oh, no no! The new tax would be purely for nationalized health care! Because money isn't fungible!
Posted by: holmegm at Jul 17, 2009 3:02:14 PM
1959: "That year represented the apex in jazz creativity."
Uh, you could make a claim that this was the last good year for jazz, but it was nowhere near the best.
The second tier was doing well, but Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown were were all gone or gone derivative by then. Monk was out of commission that year as well, and in any case had already done his best work.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane were gearing up to destroy jazz from the inside, looters that they were.
Posted by: babar at Jul 17, 2009 3:22:17 PM
1959: "That year represented the apex in jazz creativity."
Uh, you could make a claim that this was the last good year for jazz, but it was nowhere near the best.
The second tier was doing well, but Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown were were all gone or gone derivative by then. Monk was out of commission that year as well, and in any case had already done his best work.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane were gearing up to destroy jazz from the inside, looters that they were.
Posted by: babar at Jul 17, 2009 3:22:41 PM
Noah Yetter: "Reading that makes me ill."
Same here. Until I read this interview with Ezra klein, I had respect for Burce Bartlett's opinion. He's a few months younger than I am, but I fear his dementia is much further advanced.
Posted by: John Dewey at Jul 17, 2009 3:26:46 PM
About 3. remaindered books:
When I owned two used book stores, I frequently considered remainders and hurts. The latter were more interesting, as the prices were lower. But the terms of sale were not acceptable to a small book dealer.
Hurts - also known as returns - are generally unsold books returned by the retailer to the publisher, or sometimes to the wholesaler. Some have been slightly damaged, but not all of them. New book retailers often have contracts which allow them to return unsold inventory.
In 1998, one large publisher offerred me a 40 foot trailer full of returns - about 15,000 books - for $18,000. The catch was that I had no choice about the titles. I might get 10,000 saleable books from the trailer - or I might get only 1,000. No guarantees.
A large used book retailer, such as the Half Price Books chain (annual sales > $200 million), can take that $18,000 gamble once a day. With only two stores, I was unable to take the risk even once per year.
I never asked the publisher if authors received compensation for the sale of hurts.
Posted by: John Dewey at Jul 17, 2009 4:22:56 PM
Seriously? This is the reason to support a huge new tax? So that when we need a stimulus we can cut it?
Reading that makes me ill.
Hey, that reminds me of this bit from Twain's 'Following the Equator':
It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended it to a lady. She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw over lighten ship withal. Why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. When she could have acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now. It seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These things ought to be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with.
Posted by: Slocum at Jul 17, 2009 4:39:09 PM
That's a great quote from Twain, Slocum. It perfectly describes the idiocy of what Bartlett is proposing. It also reminds me of the following exchange between two people:
Man 1: "Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?"
Man 2: "Because it feels so good when you stop."
Posted by: Wayne at Jul 17, 2009 4:51:03 PM
The jazz stuff is all a matter of taste. I prefer the year when Armstrong was playing with Oliver, Morton was recording with the Norks, and Beiderbecke was playing too.
Posted by: dearieme at Jul 17, 2009 4:56:03 PM
It seems to me that Bartlett just realizes that neither party is going to cut spending (see the last 28 years for proof), so we had better at least pay for that spending. Time to start growing up and realize that Republicans spend just as much, they just run deficits.
Steve
Posted by: steve at Jul 17, 2009 5:59:54 PM
We could have had a Sales Tax Holiday that would have helped the states, and been an incentive for spending now.
Posted by: Don the libertarian Democrat at Jul 17, 2009 6:10:20 PM
I think Steve hit it on the head.
Bartlett's comment about offending the average voter is the key to all this...no one is going to voluntarily give up an entitlement, we have to figure out a way to keep it the whole thing to smallest amount possible.
I don't agree with a lot of what Barlett wrote, but I think he's trying to think about that question.
Sure, the left will spend until voted out of office. Result - big deficits. No surprises there.
But on the right, cutting taxes hasn't starved the beast, it's just put government on sale, and so unsurprisingly, we're consuming more of it. Result - big deficits.
I think Bartlett's trying to wrap his head around the fact that the public has an insatiable appetite for govt benefits, but an equally satiable (is that a word?) appetite for paying for it.
