Comments by Pacer

The money gets the message out. Voters still get to decide if they like the message as well as the messenger.

Might run into a constitutional issue assessing these taxes only from childless men. I think that we should help out all children regardless of their situation, preferably with no-strings-attached payments to the lawful caregiver. This minimizes bureaucratic leakage and lets the market compete to provide better child-related services at lower costs.

Meanwhile, since society's paying the bill, it's got a compelling interest in preventing habitual dead beat daddery. Vasectomies as punishment for default on child support payments at least contains the bad actors' scope for imposing burdens on mothers and society. Maybe consider birth control measures for single mothers already receiving state support for multiple children. No different in principle than suspending the right to gun ownership for violent felons.

Well, since we're (most of us) paying the freight when personal decisions don't work out, that certainly gives us an interest in the matter. If we can study whether drunk drivers are more apt to hurt someone and make policy based on our interpretation of the results, why not study whether children in single parent households are more apt to commit crimes or create adverse externalities?

That said, I'm all for thinking about how to better help people, particularly since I think we can get a lot more bang for the buck we're spending. Maybe spend less AND achieve better outcomes for the beneficiaries.

How's the Obama/Holder administration doing policing the externalities foisted upon the republic by the profit-seeking gamblers in the financial sector?

Deterring and ensuring compensation for the negative externalities of private (or public for that matter) activity is one thing. Attempting to manage the economy through intricate subsidies and divinely-inspired incentive schemes is wholly another matter.

If government actually focused on getting the former done well, we might find that the latter would be unnecessary.

If there really was a difference between the two parties, Romney would have a library of liberal economic theory to counter the socialist suppositions of the D's as articulated by President Obama. But sadly socialism is in both parties' DNA these days, and they're principally fighting about which group gets to fly in corporate jets more often until the next election cycle.

Or the imaginary economy predicated on overheated, imprudent credit drew in a lot of marginal workers. Now that's over (gosh, it better be), and we're finding out that the marginal workers are a bigger slice of the working age population than we had previously thought.

Central banks should target the money supply (the thing they can control), rather than inflation (which is governed by mechanisms far too complex to be controlled). If money supply is shrinking then add. If it's not then don't add. If not adding to an already-sufficient money supply means the market has to sort out the imbalances, then so be it. The integrity of the medium of exchange is the reason for central banks to exist.

The Great Depression was caused by failure of the central bank to react to the rapid destruction of money supply by promptly creating more. The Great Recession has been caused by years of central bank mistakes--pumping an already adequate money supply--leading to stagnation as private players wait for divine (central bank) intervention rather than tallying up their accounts and moving on with their lives. This indecision is evident in the cash hoarding that is so despised at the policy level, but so sensible given the uncertainty introduced by a Fed that can't stick to a simple game plan.

So teen birthrate differential is mainly a function of economic class. I'd posit that that real underlying factor is economic segregation in housing, which has gotten worse not better since civil rights legislation aimed at curing racial segregation. Income simply became the 'legal' proxy for race, and consequently the resulting problems multiplied and metastacized into every nook of our culture.

Extensive social welfare programs play a role. First they drain resources from communities that might have facilitated more local charity (and localized charity is more apt to come with hands-on assistance from the more fortunate to the less fortunate, rather than just impersonal cash transfers). Secondly they provide an excuse to those who believe in helping the less fortunate, but feel they've done their due by paying taxes to support subsidy programs. The state has stepped in and taken the emotional burden away from the community, while replacing it with something far less useful for the intended beneficiaries.

Again, the measure of policies must be their effect--not their good intentions. The results appear to be firming up credibly by just about every measure. Poverty won the war on poverty.

To add further complexity, imagine two other parties are involved but have delegated their decisions variously to A and B.

Party C, representing current supposed or real proxies (beneficiaries or losers, or both) of the fortunes of Parties A, B or both.

Party D, representing future members of Party C who have to live with the totality of the outcome of present day games.

In general, Party D loses more than it gains from the wins of either A or B. Party C's interests are more up in the air, depending mainly on how much of Party D's interests they choose to internalize.

And maybe if we wanted to really go checkers to chess, we ought to consider party E (for 'Elite') consisting of members of the bureaucracy and the 1% rentmakers/parasites who want both A and B to win all the time every time. These of course, are the enemies of 99% of D and most of C.

The most important thing to remember is that A and B are already vested in their own rewards from party E. Win, lose or draw, they still come up aces on a personal level.

It's so funny to keep hearing that Greece needs to devalue its currency. There are only two things this achieves, and devaluation is not the exclusive means to either: reducing the real value of debts owed (which is no different than default by any other name, if it involves unilaterally recasting euro loans in drachma); and reducing real greek wages (also possible by...cutting nominal wages). And it's not as if the adversely affected parties are apt to see it any other way or react any differently going forward.

Now, to the extent the EU would prefer that Greece stay in, they can always (implicitly) hold out the notion that if Greece leaves, Turkey will be granted entry.

