Why AT&T Killed Google Voice, by Andy Kessler WSJ: “Telecom operators are yesterday’s business. It’s time for a national data policy that encourages innovation.”
Obama, In Rich Irony, Can’t Afford To Wage War On Nation’s Wealthy, by W. Michael Cox IBD: “Barack Obama’s political fate depends on a group of Americans he hasn’t done much to cultivate — the rich.”
Brokers Aren’t Responsible for Bad Bets, by Charles Schwab WSJ: “To take the risk out of investing you’ll have to take Americans out of the market.”
ObamaCare Is All About Rationing, by Martin Feldstein WSJ: “Overspending is far preferable to artificially limiting the availability of new procedures and technologies.”
The Death Book for Veterans, by Jim Twoey WSJ: “Ex-soldiers don’t need to be told they’re a burden to society.”
‘Death Panels’ Just A Rumor? Go Ask Ezekiel, by Thomas Sowell IBD: “There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage….”
What Do the U.S. and Turkmenistan Have in Common?, by Freakonomics Freakonomics: “Foreign Policy came up with a list of “The World’s Worst Healthcare Reforms”. Keeping company with Russia, China, and Turkmenistan is the good old U.S. of A.”
Arnold Kling and Tyler Cowen provide some interesting analyses of the progressive worldview from a libertarian perspective. Since the various public versus private sector proposals for health care depend critically upon these underlying worldviews (with progressives preferring more government intervention and libertarians preferring greater reliance upon market forces), I can’t help but wonder a less shrill and more constructive discussion and debate of healthcare reform could occur if the opposing sides had a better understanding of these worldviews. I would be most grateful for any references concerning an analysis of the libertarian worldview from a progressive perspective.
“At 35 percent, America’s levy on corporate income is one of the highest in the developed world. In 2007, about 2.5 million companies prepared lengthy returns at great expense, yet the tax generated only about 15 percent of total federal tax revenue. The tax on corporate profits discourages capital formation, targets shareholders regardless of their wealth, and fuels frantic, and costly, business efforts to dodge it. Among experts who study its effects, support for the tax is at best sort of sheepish.”
The risk management literature actually has much to say about how the corporate tax code discourages capital formation. Specifically, the asymmetricnature of the corporate income tax creates disincentives for firms to bear risk. Tax asymmetries derive from two important features of the corporate income tax; specifically, tax rate progressivity and incomplete tax loss offsets. Thus tax asymmetries incentivize firms underinvest in risky (but potentially profitable) assets, which in turn limits the economy’s prospective growth potential.