Month: January 2009

Not Paying Their Fair Share?

Greg Mankiw cites a  Congressional Budget Office report (pdf) on effective tax rates. The breakdown:

Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent

Mankiw notes: "These figures include all federal taxes, not just income taxes."

The Online Right

Does Pajamas Media believe that the future of journalism really belongs to Joe The Plumber? Or that this is really worth publishing? It seems to me that the right is still culturally disoriented. If they are still promoting Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber and Ann Coulter and culture-war resentment as their core message, they are obviously in deep denial about what this election really meant. If their only unifying theme is hatred or reified "elite liberals", they are doomed.

This denial – this calcification of the worst of the right in the last eight years – is the real danger to Republicans. What they need is a grappling with the public policy issues at hand, and an imaginative constructive, conservative approach to them. But the posturing is so much easier, isn’t it? And still, one presumes, really lucrative for a tiny few.

A Green 2009?

Freakonomics hosts a debate: how will clean technology will be affected by the recession? George Tolley:

The major kicker clouding the future remains how high the international price of oil will be; this is a more powerful influence on clean technology adoption than any U.S. policy.

Of course, we get blowback either way. If recovery makes gas more expensive, we bail out Tehran and Moscow. If recession keeps gas prices low, we fail to make the deeper shift toward noncarbon energy that will undermine Tehran and Moscow in the long run.

Rockets From Lebanon, Ctd.

David Kenner sees the risks:

The rockets were likely fired by Palestinian militant organizations based in the refugee camps, not Hezbollah. Still, the rockets put Hezbollah in an awkward position. Hassan Nasrallah, after announcing that his group "will not abandon the fight or our weapons," cannot easily condemn the rocket attacks. Note that Hezbollah’s initial denial of responsibility for the rocket attacks did not come from the group itself, but from Tarek Mitri, the government Information Minister. Nasrallah may not want a war, but he has placed himself in a position where he cannot oppose one.

Today’s rockets lightly injured two Israelis. Though the IDF responded with mortar fire, they seem ready to shrug off the event as a minor incident. But if a subsequent attack hits a school or a hospital and the casualties are in the dozens, Israeli retaliation might be far more severe. And that could very easily drag Hezbollah into a conflict, whether they want one or not. The rockets being fired are primitive, unguided devices — whether they hit military targets, unpopulated areas, or civilian neighborhoods is simply the luck of the draw. Cruelly, the fate of many innocent people in Lebanon largely depends on where these rockets happen to land.

Malkin Award Nominee

"Unlike her compadres Jagger, Galloway and Livingstone, who all have notorious histories of Communist fellow-traveling, Lennox is not known for far-left or anti-Israel posturing. Indeed, her political activism has thus far mostly consisted of feel-good stuff like singing at the Live 8 concert and generally raising awareness about global poverty. So one wonders what prompts her current, passionate antipathy towards Israel. Maybe it’s something as petty as the 2000 break-up with her Israeli husband, Uri Fruchtmann?" – Jamie Kirchick, Big Hollywood.

The Truth About Marriage’s History

A reader makes some great points:

With Larison’s argument against marriage equality, I think you miss the most fundamental flaw. Larison assumes that changes to marriage are made explicitly.  But birth control and the destigmatization of out-of-wedlock childbirth have changed the institution of marriage as profoundly as no-fault divorce laws.  Throughout the Western world, marriage is no longer invariably associated with procreation.  People have children without being married; people are married with no thought or even possibility of having children. My father & stepmother, for example, married when she was menopausal.

Historically, marriage has never been solely about procreation; it was about extending kinship ties and the concomitant financial security of an extended family.  That’s why in the west, in-laws once played such a significant role in selecting mates and in rearing the Ringjustinsullivangetty children.  In the 1700-1800s, when the idea of marriage become associated primarily with the couple, the nuclear family grew in importance, & the industrial revolution changed the role of the extended family in financial security, the nature of marriage changed significantly. Once we stopped being an agrarian society, large families went from being an economic plus to a minus, which is a major reason the push to develop effective birth control became so important.

These bottom-up changes in the definition of marriage far surpass anything proposed by gays seeking equal access to the institution. And that is why the only way to strengthen the older form of marriage so prized by social conservatives would require repealing no-fault divorce laws (not something that likely to happen, insofar as conservative men seem to enjoy their trophy second & third wives as much as liberals do), repealing all opportunities for women to earn wages independently of their husbands, outlawing any corporate policies that allow or encourage people to move away from their parents’ homes, etc.  Those kinds of explicit social, legal, and economic changes are just not going to happen. So unplanned change is going to continue in how Americans create & maintain their families. Since a certain amount of instability in family arrangements is beyond the control of conservatives, they’d better look for where they can bolster stability. Do committed relationships between adults foster more stable societies or weaken them? Surely the answer is that they foster stable societies, and for that reason, they should be not just accepted but encouraged.

Why do social conservatives not want to encourage stability, responsibility and commitment among gay Americans? What real policy do they have for gay Americans at all?