Fair answers each and every one Shaun39. I'd quibble with respect to disease though. It's the elite who worry less about subsistence than love wilderness and prefer traditional food rather than soylent what-have-you, who are nostalgic for the days of population < 1 billion and who see as much moral/humanitarian weight in Malthus as any other philosophy. Coincidentally these folks tend to have disproportionate access to emergent biotech research and resources. It cannot be assumed that best efforts will be put to reducing mortality, or that there won't be formidible countervailing efforts.

Want-ads are still out there, and not a week goes by I don't read an article about employers who cannot find sufficient workers. Wages are still rising in some specialized fields.

Yes there is a dearth of jobs in some fields that were robust several years ago during the Minsky artificial prosperity. I don't discount that maybe another 20-30 percent of current jobs are redundant in a real sense.

But there are quite a few areas where the jobs are there but qualified workers are not.

I hardly see how paid employment ever comes to be a luxury in aggregate. And if it did, woe be unto the masses.

That those whose labors aren't valued by society are not paid (or barely paid) by society heads off demands to 'show cause' for one's existence. Poverty is justice, in that sense. When fear of poverty is removed as a driving force for useful human endeavor, society will undoubtedly move to fill the void with something far worse. Freedom to live, freedom to prosper and freedom to fail (at great personal cost) are pretty much inseparable.

No disagreement from me that not all markets are sufficiently competitive. The least competitive markets are those in which the government is most involved. Education, financial services, health care. All so regulated that the cost of entering and offering the customer a better deal is fraught with perils completely unrelated to the simple matter of devising a better product that can be sold at a lower price and still be profitable.

In sectors not subject to so much crushing regulation, there is far more competition and value. Computers have gotten cheaper and cheaper, better and better, without the government needing to mandate innovation or control prices. Walmart puts other retailers out of business because it offers a wide selection at typically the lowest prices available--not by charging more and providing less. And last I checked computer companies and Walmart were also turning tidy profits.

But suppose the government had mandated that no computer could be sold that didn't have every bell and whistle available. And then the government decided it would make up for the fact that there isn't much demand for the high-end models by subsidizing the cost for lower income consumers. Now that the state is paying, it would need to cap prices to reduce 'excess' profits. So there would be shortages and corners being cut on quality. And a proliferation of dubious add-ons that serve mainly to jusify government approval of higher prices? Lord we'd be spending 15% of GDP on computers, at the expense of other things we probably need just as much (bridges?). That's the health care industry for you.

Then I probably do disagree with Taleb and Soros. My prescription is to further separate the state and finance (in particular removing the myriad of subsidies and restraints on competition), which in turn probably shrinks the financial sector back toward its historic share of <10% of the economy rather than the >20% to which it swelled in a few decades. Make it so that a widespread run on banks would have no more significance to main street than a nationwide failure of car dealerships or fast food restaurants. Not to say such occurrences would not be problematic, of course, but not to the extent of imperiling every other productive element of the economy.

Well, savers typically don't keep all their loot in cash in the closet. Or in gold bars. Far more commonly they let someone else use/spend the money today, with the expectation of receiving more than the amount invested at some future point. Put another way, the saver is a type of spender who exchanges her money for the means of production, rather than the outputs of production. Yes I understand this is an offensive concept to some folks, who would like all means of production to be communally owned even if it is funded by the foregone consumption of a subset of the society.

Completely concur. Banks ought to be unsubsidized and for the most part unregulated. Rather than convincing the regulators that they're making good bets and doing things above-board, let them convince their depositors and investors. I suspect that the latter standards are the tougher ones to meet, and at much less involuntary societal cost than our present system.

If the market needs or desires certain functions to be performed by banks, it will pay and those services will be rendered. If the market won't pay for some activity (for example, market rates of interest on loans) or some feature of any activity (for example, deposit insurance), then there should be a very high burden of proof for the government to meet before it steps in to require or obtain such things.

Seems like a reasonable step to lock in the 15% cap gains rate that is highly unlikely to last long enough for him to divest all those shares. Even if he were not under any covenant to hold his shares for some period of time, the price declines would be self-defeating if he tried to exit his stock position too quickly.

One thing to consider though, is the risk he's taking that the share values collapse before he can sell, and no longer being a citizen he won't get any offset for the taxes he paid based on the current valuation.

But the number is rising quickly. Annual number of renunciations is up more than 200% over the last few years alone. Considering what a large share of the government's revenue the top 1-5% pays, the fiscal effects are outsized in relation to the number of folks getting out. Who is John Galt, right?

Yes, the spenders want to give you money for your goods. But the savers aren't so different. They want to give you money for equity in your business (if it's a profitable one). Or maybe to fund someone else's business, which will pay wages to workers, who may just end up being the spenders you're looking for.

And most savers I know still can't resist a bargain. So perhaps it's just a matter of tweaking the price and/or quality to win their money.