J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 60

Morning Coronavirus:#coronavirus #orangehairedbabo...

Morning Coronavirus:

#coronavirus #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-03-09

A Note on Coronavirus

Comment of the Day: A Note on Coronavirus https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/a-note-on-coronavirus.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4f0002c200d#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4f0002c200d: Is there anything wrong with this analysis?... Now about 22,000 people have and in the next week about 44,000 people in the U.S. will catch coronavirus. These numbers could be five times too big. These numbers could be five times too small.... Ronald Brakels: 'It's now coming up to spring in the Northern hemisphere and warmer temperatures and higher humidity will slow the spread of the virus. People should also be taking precautions since they are forewarned, unlike the inhabitants of Wuhan. But yeah, there's plenty of potential for large scale outbreaks in the US, so your back of the envelope estimate may not be too far off. I'm more optimistic about the rate of spread, it's going to be 29 degrees Celsius in Houston on Wednesday, but what do I know?...' Mark Field: 'According to Johns Hopkins, the median time until death was about 33 days.... As for the doubling rate, 2 weeks ago Italy had 9 cases. Now it has 5800. Since Trump is deliberately suppressing the ability to diagnose cases, we have to estimate as the good prof has done here.... Ronald Brakels: 'Thinking about it, if 22,000 people have COVID-19 new centers of infection should be becoming apparent. If 11,000 people currently have it and have passed through the incubation period and developed symptoms there should be around 2,000+ severe cases coming to the attention of medical professionals. While this is nothing compared to the 490,000 US hospitalizations due to the flu last year, I presume there would be enough concentration in new centers of infection for suspicions to be raised. If there are normally 2,000 flu hospitalizations a day in the US at this time of year, an extra 200 or so a day concentrated in a few clusters should ring alarm bells. Unless of course it's more difficult to detect the signal than I think, or the United States is particularly bad at this sort of thing despite having months of warning.... I suspect the rate of doubling is slower than in Brad's back of the envelope calculation. This is not surprising, people have changed their behavior and the US is less crowded than China, South Korea, or Italy. Also, the United States may have been lucky with very few clusters forming in the wild. But in about a week we should be able to say if the United States has been fortunate or unfortunate...

#commentoftheday #coronavirus #2020-03-08

Coronavirus Update https://www.worldometers.info/coronavi...

Coronavirus Update https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/: '101,607 Cases and 3,461 Deaths from COVID-19 Wuhan China Virus Outbreak...

#noted #publichealth #2020-03-07

A Note on Coronavirus

Note to Self: Is there anything wrong with this analysis?: With 14 deaths in the U.S., a 1% death rate, and 4 weeks between infection and death, that means that as of Feb 8 there were 1400 coronavirus cases in the United States. If it is doubling every seven days, then now about 22,000 people have and in the next week about 44,000 people in the U.S. will catch coronavirus. These numbers could be five times too big. These numbers could be five times too small. But with only 1 in 10,000 currently affected, it seems 4 or 5 weeks early to start imposing serious geographical quarintines...

#notetoself #publichealth #2020-03-07

Erik Loomis: If Only We Could Choose Who the 2% Would Be ...

Erik Loomis: If Only We Could Choose Who the 2% Would Be https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/03/if-only-we-could-choose-who-the-2-would-be: 'Rick Santelli, a decade off of leading off the corporate-racist freakout against Obama that created the Tea Party, is back wishing 2% of the world would die of coronavirus so that the markets would just keep going up, no doubt to 36,000: @rationalsquad: "Rick Santelli on @CNBC just made the argument that we'd be better off if everyone got the #coronavirus right away and 2% of the world died off, so that financial markets could stabilize. Rick likes Republicans, don't be like Rick...

#noted #2020-03-07

Simon Balto: On Bernie, Biden, Black Voters, and Whitenes...

Simon Balto: On Bernie, Biden, Black Voters, and Whiteness https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/03/on-bernie-biden-black-voters-and-whiteness: 'I want to discuss some things that Chris [Koski] raised in his post last night on Black voters and the Biden-Bernie matchup.... I don���t have any issues with Chris���s larger conclusion that Biden manhandled Sanders in attracting Black voters in the South. That���s clearly true and not up for debate. I also agree with the point that it���s patronizing to write off Black voters as voting against their interests, being ill-informed, etc. It���s also not borderline offensive. It is offensive. However, I think there is a lot of nuance that���s lost...

...The John McWhorter quote that Chris offers (���Trump���s racism is less important to probably most black people than it is to the minority of black people in academia/the media/collegetownish circles���).... McWhorter is dispositionally and professionally prone to denying the importance of racism in anything, so I don���t really think it���s worth putting stock in his opinions on this....

As the great Black Freedom Movement scholar Hasan Jeffries put it:

I���m only going to say this once, so listen up! It���s not that Black voters don���t trust #BernieSanders enough to vote for him in the primaries, it���s that they don���t trust white voters enough to vote for him over Trump in the general election. So #Biden it is.

I know from reader reactions to my postings on reparations last year and Erik���s postings on school segregation, etc. that there���s a true aversion within a lot of this community to thinking truly and hard about whiteness and its power. But people need to know that whiteness and the ways it works are routinely part of the political arithmetic for voters of color. They have to be. (It hardly needs reiterating that Trump���s base is white men and white women, in that order, but I���ll reiterate it anyway.) For the duration of this election cycle, Sanders has been more popular among people of color than he has been among white folks.... But there is also the reality that many nonwhite voters are suspicious, based upon experience and history, of white voters��� commitment to a politics explicitly premised on social, economic, and racial justice that might disrupt the privileges of whiteness. That reality weighs on what people think is possible, and thus influences how they primary. It���s obviously not the only thing, but it���s there. The voting calculations of nonwhite voters aren���t made in a vacuum. They���re made in a political landscape indelibly shaped (one might say mutilated) by whiteness...

#noted #2020-03-07

Shelton the Charlatan: Project Syndicate

In 1994 Milton Friedman wrote about Judy Shelton: "In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (July 15)... Judy Shelton started her concluding paragraph: ���Until the U.S. begins standing up once more for stable exchange rates as the starting point for free trade...��� It would be hard to pack more error into so few words.... A system of pegged exchange rates, such as the original IMF system or the European Monetary System, is an enemy to free trade. It is no accident that the 1992 collapse of the EMS coincided with the agreement to remove controls on the movement of capital..." https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/NR_09_12_1994.pdf. To turn monetary policy away from internal balance toward preventing exchange rate movements that market fundamentals wanted to see occur was, in Friedman's view, the road toward disaster. It was simply wrong. And it could be held together only if economies moved from free trade back toward managed trade���and so beggared not just their neighbors but themselves.

Two and a half decades later, today's Judy Shelton seems no freer from error, but to it has added an enormous amount of incoherence. There is no consistent thread of argument in what she says. She is, rather, a weathervane pointing in the direction of whatever political wind she thinks likely to get her her next job.. Last year she said that the Federal Reserve should be careful not to do anything to curb stock prices: "More than half of American households are invested through mutual funds or pension funds in this market. I don���t want the Fed to pull the rug out from under them..." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/trump-fed-pick-shelton-says-central-bank-should-support-markets. But in 2016���when unemployment was higher and the case for easy money stronger���it was the Fed's "appeasing financial markets" that was the thing to be avoided https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html. Back then under the Obama administration when there were lots of unemployed workers who could be put to work producing exports, policies to produce a weaker dollar to boost exports were to be shunned: "The obvious quick route to export success for any nation is to depreciate its currency. Dollar depreciation is already being pushed by the Obama administration.... Let's not compromise our currency in a misguided attempt to boost U.S. job growth. America's best future is forged through sound finances and sound money..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704698004576104260981772424. These days "compromising the currency" is a plus from the interest-rate cuts she wants to see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-fed-choice-judy-shelton-says-interest-rate-cut-needed-because-europe-is-set-to-devalue-euro-2019-07-05. Today monetary policy should be made looser "as expeditiously as possible" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/19/fed-meets-trumps-potential-next-pick-wants-see-lower-rates-fast-possible. Back then "loose monetary policy... leads to internal bankruptcy... whole nations have foundered on this path..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123742149749078635.

