Month: July 2010

How Britain has changed since 1997.

(Hat tip: Yau)

Steinglass wants to know why a carbon tax can't replace a payroll tax:

The payroll tax is a tax on human labour; it discourages companies from employing people. A carbon tax is a tax on fuel; it discourages people from using carbon-based fuels. If we shifted our tax structure to tax carbon more and human labour less, we would certainly use less carbon, and we would presumably use more human labour. What are the multipliers showing that this leads to a net loss in production? Why?

(Hat tip: Jack Stuef)

Exum counters Bacevich:

Just because you disagree with the Obama Administration on Afghanistan does not mean that the administration lacks a moral compass. They probably just did a strategic and moral cost-benefit analysis and arrived at a different conclusion than Bacevich did. I understand that Andrew Bacevich is upset about our policy in Afghanistan. But concluding as he does — without any evidence to suggest that moral considerations, such as an obligation to the Afghan people, were not weighed in the president's decision-making process — that the president lacks a moral compass is ugly, unnecessarily ad hominem, and beneath a man of Bacevich's intelligence and humanity. If Bacevich was serious, he would consider not just the strategic risks to a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan — which is what he is apparently advocating — but also the moral costs to be paid by the Afghan people we leave behind. In that light, the moral economics of war are no more black and white than the strategic economics of war. We're left with hard choices and trade-offs, and the public discourse is very poorly served by those who pretend they are easy.

Larison attacks from a different angle:

A truly morally vacuous administration would take the far easier way out, which is to have a much smaller U.S. presence augmented by steady bombardment of the countryside for years to come: there would be far fewer American casualties, the humanitarian disaster created by such tactics would be shrugged off with Rumsfeldian indifference (“stuff happens”), and each new wave of strikes would create another generation of embittered and radicalized enemies whose existence would justify continuing the war indefinitely. This would be an essentially amoral policy that takes no account of the dangers of blowback, but it would be immensely popular and politically very expedient. What should concern us is that Obama’s instinct to accommodate will eventually lead him to embrace such an amoral policy, at which point he will be deserving of the contempt Prof. Bacevich evidently wants to heap on him now.

Here’s a heart-warming video of a rescue of 90 beagles who had spent their lives being experimented on in a laboratory in New Jersey. The lab had gone bankrupt and these admirable volunteers found the dogs and freed them. The activists believe that the beagles had never been outdoors in their entire lives. And yes, this happened on July 4:

Jonah Lehrer is all for a soda tax:

Just look at cigarettes: If you want to decrease the numbers of smokers, raising the price of cigarettes is the only proven solution. In fact, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes causes a 4 percent reduction in demand. Teenagers are especially sensitive to these price changes: a 10 percent increase in price causes a 12 percent drop in teenage smoking… And let's not forget that nicotine is an extremely addictive substance. (While high fructose corn syrup might taste good, it's not chemically addictive.) So I think there's good reason to think that a 10 percent hike in the price of sodas might be even more effective than a cigarette tax.

Joel Wing updates us. We're on schedule.

Josh Green hedges his bets a little.

In a must-see clip, David Boies describes how he persuaded opposing witnesses in the Prop 8 trial to come to his side: