Better Paul Krugman: Why Not Tax Financial Transactions Opinion Columns?
Nobel Prize-winning cat-stroker Paul Krugman thinks we should tax financial transactions, given that much trading is "dubious at best," and that "there's considerable evidence suggesting too much trading is going on."
I would like to suggest a slight revision to the professor-turned-pundit's grand idea:
Then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions opinion columns, blogs, and other forms of expressing oneself, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading yammering is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading bloviating is going on....
And here’s the thing: Because there are so many transactions blowhards, such a fee could yield several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade....
But wouldn’t such a tax hurt economic growth opinion-making? As I said, the evidence suggests not — if anything, it suggests that to the extent that taxing financial transactions pundits reduces the volume of wheeling and dealing opinions (or anything else with which I disagree) that would be a good thing.
In the same col, Krugman asks, "The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts?"
Let the record show that neither of the two official long-range budget proposals for fiscal year 2012 (now entering its third month without even the semblance of a budget!) propose cutting spending. Barack Obama's budget envisions spending $3.7 trillion in 2012 and $5.7 trillion in 2021. The Republican alternative, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and passed by the House, wants to spend $3.6 trillion this year and $4.7 trillion in 2021. As Los Lobos asked so many years ago when we were young and carefree, how will the wolf survive on such meager rations? Especially since spending in the decade of the 2000s only increased by roughly 100 percent in nominal outlays?
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Reason loves it.
Because Wall Street's three card monte is as important as free speech.
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[DERP]
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Actually, the regulators of commerce do indeed want to also be the censors of speech.
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It's like putting Tony, mustard, and There is no "we" in a blender.
Guess White "Jason Godesky" Indian's mom paid the internet bill again.
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Nobody's forcing you to invest in the market. You can live peacefully in the woods without ever owning a share of a REIT.
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"Free" market capitalism, as well as communism, both agricultural city-Statist systems, and both brutally enforce Gambol Lockdown.
Officer, am I free to gambol about plain and forest?
MARX: NO!
MISES: NO!So yeah, everybody IS indeed forced to survive somehow in the city-Statist "market," rather than in Non-State society lifeways.
As Dr. Ralph Borsodi states in This Ugly Civilization:
Our system of private property in land forces landless men to work for others; to work in factories, stores, and offices, whether they like it or not...They cannot be made to work regularly at repetitive tasks in which they have no direct interest except by some sort of duress. Disestablishment from land, like slavery, is a form of duress. The white man, where slavery cannot be practiced, has found that he must first disestablish the savages from their land before he can force them to work steadily for him. Once they are disestablished, they are in effect starved into working for him and into working as he directs.
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herp derp derp ctrl+v
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+1 Scruffy
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Yawn.
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Well, yes it is. Wall Street three card monte is as important as any other. Why do you hate freedom?
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...are the "freedom" Libertarians seek to get away with.
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Commie
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+1 Suki
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Because Wall Street's three card monte is as important as free speech.
Freedom's freedom. Your tongue, you say what you like. Your money, you spend as you like.
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If you replace "three card monte" with "economic freedom" then yes, it is as important as free speech. Important to a country that wants to grow, that is.
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In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on. Still, nobody is proposing a punitive tax.
Phew. That's good to hear.
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Reminds me of the old Rush clip of some Southern Democrat politician "They's just too much consumin' goin' on out dah!"
Morning Links at 9:07AM
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9:07 on the nose!
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If you work for the government, and your paycheck increases by less than you wanted, then it actually decreased.
More is less. -
Krugman -- Nobel in Economics. Obama -- Peace Prize. Those Scandinavians are such pranksters!
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And the Nobel Prize in Literature goes to...Dan Brown!
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No no no.... Stephanie Meyer
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Ok. Now, by mentioning Dan Brown, I've set myself off on a fucking rant. Isn't it time for Umberto Eco to win the fucking Prize for Literature? Is it because he sells too many books? Was Name of the Rose too accessible?
I finished The Prague Cemetery recently. It's no Foucault's Pendulum, but it's very good. -
Is it because he sells too many books? Was Name of the Rose too accessible?