Catherine Rampell https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html earlier this month correctly called Judy Shelton "an opportunist and a quack", and reported that Republican senators think she is not qualified. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said: "I wouldn't want five [Fed Board] members like her". Thom Tillis (R-NC) said that her views on the gold standard do not matter because return to the gold standard is off the table. Tim Scott (R-SC) agreed with Tillis, stating that "controversial statements" were "not relevant". Pat Toomey (R-PA) worried about the "very, very dangerous path to go down" she advocated. Richard Shelby (R-AL) was "concerned". John Kennedy (R-LA) said: "Nobody wants anybody on the Federal Reserve that has a fatal attraction to nutty ideas" https://www.wsj.com/articles/republican-senator-raises-concerns-over-sheltons-fed-candidacy-11581608467?mod=hp_major_pos1.

But the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided to back Judy Shelton's "more error packed into so so few words" over Milton Friedman by praising her as a believer that "monetary policies that ignore exchange-rate stability wreak political and economic havoc". Trump wants Judy Shelton on the Fed Board so he can threaten to���and possibly actually���replace Jay Powell with her as chair. If we have learned anything over the past three years, it is that furrowed brows of concern from Republican senators are worth precisely nothing. John Kennedy (R-LA) followed his furrowed brow by saying "I���m not saying that���s the case here". Mike Crapo (R-ID) praised her "deep knowledge of democracy, economic theory and monetary policy", and denounced the "war on Judy Shelton". If Republican senators are going to save the country from yet another Trump misstep that makes America less great, first core Republican supporters have to step up and give their senators 53 spine transplants.

J. Bradford DeLong: Shelton the Charlatan https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/judy-shelton-fderal-reserve-nominee-charlatan-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-02: Like most of US President Donald Trump's earlier picks for the US Federal Reserve Board, Judy Shelton has no business even being considered for the job, let alone winning the support of self-respecting conservatives. But in the Trump era, up is down, and quackery is the new expertise.

BERKELEY ��� Back in September 1994, the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman actually wrote about one of US President Donald Trump���s current nominees to serve on the Federal Reserve���s seven-member Board of Governors. ���In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece,��� Friedman observed, ���Judy Shelton started her concluding paragraph: ���Until the US begins standing up once more for stable exchange rates as the starting point for free trade��������� Stopping there, Friedman noted that, ���It would be hard to pack more error into so few words���...

...���A system of pegged exchange rates, such as the original [International Monetary Fund] system or the European Monetary System,��� Friedman went on to explain, ���is an enemy to free trade. It is no accident that the 1992 collapse of the EMS coincided with the agreement to remove controls on the movement of capital.��� In Friedman���s view, the idea that monetary policymakers should turn away from the internal balance and focus instead on preventing market-driven exchange-rate movements was a recipe for disaster. Such an approach would require all economies to abandon free trade and return to managed trade, thereby beggaring not just their neighbors but also themselves.

More than two decades later, Shelton���s views are no less erroneous or incoherent. Her arguments about monetary policy do not follow any consistent thread, because��she is merely a political weathervane, pointing in whatever direction is most convenient for securing her next job.

Last year, she warned that the Fed should be careful not to do anything to curb stock prices, telling CNBC, ���More than half of American households are invested through mutual funds or pension funds in this market. I don���t want the Fed to pull the rug out from under them.��� And yet, in 2016, when unemployment was higher and the case for easy money stronger, she chastised the Fed for ���appeasing financial markets��� with loose monetary policies. Given this volte-face, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Shelton���s support for monetary-policy easing depends not on economic fundamentals but on who is in the White House.

