Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • THOUGHT THIS WAS A JOKE: IT’S NOT. HE ACTUALLY SAID IT. There is a sort of chain

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/43670783I THOUGHT THIS WAS A JOKE: IT’S NOT. HE ACTUALLY SAID IT.

    There is a sort of chain letter floating around about the Buffett plan. I thought it was a joke. But it turns out it’s only partly humor.

    The institutional solutions I suggest we put into place are probably more effective than Buffett’s. But the sentiment’s the same.

    So I’ll share it on sentiment rather than on reason.

    ‘if the deficit is greater than 3% all members of congress become ineligible for office.”

    Simple plan. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-26 06:08:00 UTC

  • ENERGY: WE HAVE ONLY TWO KNOWN CHOICES a) Control breeding and therefore the pop

    http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/17/limits-of-green-energy-is-the-earth-f_ked/LIMITED ENERGY: WE HAVE ONLY TWO KNOWN CHOICES

    a) Control breeding and therefore the population (legal administrative solution)

    b) Rapid expansion of nuclear power, and capitalism (organic solution)

    There are no political problems. There are no pollution problems. There are no resource problems. The only problem is the unregulated breeding of the lower classes.

    Why a woman has the right to bear a child is an open question. She doesn’t.

    ON ILLUSIONS OF GREEN ENERGY

    http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2012/12/10/green-illusions-the-limits-of-alternative-energy/

    LIMITS OF GREEN ENERGY DISCUSSED

    http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/17/limits-of-green-energy-is-the-earth-f_ked/

    BOOK: GREEN ILLUSIONS

    http://www.greenillusions.org/

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-18 07:44:00 UTC

  • BUYING ISOLATION It’s very visible. Americans buy spatial freedom as their first

    BUYING ISOLATION

    It’s very visible. Americans buy spatial freedom as their first priority. Spatial freedom, along with the destruction of marriage, are why household incomes are not keeping pace in the lower classes.

    With spatial freedom you no longer have to compromise with others over the mundane things.

    But then your self perceived signals are all contrived. And others don’t reinforce them. And we feel alone and isolated. And contentious.

    Here the majority don’t have that kind of freedom. And so the signals are less misleading.

    And they are more civil because of it. And since relationships are cheap entertainment. And these people are relatively poor – at least for white people – they interact with one another.

    It’s not consumerism that’s the social problem. It’s the epistemically problem of isolation and a failure for our signals to endure the test of exposure to others. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-15 19:08:00 UTC

  • THE SOUND OF MUSIC: AMERICANS TALKING FINANCE There are things you miss when you

    THE SOUND OF MUSIC: AMERICANS TALKING FINANCE

    There are things you miss when you’re away. Some of them are obvious. Most of them aren’t: they’re the familiar things we take for granted.

    I was overcome with joy this morning when I heard an American accent. It was the CEO of a large insurance company. He talking about finance with the head of his French operation.

    Something familiar that I took for granted.

    It sounded like music to me.

    We chatted. He laughed.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-14 02:18:00 UTC

  • ON INEQUALITY 🙂

    http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2012/12/08/sir_issac_newton_explains_income_inequalityANTIQUITY ON INEQUALITY 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-12 10:57:00 UTC

  • SCHIFF ON THE MYTH OF THE 91% TAX RATE IN THE 50’S “…the top marginal income-t

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808.htmlPETER SCHIFF ON THE MYTH OF THE 91% TAX RATE IN THE 50’S

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808.html

    “…the top marginal income-tax rate in the 1950s was much higher than today’s top rate of 35%—but the share of income paid by the wealthiest Americans has essentially remained flat since then.

    In 1958, the top 3% of taxpayers earned 14.7% of all adjusted gross income and paid 29.2% of all federal income taxes. In 2010, the top 3% earned 27.2% of adjusted gross income and their share of all federal taxes rose proportionally, to 51%.

    So if the top marginal tax rate has fallen to 35% from 91%, how in the world has the tax burden on the wealthy remained roughly the same? Two factors are responsible. Lower- and middle-income workers now bear a significantly lighter burden than in the past. And the confiscatory top marginal rates of the 1950s were essentially symbolic—very few actually paid them. In reality the vast majority of top earners faced lower effective rates than they do today.

    In 1958, an 81% marginal tax rate applied to incomes above $1.08 million, and the 91% rate kicked in at $3.08 million. These figures are in unadjusted 1958 dollars and correspond today to nominal income levels that are at least 10 times higher. That year, according to Internal Revenue Service records, just 236 of the nation’s 45.6 million tax filers had any income that was taxed at 81% or higher. (The published IRS data do not reveal how many of these were subject to the 91% rate.)