On the nose. He does high lit'ry style so well that people actually enjoy his work instead of pretending to do so.
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I think it's because while his books are literary in nature, they're also mysteries, and the committee probably thumbs their noses at any form of genre fiction.
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Well, I do have to give them credit for Mario Vargas Llosa. I did not see that coming.
Blind hogs, acorns I suppose. -
Cormac McCarthy first, then Eco can have a go.
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What... no love for the V.C. Andrews canon...?
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Haven't read any. But anyway, I thought she died. Don't know if you can receive the Nobel posthumously.
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It's just the Swedes. I once asked a bunch of Finnish women what they thought of Swedish men. After some mild cajoling to get them to talk, the response was "We think they are all gay." NTTAWWT
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Finns for the win!
Though I'd prefer a Dane with an Italian for the mistress.
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Seems an appropriate place to link this webcomic about the stereotypical differences between those wacky Scandinavians. Other strips in the same comic are, well, a bit strange and NSFW.
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I see that the deathmatch
between Ezra Klein and Krugman
to be crowned King of the Retards
remains bloody. Good to know. -
They brought back Beavis and Butthead.
Maybe Celebrity Death Match is next? -
Show had a weird hard-on for Marylin Manson.
[Cue bent claymation penis]
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They could join forces, they could be CatMan and TardBoy
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That chart shows the wrong numbers.
What it should show is requested budgets, actual budgets, and the difference between them. Those would be negative numbers, and represent a decrease in federal spending.
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???!
Spending is nominally going up over today's levels. How can that be considered decreased federal spending? Sure, much of that increased money is already allocated, but until the money nominally drops, there have been no real spending cuts.
Let's say Rather's a 400 pound diabetic who promises to start a diet. She currently eats an average of 4000 calories a day but should be eating 1600 calories. For lunch today she decides to eat a 5000 calorie triple hamburger combo instead of a 5500 calorie quadruple hamburger combo. By your math, she actually decreased her calorie intake, despite the fact that she ate 1000 more than her current average and over 3000 more than she should have?
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I eagerly await his column on how the NYT should be limited in its ability to report on candidates because they are an evul corporashun.
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...so why aren't they "evul?"
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+1 Brett
Or am I not allowed to dole out points?
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You're a libertarian, DN. Ask yourself: "does doling out troll points violate anyone's rights?"
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"The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts?"
"Why should kicking my heroin habit involve shooting less heroin? That's not fair."
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Both stupid and a fascist. That's a powerful combination.
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...thus Fibertarian city-Statism is fascist.
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+1 Bill
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Yawn.
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Only libertarian Nobel Prize winners mean anything. On all the rest, the Nobel Prize committee and the prize winners were mistaken.
Or cat-strokers.
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I'm sure Krugman did lots of good work and deserved the prize. But, like may fields, economics is very specialized and his being an expert on some things doesn't necessarily qualify him as an expert on everything.
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His nobel prize was for work done on new trade theory. Doesn't make him an expert on domestic policy. Or even smart for that matter, considering the empirical evidence supporting his work is, uh, sparse to say the least. Even if he was correct with regard to his theories and models it has nothing to do with the moral justification to carry out his statist schemes. He's a partisan liberal and this is the wellspring from which all his opinions flow.
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Yasser Arafat got a Nobel "peace" prize, which shows just how fucked-up Nobel's judging has been over the decades.
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The obvious problem is that the committee often has less expertise on the subject than the people they're awarding the prize to... although one wonders how much expertise you need to judge services to peace.
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No Top. Men. at Nobel?
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Well, we shouldn't overstate it: they're not uneducated. But their job is to decide between those who are literally the top of their field and choose the most worthy - by definition they can't be as qualified or as knowledgeable as the natural nominees.
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Which is to say, when the Nobel committee chooses Krugman over any other economist, we don't have any new information. Saying "he's a Nobel prize winner" shouldn't count towards his creditability at all - if the committee were actually in a position to say with authority who was right, they would be in line for the prize (this is a general problem with identifying experts - you can't just have an expert on experts tell you who they are).