Similarly, back in 2011, when there were lots of unemployed Americans who could be put to work producing exports, Shelton argued against policies that would weaken the dollar. ���Let���s not compromise our currency in a misguided attempt to boost US job growth,��� she advised in a commentary for the Wall Street Journal. ���America���s best future is forged through sound finances and sound money.���

But nowadays, the same person who wrote those words sees compromising the currency as an added bonus from the interest-rate cuts she wants the Fed to pursue in response to monetary-policy loosening by the European Central Bank. In fact, she now believes that US monetary policy should be eased ���as expeditiously as possible.��� Never mind her warning in 2009 that ���loose monetary policy ��� leads to internal bankruptcy ��� whole nations have foundered on this path.���

Given this history of flimflam, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post was absolutely correct earlier this month when she called Shelton ���an opportunist and a quack.��� Rampell also notes that, ���Senate Republicans seem to know this,��� even if they ���still may be too craven to oppose her nomination, for fear of crossing Trump.���
For example, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota has said that while he likes the idea of having someone on the Fed Board who will challenge the status quo, he ���wouldn���t want five members like [Shelton].��� More worryingly, Thom Tillis of North Carolina apparently does not think that Shelton���s bizarre advocacy of the gold standard matters, because that issue is already off the table. Tim Scott of South Carolina agrees, arguing that Shelton���s past ���controversial statements��� are ���not relevant.���

Putting on a slightly braver face, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania told Shelton at her confirmation hearing that he is worried about her recent statements in support of devaluing the dollar. ���We don���t get to control other countries��� monetary behavior,��� Toomey warned. ���I think that is a very, very dangerous path to go down.��� Likewise, Richard Shelby of Alabama has indicated that he is ���troubled by some of [Shelton���s] writings,��� and John Kennedy of Louisiana admits that, ���Nobody wants anybody on the Federal Reserve that has a fatal attraction to nutty ideas.���

Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided to defend Shelton���s nomination, particularly her belief that ���monetary policies that ignore exchange-rate stability wreak political and economic havoc.��� In effect, it is choosing her error-packed words over Friedman���s commonsense arguments about the proper goals of monetary policymaking.

Trump, of course, wants Shelton on the Fed Board so that he can threaten Fed Chair Jerome Powell by holding her out as a ready replacement. If we have learned anything over the past three years, it is that congressional Republicans��� furrowed brows and rhetoric of ���concern��� are worthless. Kennedy, after expressing his reservations about ���nutty ideas,��� went on to stipulate that, ���I���m not saying that���s the case here.��� And Mike Crapo of Idaho has gone so far as to praise Shelton for her ���deep knowledge of democracy, economic theory, and monetary policy.���

If Republican senators are going to save the country from yet another Trump misstep, they will need to find their long-lost spines. I���m not holding my breath....

#highlighted #monetarypolicy #orangehairedbaboons #politicaleconomy #projectsyndicate #2020-03-07

Wealth Tax: Project Syndicate

Larry Summers hates this, and, given that I lose three of four arguments I have with him, that is a sign that I may well be wrong here. Maybe it is that I spend too much time back in the eighteenth century, and do not understand modern public finance. Maybe it is just that we upper middle class urban Californians pay huge wealth taxes, and so don't see why others think it is a big deal. But it seemed and seems to me that whether one taxes wealth, income, or consumption in order to try to minimize the utility cost of taxation by placing burdens on those with a very low marginal utility of wealth is overwhelmingly a question of administrative practicality: how to identify those with a low marginal utility of wealth:

Isn't a Wealth Tax Common Sense? https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/wealth-tax-common-sense-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-01: I was not surprised when Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Saez-Zucman_conference-draft.pdf in offices down the hall and Thomas Piketty over in Paris began proposing, and Democratic presidential candidates began endorsing https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/24/18196275/elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/24/20880941/bernie-sanders-wealth-tax-warren-2020, the idea of a ���wealth tax���. What did surprise me was what seemed and still seems to be a surprising amount of unexpected pushback���pushback from people I had always thought to be on the side of a more-progressive rationalization of the tax system.

