Paul M. Jones

Much as I hate to say it, probably so:

If the GOP really believes that they can get to anything close to a sustainable budget without raising taxes at least a little bit, then they are spending too much time reading their own press releases, and far too little time talking to voters outside of their tea party base.  I think it's probably possible to do more, on balance, with spending cuts than with tax hikes--but not all. Mathematically, it's certainly possible--but politically, it isn't.

via Do We Really Need to Raise Taxes to Close the Deficit? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic. See also my take on it from last year: http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/1354.

Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

via The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

[Paul Ryan's] genuinely radical plan goes where Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich never did by terminating the entitlement status of Medicare and Medicaid. (It doesn't touch the third major entitlement, Social Security, though Ryan has elsewhere argued for extending its life by gradually raising the retirement age to 70.) Ryan changes Medicare into a voucher, which would be used to purchase private health insurance. He turns Medicaid into a block grant for states to spend as they choose. Though his budget committee isn't responsible for taxes, Ryan includes the boldest tax reform proposal since the 1980s, proposing to lower top individual and corporate rates to 25 percent and end deductions. While he's at it, Ryan caps domestic spending, repeals Obamacare, slashes farm subsidies, and more.

...

But more than anyone else in politics, Rep. Ryan has made a serious attempt to grapple with the long-term fiscal issue the country faces. He has a largely coherent, workable set of answers. If you don't like them, now you need to come up with something better.

via Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Medicare: The Republican's plan is brave, radical, and smart. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine.

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

via FuturePundit: Deep Fat Is Not The Problem.

It turns out that free markets are not just an absence of government intervention, or even a simple and clear set of rules. Liberal market economies require a huge amount of what you might call "software" to run: not just a good legal system, but respect for the law; not just a central bank, but consensus about the central banker's role; not just unrestrained trade, but a shared set of assumptions about what sorts of trades are fair; not just penalties but trust; not just anti-corruption laws, but a society that demands corruption cease, rather than attempting to use it to get around inconvenient but necessary rules.

via Doing Business In Iraq - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

... Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Virginia statute protecting religious freedom, which he drafted, deliberately covered “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination,” and that a proposal to mention Christ in the bill “was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend” all religions.

Which is as it should be. Read the whole thing. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » Islam and the First Amendment.

In spite of our having the second-highest nominal corporate-income tax rate in the developed world (Hello, Japan!), the rates actually paid by businesses vary wildly according to their political clout. Progressives look at that and see the evidence of businesses’ having undue influence on Washington; I look at that and see evidence of Washington’s undue influence on business. But it’s a two-way street, and the end product smells the same.

There are many arguments for a flat tax: Compliance costs are lower, it’s easier to understand, it doesn’t create a divide-and-conquer dynamic with regard to the tax brackets, it aligns taxpayers’ incentives, etc. But there’s a practical moral argument, too: The tax code is corrupt. Using the tax code as a cookie jar full of special favors for friends and supporters is corrupt. It does not matter that it’s legal, it is immoral. The purpose of taxes is to raise revenue for the government, not to repay political favors or to bribe voters with their own money. I do not think our tax system probably is really salvageable: Obamacare is not the only thing that should be repealed and replaced.

via Our Tax Code Is Corrupt - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits -- self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. -- that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

via Reynolds’ Law « The View from Alexandria.

Twitter and identi.ca are fine for what they are: immediate distribution of small pieces of information that are connected primarily by a timeframe and a shared experience. However, they are unsuitable for extended, nuanced dialogue on any topic requiring thoughtful consideration. Commentary in such locations disappears too quickly into the ether. I said back in May 2009 that Twitter is too "constrained and ephemeral" and I stand by that assessment. You want to create something that lasts (as much as anything lasts in a digital ecology)? Blog it.