Posted by: JackTrade at Jul 17, 2009 6:30:02 PM
Bartlett "courageous"?? He's got nothing to lose by advocating a VAT and is just a poser. Increasing taxes VAT or otherwise would simply facilitate the looting of citizens. No new taxes... let the deficits grow...bring on the inflation.
Unfortunately, nothing less than a complete meltdown will stop this irresponsible behavior so lets get it over with!
Posted by: Brian at Jul 17, 2009 7:22:22 PM
Skidelsky seems to be one of many who are now making the argument that there was nothing wrong with Keynesian economics until Thatcher and Reagan came along and brainwashed everyone by bringing back out-dated abstract free market dogma.
This is so typical of the kind of provincial explanations that you hear from Washington or London that tries to explain world events through their capital cities. But this explanation doesn't tell us why so many other countries moved towards deregulation; not only of financial markets but of labour markets. In Australia it was the left-wing party that brought these reforms about, not the conservative party. Sweden, that great welfare state, adopted similar reforms.
Regardless of whether 'free market economics' is right or wrong, the events of the 80s were a reaction to a broken system, not some externally imposed dogma like Skidelsky would have us believe.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 17, 2009 7:43:10 PM
Sigh, this is sad. The VAT is a money machine, and due to the regressive nature of the tax its more stable than a tax on high income people who can just move.
This is rather bad. I don't see how we can rollback the gov, once they get ahold of this cashcow.
Posted by: Doc Merlin at Jul 17, 2009 10:16:18 PM
Time to start growing up and realize that Republicans spend just as much, they just run deficits.
I think that the last couple of years have discredited this view. It certainly seemed reasonable to think that Republicans spent "just as much," because of how much they were spending. But the new Democratic Congress (and Administration) is spending even more, and running even higher deficits*, something scarcely thought possible.
(If you go by the President's proposed budget, even higher deficits in 2013-2019 than the baseline, than the baseline with common policy extensions, than the GWB deficits, etc. And that's with several measures, like limiting charitable deductions, that the Democratic leadership has ruled out.)
Posted by: John Thacker at Jul 17, 2009 10:38:29 PM
What's the bad thing that's going to happen to Bruce Bartlett on account of his courage? Should he be keeping an eye out for ninjas?
Posted by: Paul Zrimsek at Jul 17, 2009 11:00:22 PM
Any "courageous" progressives out there that are "realist" about spending?
Just sayin'.
Posted by: mobile at Jul 17, 2009 11:19:03 PM
Bruce Bartlett's health is not a public good. Nothing personal, but why not spend time arguing against the ridiculous spending? Why would Republicans want to be 'responsible' and look for costs to pay for the Dem's benefits? Why would that even be responsible? Well, one might say, because the deficit will cause a calamity, but they and Bartlett is approaching this half-blind. The government aren't us.
If you want to tax people where they are, why not a real estate tax? And it could be done equitably. I'd allow people to pay as they go or at sale. You could assess values by setting up a one-sided futures market for properties.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 18, 2009 6:23:17 AM
Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, Coleman, preceded
by the trail-blazing Bird, made "modernist"
jazz, sacred to some and anathema to others.
Some would argue that the new is always greeted
with venom, others that there is no obligation
to like the new merely because it is new.
Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday,
Pee Wee Russell, Ellington, and Beiderbecke
still have listeners. As another poster has
said, tastes differ.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai at Jul 18, 2009 10:05:07 AM
Bartlett: Reducing the VAT rate temporarily would be a wonderful way to stimulate consumption.
And we, but of course, all know countless cases of governments doing just that all across Europe.
Posted by: Ozornik at Jul 18, 2009 10:37:20 AM
The people complaining about VAT's regressiveness seem to have missed the part of the Bartlett interview where he explains the VAT he's proposing is meant to fund progressive (in an economic sense) measures like healthcare for the poor. While it's far from the cleanest or most satisfying solution, it's one worth considering.
On a different note, I wonder why people always assume deregulation started with Reagan. We make fun of him, but it was Carter who really kicked off deregulation.
Posted by: johnleemk at Jul 18, 2009 12:11:27 PM