Back up: When I learned public finance, I was taught that there were three principles of taxation, all spring from Jean-Baptiste Colbert���s observation that the point was to extract the feathers from the goose with the least amount of hissing. That meant, first, always broadening the tax base so that you could hit your revenue target with the lowest possible and hence the least annoying tax rates. That meant, second, imposing taxes on items for which demand was inelastic, so that the tech system did as little as possible destructive distortion to the pattern of economic activity. That meant, third, taxing those for whom the utility cost of their tax payments was least���that is, taxing the rich. And what is the broadest possible tax base on which to tax the wealthy? It is their wealth, of course. And for what is the demand of the wealthy least elastic���what are they least willing to sacrifice to try to reduce their tax burden? Their wealth, of course.

Hence I thought it obvious that the technocratically-best tax system would contain a substantial wealth tax component. I interpreted arguments based on the work of Christophe Chamley and Ken Judd that in the long run one would seek to tax labor income and not wealth to mean that getting the amount of wealth taxation done was a high priority, hence it should all be accomplished in the short run. So I was surprised at the reaction I heard.

Smart, sensible, public-spirited people with their heads screwed on right opposed the idea. AEI's Alan Viard concluded that "reforms of the income tax and estate and gift taxes" would be "simpler and more prudent" https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Wealth-Taxation-An-Overview-of-the-Issues-Revised-Nov-9-2019.pdf. Brookings's Bill Gale is "not ready to buy on to the wealth tax yet for a lot of reasons��� https://www.theepochtimes.com/experts-slam-wealth-tax-proposal-by-warren-sanders_3130293.html. Niskanen's Karl Smith calls it "simply un-American" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-29/wealth-tax-proposals-may-be-feasible-but-they-re-un-american. A chorus at a Saez and Zucman's Brookings Institute presentation feared that it would reduce Americans' willingness to make risky investments. My former coauthor Dean Baker fears "the growth of a large tax avoidance/evasion industry, which... produces nothing of social value". My frequent coauthor, good friend, and long-time patron Larry Summers fears a wealth tax would not reduce but "increase the influence of money in policy": if you can't keep your wealth and transmit it down the generations, you will spend it shaping society more to your liking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=oUGpjpEGTfE&feature=emb_logo.

Moreover, Summers sees the move for a wealth tax as a diversion of effort: "For progressives to invest their energy in a proposal that the Supreme Court has better than a 50% chance of declaring unconstitutional... seems to me to potentially sacrifice an immense opportunity". And the Tax Policy Center's Janet Holtzblatt���whom I learned back in 1993 was better at public finance than I am���focuses on what she, in her understated way, calls "grave implementation and administrative challenges" https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/holtzblatt_ppt.pdf.

Summers's "waste of opportunity" point seems cogent: I would agree that it would require a government that is already committed to doing the right thing, in view of the Supreme Court's partisan turn from Bush v. Gore to NFIB v. Sibellius and the blocked confirmation of Merrick Garland, and doubling the size of the Supreme Court. And the administrative and enforcement problems involved in defining and valuing the wealth of the rich are immense, as are the administrative and enforcement problems involved in defining and valuing the income of the rich. It would seem a cogent point to ask the IRS to pick one of these tasks to perform���to tax either all income, or wealth and labor income.

But I still have a sense that the discussion has gone wrong. What seemed to me to be a basic public finance point seems to have been lost. Why isn't it settled technocratic doctrine that a wealth tax is the ideal way to tax the wealthy, and that moves away from that benchmark must be justified in terms of administrative convenience and effectiveness? I am puzzled.

