Month: August 2010

Nate Silver piles on (reasonably):

Ryan's budget consists of a series of proposals that would cut spending on entitlement programs in a very serious way, coupled with an equally serious restructuring of the tax code that would have the effect of lowering taxes on most individuals and businesses. On the spending side, one can debate whether or not the cuts that Ryan proposes would be (a) wise and (b) politically tenable, but they would certainly reduce the debt in a very substantial way; nobody really doubts that.

The problem is on the government revenues side, which Ryan's tax cuts would reduce, thereby counteracting the effect of his ambitious spending cuts. I'm not going to spend 200 words qualifying this: yes, tax increases have deleterious effects on productivity, which means that you're giving back some number of pennies on the dollar — and tax cuts have beneficial ones, thereby making the opposite true. But, given that current levels of taxation are low-ish by modern standards, and that Ryan's budget would make them lower, we are nowhere near the point on the Laffer Curve where tax cuts would have a net positive effect on government revenues. (In the long run, at least: tax cuts are more beneficial during a recession when a multiplier may be in play.)

Where the deceptiveness comes in is in the CBO's scoring of Ryan's proposal, which makes it appear as though Ryan's plan would substantially reduce the debt over current projections. The problem, as a separate Krugman blog post points out, is that the CBO actually only scored half the bill: they gave Ryan credit for the spending cuts, but did not deduct any points for the revenue reductions resulting from his changes to the tax code.

And Ryan provided no objective alternative to judge the revenue numbers, even though he insists that he'd raise taxes if his magical realist supply-side theory didn't work. My view, I guess, is that Ryan's spending cuts look promising. His tax cuts look like a replay of Reaganomics, whose failure could not be clearer in the soaring budget deficits today.

Greg Beato supplies one:

These days, the idea of not tipping is almost as impossible to comprehend as the idea of paying for news. Who does that? Crazy people? Criminals? … Things were much different a century ago. Between 1909 and 1926, six states passed laws that made tipping illegal. Restaurants posted “Tipping is not American!” signs in their dining rooms. In a republic where the waiter was the political and moral equal of the millionaire factory owner, each endowed with the same essential rights and freedoms, tipping was seen as “a hangover of Old World flunkeyism” as one New York Times editorial opined. It divided a classless society into servant and served.

Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 6.32 pm

Jonah Lehrer rejected the bizarre, politicized distortions of his most recent Wired piece on the search for a stress vaccine. Then he explained the cognitive dissonance of said distortions and how the Internet feeds them:

While neuroscientists have begun to decipher the anatomy of this mental flaw – you can blame your anterior cingulate cortex – I sometimes worry that the internet is making things worse. Although we're all vulnerable to cognitive dissonance (and the paranoid style has always been a loud presence in American politics) we seem to squander ever more oxygen on worthless conversations about Obama's birth certificate or the spurious link between autism and vaccines.

The online game “Foldit,” released in 2008, “enlists the help of online puzzle-solvers to help crack one of science’s most intractable mysteries – how proteins fold into their complex three-dimensional forms.”

Some new data on the effort:

When the researchers analyzed the strategies employed by a group of 57,000 Foldit players, they found that humans were better at some aspects of pattern recognition and protein structure prediction than current computational software.

As Bubble might say, we’re not completely useless you know.

Scott Adams wonders why we are often accurate:

One theory is that we're good at predicting the quality of things from scant clues. But can you really tell if a movie will have a good plot, which presumably matters, from the first two minutes?

A second theory is that we make up our minds about things based on the first few irrational cues, and everything that follows is rationalization. So if there's something in the first two minutes of a movie that I like, for whatever subconscious reasons, I later think that the directing, acting, and plot were also good (enough), even if on some objective level they were not.

He believes in the latter.

I have to say that Paul Krugman made a very strong case that the young GOPer is still drinking supply-side Kool-Aid. But it's somewhat unfair to say he opposes any revenue increases. Here's the Roadmap itself:

Claim: The Roadmap does not bring in the amount of revenue specified to the CBO according to the Tax Policy Center, and therefore it does not reduce the deficit as is claimed. (pg. 2)

Reality: The Tax Policy Center does not give official revenue estimates, and in their analysis admit to significant uncertainty and unfamiliarity with a proposal of this size and scope. The tax reforms proposed and the rates specified were designed to maintain approximately our historic levels of revenue as a share of GDP, based on consultation with the Treasury Department.

Congressman Ryan stands by his numbers, and of course would be open to adjustments in the specified rates under his tax reforms if in fact TPC’s estimates are closer to reality than Ryan’s estimates. We clearly cannot chase our unsustainable growth in spending with ever-higher levels of taxes – and the purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue – not the other way around.

I remain pretty much persuaded by Krugman's broad critique, however. Cutting taxes at this point in American history, in the face of this much debt, strikes me as loony. Revenue will have to come from somewhere if the debt is to be tackled. And defense will need to take a real cut as well. Serious fiscal conservatives will acknowledge this. The others are dreaming.

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains the merger of charity and capitalism. Entertaining:

Melinda Henneberger:

At the age of 6, James King announced his intention to become a novelist. And in his 50s, that was still the plan. Yes, he paid the bills (and two college tuitions) with his day job writing corporate training materials. But every morning at 5, he'd turn on the computer in his basement in Stamford, Conn., and after a few minutes of staring at the screen, spend the next couple of hours writing fiction no one ever wanted to buy.

Fifty-four book agents had taken a pass on his fourth unpublished novel when he happened upon a link to something called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition on one of those agent's Web sites. "What do I have to lose?" he asked his wife, strictly rhetorically. And this Monday, Aug. 9, as winner of that contest, which was entered by some 6,500 writers in 22 countries, James King's debut novel, "Bill Warrington's Last Chance," will be published by Viking.

The New Yorker's Book Bench highlights Last Words of the Executed and interviews the man behind the project, Robert K. Elder:

Modern last words tend to be more political, as illuminated by the passionate death-penalty debate in this country. During Prohibition, the condemned tended to blame their troubles on “liquor and bad women.” The largest shift, however, was the move from public to private executions behind prison walls. Those on the gallows, speaking to crowds, were in a very real way on a public stage. They would often offer advice, spiritual guidance—even sing hymns.

Behind prison walls, in some states, the condemned could speak directly to their family or the family of their victims. These last words tend to be more plainspoken, more intimate, and people are addressed directly and by name. You don’t find much of that before 1930.