Skirting The Comments

I found this the other day over on the XKCD forum and thought it to be most apropos.  Not that I every followed such sage advice, but I do think the analogy is most apt.

Won't You Please Let Me In?

Via the Blogfather comes this excellent essay from The Volokh Conspiracy about the Occupy movements and the underlying socioeconomic forces that have created it.  The short version is that they have dutifully gotten their tickets punched and now expect the rewards to flow regardless of their actual talents or the collective need for their "abilities".  Such as they are.

The longer version....

Keynesian? Really?

Nick Gillespie over at Reason makes the salient point that current federal spending is not really what John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he suggested that government spending in a down cycle might spur growth.

But Whalen isn't simply dumping on Keynesianism, he's bent on pointing out that even its latter-day adherents are straying far from their master's theory. And in this, he's surely correct. As Allen Meltzer has argued, Keynes was against the very sort of large structural deficits that characterize contemporary federal budgets and policy, believing instead that deficits should be "temporary and self-liquidating." And Keynes believed that any sort of counter-cyclical spending by government should be directed toward increasing private investment, not simply spending current and future tax dollars on public works projects.

Nick quotes Mike Whalen in an article posted at The Washington Times.  Mike suggests...

If the federal government announced a real road map to fiscal soundness, the impact would be truly stimulating. If American businesses and consumers saw that Washington was really cutting, not just reducing future increases, there would be tremendous relief and an increase in confidence across the country. Job creators would sing “hallelujah”; they would get off their wallets, start hiring, and then you’d see that Keynesian multiplier kick in.

Which is a point that the current Administration and their supporters keep passing over as if it did not exist.

A big part of the problem with the sluggish economy is that business owners can see current government spending, and future spending obligations as being capable of turning a sour economy into a really dismal economy.  Greco-Japanese dismal.

When they are convinced that their sidelined capital could be safely invested with the reasonable expectation of making a profit in the bargain, then they will begin investing.

All this talk of raising taxes on "the rich" and passing behemoth federal programs does nothing more than reinforce the idea that they are better off sitting on their cash.

Leftists Back Cutting Corporate Income Taxes

Which is a bit of a milestone.  But given how little we collect and how much gets spent enforcing and complying with those laws, isn't better to just eliminate the corporate income tax?

That would make the US a tax haven.  Just think of all the money that would be parked here!