As Published:

J. Bradford DeLong: Isn���t a Wealth Tax Common Sense? https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/wealth-tax-common-sense-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-01: The wealth-tax proposals being advanced by Democratic US presidential primary contenders clearly meets the public-finance standard for an ideal form of revenue generation. So why have these plans drawn such vehement criticism from so many who should be supporting them?

BERKELEY���I was not surprised when leading Democratic primary contenders began endorsing a ���wealth tax��� along the lines of what has been proposed by my University of California, Berkeley, colleagues Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. What has surprised me is the level of pushback these candidates have received, particularly from those who should be in favor of anything that moves the United States toward a more progressive tax system.��

When I first began studying public finance, I was taught that there were three principles of taxation, all stemming from the seventeenth-century French politician Jean-Baptiste Colbert���s dictum to ���so [pluck] the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.���
The first principle is always to broaden the tax base, so that you can hit your revenue target with the lowest possible (the least hiss-inducing) tax rates. The second is to tax items with inelastic demand, in order to minimize the tax system���s distortive effects on broader patterns of economic activity. Finally, the actors who should be taxed the most are those for whom the utility costs of paying taxes are the least���that is, the rich.

Keeping all three principles in mind, what is the broadest possible tax base upon which to tax the rich? It is their wealth, of course. And what good are the rich least willing to sacrifice in order to reduce their tax burden? Their wealth, of course.

Given these basic principles, it is obvious from a technocratic perspective that the tax system should contain a substantial wealth-tax component. Even those drawing on the��work of economists Christophe Chamley and Ken Judd to argue that one should tax labor income in the long run seem to accept that establishing some level of wealth taxation should be a high priority in the immediate term.

That is why I was surprised to hear smart, sensible, public-spirited people opposing the wealth-tax proposals advanced by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others. According to Alan D. Viard of the American Enterprise Institute, it would be ���simpler and more prudent��� to reform ���the income tax and estate and gift taxes��� than to pursue a wealth tax. Likewise, William Gale of the Brookings Institution supports higher taxes on the wealthy, but then says that he is ���not ready to buy [in] to the wealth tax yet for a lot of reasons.��� And Karl W. Smith of the Tax Foundation believes a wealth tax would ���undermine a central animating idea of American capitalism.���

Moreover, when Saez and Zucman presented their wealth-tax proposal for a Brookings Institution conference, they were met by a chorus of naysayers, with many fearing that the policy would reduce Americans��� willingness to make risky investments. Even my former co-author Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research worries that a wealth tax would strengthen the incentive for the rich to ���hire accountants, lawyers, and other people engaged in the tax avoidance/evasion industry.���

Similarly, my good friend and long-time patron Lawrence H. Summers warns that a wealth tax could actually increase the influence of money in politics and policymaking, arguing that if the rich cannot keep their wealth to pass down to future generations, they will instead spend it shaping society in the here and now. Summers sees the push for a wealth tax as a distraction: ���For progressives to invest their energy in a proposal that the Supreme Court has a better-than-50% chance of declaring unconstitutional ��� seems to me to potentially sacrifice an immense opportunity.��� Finally, the Tax Policy Center���s Janet Holtzblatt���who, as I learned back in 1993, is better at public finance than I am���notes that a wealth tax could come with ���grave implementation and administrative challenges.���

Summers���s point about a potential wasted opportunity seems cogent. For an effective wealth tax to prove lasting, the US would also need a government committed to doubling the size of the Supreme Court. Between Bush v. Gore(2000), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2011), and Senate Republicans��� refusal even to hold hearings on Merrick Garland���s nomination, such a move is more than justified.

The concerns about administrative and enforcement problems are also understandable. Defining and assigning a value to the wealth (and incomes) of the rich would be an immense and difficult undertaking. To simplify matters, the Internal Revenue Service perhaps should be given just one task: either to tax all income, or to tax wealth and labor income.