    In 1958, approximately 28,600 filers (0.06% of all taxpayers) earned the $93,168 or more needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans—genuinely wealthy by the standards of the day—paid 5.9% of all income taxes. And now? In 2010, 3.9 million taxpayers (2.75% of all taxpayers) were subjected to rates that were 33% or higher. These Americans—many of whom would hardly call themselves wealthy—reported an adjusted gross income of $209,000 or higher, and they paid 49.7% of all income taxes.”

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-07 08:34:00 UTC

  • BREAKUP OF COUNTRIES IS NO ECONOMIC DISASTER Actually, it’s a fantastic opportun

    http://becker-posner-blog.com/2012/12/breakup-of-countries-no-economic-disaster-becker.htmlTHE BREAKUP OF COUNTRIES IS NO ECONOMIC DISASTER

    Actually, it’s a fantastic opportunity.

    Here is Gary Becker chiming in on the Catalan secession movement.

    To bad he doesn’t turn his attention to what would happen to the united states if we broke up. And how fantastic an opportunity it would be.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-04 15:41:00 UTC

  • MATTER

    http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Economics/Labor/?view=usa&ci=9780199942213INCENTIVES MATTER :

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-30 22:04:00 UTC

  • FOR CANADAS CRASH?

    http://business.time.com/2012/11/30/oh-no-canada-as-household-debt-skyrockets-will-canadians-face-a-2007-style-crisis/TIME FOR CANADAS CRASH?

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-30 17:32:00 UTC

  • “5000 YEARS OF DEBT” By David Graeber (From Elsewhere) I started to write someth

    https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=CZIINXhGDcsON “5000 YEARS OF DEBT”

    By David Graeber

    https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=CZIINXhGDcs

    (From Elsewhere)

    I started to write something substantial about this but I havent read his book. So I’m afraid to criticize his lecture, under the assumption that his book may make some kind of substantial argument where his lecture absolutely fails to.

    The lecture is entirely anecdotal. He describes what could be construed as proximal accounting practices when people all know each other, are marginally related, and where their productivity and interests marginally indifferent.

    But that’s not why we have debt. we have debt because people who do NOT know each other, are not related, and where their productivity and interests are marginally different.

    We have numerical debt because it would be impossible to plan our use of resources without it. This property of money is known as “a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value”. Without units of account, we cannot plan the complex economies that make our escape from malthusian poverty possible.

    His argument that debt has become a component of morality is sensible only in the sense where we DO have numerical monetary debt. Humans and most animals obey reciprocity. if they didn’t they’d cease all cooperation (like apes). Humans would simply go extinct. So non-numeric debt is demonstrable in all societies. And it must be. It is necessary for cooperation.

    His argument that we have made debt immoral, and that we must pay our debts is a moral technological innovation that guarantees that people will take the vast risk necessary to lend money to people that they don’t know. Just as the church broke family bonds by giving women property rights and prohibiting cousin-marriage in order to de-capitalize the extended family so that it could more easily acquire lands, the manorial system that resulted made it necessary for farmers as well as merchants to borrow money for tradable goods from people who were NOT in their families. This allowed greater concentration of capital, but also led to the protestant work ethic, and from the protestant work ethic, the high trust society that exists EXCLUSIVELY in the west.

    In this sense, Debt is in no small part, part of the reason we have such dramatically lower corruption than the rest of the world. (And why it is counter-intuitive to have a high trust society.)

    His argument that the purpose of FIAT MONEY and FIAT CREDIT, which is the requirement that taxes be paid in government currency, and that this allows the government to finance warfare, is true. That the vast expansion of warfare from the traditional european monarchical war, to Napoleonic Total War, is only possible with Fiat Money and the ability for the government to borrow vast sums because of it. (Which we now borrow to pay for services. We do not pay for our military. The rest of the world does through the artifice of petro-dollars, US treasuries, and US Inflation.) Without this artifice we would not be able to possess our military, nor would Europe be able to possess its social programs.

    So not only is debt necessary but it’s GOOD. Unless we want to return to dirt scratching poverty again.

    Lastly, the current reason to criticize debt is that it’s unclear that it is not more profitable and evolutionarily viable to directly redistribute gains (profits we call taxes, or additional fiat debt we call inter-temporal-redistribution) to consumers in order to stimulate demand. This is the idea behind Modern Monetary Theory. THe general criticism of this theory is that it will not only lead to permanent inflation which destroys risk taking, and economic calculation, but that it would (like the tech and housing booms) misallocate human capital and expose the nation to competitive long term risk. This is why the debate among economists is to determine how much intertemporal debt we can create without dangerous consequences (like our current collapse), by targeting NGDP growth rates rather than inflation. People in my wing of economics argue (rightly I think) that this limit is very low before it causes disastrous booms and busts.

    Debt has further value, since it acts as an unorganized police force on human behavior. One can be ostracized from the credit system by bad behavior and impulsive behavior, and doomed to poverty. As such, DEBT= Citizenship.

    I hope this is useful to someone on your list. I”ll cross post it on mine.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-24 15:56:00 UTC