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Agreed. But just because someone went to college, doesn't mean they're good at what they do.
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At some point, you start to wonder whether Krugman is just doing all this as a silly prank. He can't really be that shallow and dishonest, right? Right?
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He's a pretty good troll I believe. Nobody can be that willfully ignorant.
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He's a liberal. By definition that means he feels force and fraud are OK if he benefits, which makes him shallow and dishonest.
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Yeah, maybe he is next column will just say "You've been punked, bitches!"
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It's ok when libertarians are shallow and dishonest.
Because calling another economist a cat-stroker just because you found a picture of him holding a cat is just so serious.
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+1 ChrisO
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Piss off, Godesky.
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Yawn.
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You mean by being rational and pragmatic rather than a blind idealogue?
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In the grand scheme of things, a "consumption tax' on some classes of financial transactions is not the worst thing imaginable (assuming! the proceeds are not just shoveled into the general slush fund and used to finance municipal dog parks, skating rinks, and other yuppie lifestyle accessories).
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But, Nick, if such a tax were implemented, you'd go broke.
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According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007, or more than half a percent of G.D.P. I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit.
Wow. Only ~20 more tax increases that bring in this much money and I think Krugman has erased the debt entirely by 2022. Too easy.
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if such a tax were implemented, you'd go broke.en,ha!!
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Bring back the Luxury Tax! See what other industries it can kill off.
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On the bright side, here's a lefty implicitly admitting that taxation reduces abundance.
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After seeing that photo of Krugman, I'm now a little ashamed to be a cat guy.
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I feel sorry for that cat, being surrounded by such a strong field of stupidity. That's got to be painful.
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Normally, I would tell a cat not to get inside a steel chamber, but in this case, "Hey, Krugman's Cat! Run to the chamber and knock down that hammer!"
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Who would oppose a tax on financial transactions? The cause of the recent financial crisis is tied directly to shady practices such as mortgage derivatives. I agree that the government should be blamed for it's policies, but they are policies demanded by the financial community. Thinking government is the primary problem is like thinking the puppet rather than the puppetmaster is the problem.
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So you think that this "puppetmaster" of yours is going to be taxed out of existence? Please don't be that naive.
The real solution, as I see it, is to get the government largely out of the finance business altogether. Let Wall Street idiots lend and invest however they wish, so long as its only their money on the line, and that of their clients. If clients know their money isn't backstopped by Uncle Sugar, they'll undoubtedly choose and monitor the moneyhandlers more carefully.
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"If clients know their money isn't backstopped by Uncle Sugar, they'll undoubtedly choose and monitor the moneyhandlers more carefully."
Hahahahaha, and Dancing with the Stars will be less popular than C-SPAN.
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Really? Let's say I demand a daily tribute of $10 from every person's paycheck just for being awesome, and the government gives it to me. Who's at "fault" here? Market participants will always attempt to gain some advantage over their competitors, but only government has the power to legally enshrine them.
What difference does it make what protectionist, anti-free market demands X makes, if the government doesn't violate property rights by enabling them? -
The cause of the recent financial crisis is tied directly to shady practices such as mortgage derivatives.
Wrong.
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I like that song. How about chicken and mashed potatoes?
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I've said it before. Gillespie isn't worth the peanuts in Krugman's shit.
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We know all about your preoccupation with shit, Max.
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Let's go chase Krugman's cat. I hear it's been declawed.
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I was hoping to read an interesting piece defending the idea that a lawless and massively speculative wall street is still a safe and socially productive wall street. I mean we did just have that wee issue of a near societal collapse due to corrupt financial speculation. But oddly - given that this is the freaking purpose of the tax - that entire question was ignored.
When I first heard about this tax idea it seemed stupid to me (I'm an investor after all), but now I am more in favor of it. Still waiting to hear a real argument against it...
Also, let the record show most Republicans are on record that they would reject deficit reduction packages which are 10 to 1 spending cuts to revenue increases. It's become increasingly clear to the gen public that they are just kind of being dicks. Dems have offered deals overwhelmingly skewed to spending cuts. Please retain a smidge of credibility on the direction of our budget talks here...