Yet looking beyond these details, I cannot help but think that the discussion has gone badly wrong. A basic public-finance point seems to have been lost. It should be a settled technocratic doctrine that a wealth tax is the ideal way to tax the wealthy. As such, shouldn���t the burden of proof lie not with proponents of a wealth tax, but with all who would defend a status quo that departs from that ideal benchmark? I am genuinely puzzled, and would love to hear a convincing response on that question....

#highlighted #politicaleconomy #projectsyndicate #publicfinance

Friedrich Engels (1884): The Relative Autonomy of the State: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading: Friedrich Engels (1884): The Relative Autonomy of the State https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf: 'The state... is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed.... The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another...

...and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian Cabbage-Lord Junkers.

Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class.... This political recognition of property differences... marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie... no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this... by plain corruption of officials... and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself.... In addition to America, the latest French republic illustrates this strikingly, and honest little Switzerland has also given a creditable performance in this field. But that a democratic republic is not essential to this brotherly bond between government and stock exchange is proved not only by England, but also by the new German Empire, where it is difficult to say who scored most by the introduction of universal suffrage, Bismarck or the Bleichroder bank....

The oppressed class... the proletariat... in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation... constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists.... On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand...

#politicaleconomy #weekendreading #2020-03-07

Zeynep Tufekci: Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U...

Zeynep Tufekci: Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/preparing-for-coronavirus-to-strike-the-u-s/: 'The real crisis scenarios we���re likely to encounter require cooperation and, crucially, ���flattening the curve��� of the crisis exactly so the more vulnerable can fare better, so that our infrastructure will be less stressed at any one time.... The infectiousness of a virus, for example, depends on how much we encounter one another; how well we quarantine individuals who are ill; how often we wash our hands; whether those treating the ill have proper protective equipment; how healthy we are to begin with���and such factors are all under our control. After active measures were implemented, the R0 for the 2003 SARS epidemic, for example, went from around three, meaning each person infected three others, to 0.04. It was our response to SARS in 2003 that made sure the disease died out from earth, with less than a thousand victims globally. Similarly, how many people die of seasonal influenza (or COVID-19) depends on the kind of health care they receive. In China, death rates are much higher in the overwhelmed Hubei province than the rest of the country exactly because of the quality of the care. Hospitals only have so many beds, especially in their intensive care units, and those who have a severe case of COVID-19 often need mechanical ventilation and other intensive care procedures. When they are out of beds, people end up languishing at home and suffering and dying in much larger numbers. All this means that if we can slow the transmission of the disease���flatten its curve���there will be many lives saved even if the same number of people eventually get sick, because everyone won���t show up at the hospital all at once.... This disease is mild to nonexistent in children.... On the other hand, for the elderly or for people who have other diseases or comorbidities, it���s very serious, with death rates reaching up to 15 percent. It���s also a great threat to health workers who handle people with the virus every day, with thousands of cases already. Overall, it appears to have a case fatality rate around 2 percent, which is certainly very serious: seasonal flu, a serious threat in and of itself, has a case fatality rate around 0.1 percent in the United States, so this coronavirus is about 20 times as deadly.... Here���s what all this means in practice: get a flu shot, if you haven���t already, and stock up supplies at home so that you can stay home for two or three weeks, going out as little as possible. The flu shot helps decrease the odds of having to go to the hospital for the flu, or worse yet, get both flu and COVID-19; comorbidities drastically worsen outcomes. Staying home without needing deliveries means that not only are you less likely to get sick, thus freeing up hospitals for more vulnerable populations, it means that you are less likely to infect others.... If you are in a position of authority, that means figuring out how to help people stay at home.... The practical steps facing households are immediate and important; for the sake of everyone else, prepare to stay home for a few weeks. You���ll reduce your own risks, but most importantly, you will reduce the burden on health care and delivery infrastructure and allow frontline workers to reach and help the most vulnerable...

#noted #publichealth #2020-03-07