A whole lotta stupid

Ezra on taxes:

Scene: The exterior of a typical American high school on a beautiful, sunny day, near the cafeteria. A young couple sits under a tree finishing their lunch. The boy rests with his head in the lap of his older, taller, girlfriend, who is playing with his hair. A third student, heavyset and bearded, walks towards them, hesitantly, but his approach is met with dual icy glares, and he sinks back towards the school paper lunch table from which he came.
The couple begins to converse.

Ezra claims that we shouldn't try to compete with Ireland and Greece on taxation because . . . "But that's nothing compared the odd idea that we have to kick the legs out of our revenue collection in order to fend off challenges from...Greece and Ireland. Operating costs are cheaper in smaller, less advanced countries, and much cheaper in smaller, much less advanced countries." Ireland is the richest country in Europe, except for Luxembourg, which is basically one big tax-advantaged bank. Its per-capita GDP is nearly as high as America's. In 1980, the year before Ireland cut its corporate income tax, the country's GDP was half the size of America's. I agree--why would we want to emulate soaring growth?

Hear that? A good solution to our economic woes is to have a major portion of the US erupt in religious violence with political undertones, then stop. The economic growth that comes with a lack of local explosions is tremendous, especially if you're also allowed into the EU just before the world financial markets begin moving large amounts of capital out of the US in favor of Europe. That seems practical.*
Oh, wait, she wants to credit Ireland's rebirth to reduced corporate taxes. Fuck you, Megan.

He also argues for narrowing the tax base and raising the rates, though that's probably not how he thinks of it:

I've argued often on this blog that given how much income is concentrated in the hands of the rich, you can cut taxes for the majority of the country, raise taxes on a small slice of wealthy Americans, and raise revenue, even as the average American's tax bill goes down. As Leonhardt argues, the relentless march of wealth accumulation -- the rich getting much richer, year by year -- made this truer in 2008 then it was in 2007, truer in 2007 then in 2006, and a helluva lot truer in 2006 then it was in 1993.

High taxes on a narrow base are about the opposite of optimal tax theory. This is not because economists are mean, cruel people who are primarily interested in serving their corporate overlords, but rather because the narrower the base, and the higher the rates, the more sharply the marginal returns to rate increases diminish.

If you think that made no sense, well, prepare yourself for the most incoherent onslaught of jargon you've ever seen, unless you're Spencer.
...
Actually, I'm not going to bother quoting Megan further, at least not in bulk. Her argument begins with acknowledging

The top 1% of households, about 1 million in all, have about 20% of national income. They've also experienced most of the income gains in the last twenty years.

then she flails about trying to make her readers think making this slice of America give back to the nation which has benefited them so would fuck the economy. Cuz, y'know, back when we taxed the shit out of the rich in the decades following WWII until the Reagan era we didn't have any kind of economic growth as a nation, so if we raised taxes on the rich we'd just go straight into a recess.... .... Look, a pony!

Barack Obama's tax plans probably won't put us there, even with the partial lifting of the payroll tax cap. But Barack Obama's plans do nothing to close the really fairly gargantuan deficit we're staring down--he wants to use the money to fund new spending.

This is true, if you completely ignore Obama's intention to not only end the war in Iraq, but no longer allow it to be a monstrously corrupt process of blatant theft of billions from the public treasury by private hands attached to the body of Dick Cheney and/or his bosses. That might free up some pocket change for the comparatively incredibly inexpensive social programs he's proposing, but Megan's got her fingers in her ears, still, because someone someone suggested making the rich pay back the rest of the nation for affording them the privileges they enjoy. She can't hear us.
And, in the end, remember, if we try to tax the rich

they'll shift their income to more tax advantaged forms, or places. If we try to concentrate all our taxation on the rich, we will quickly reach the limits of our ability to tax.

Better to continue to make taxation primarily a means of draining the middle class for the benefit of military contractors and Chinese banks than inconveniencing the rich by making them move some of their assets in ways that weren't already in their plans. It'd just be rude of us.

*- Megan's commentariat find it to funny forever that I connect the past problems in Northern Ireland with the economic difficulties the independent nation just to its south faced. I wish I had paid more attention when the connection had been explained to me in the past, but I guess I'll just have to go on the instinct that not being near a major center of terrorism and violence is a plus when trying to attract business.
Oh, and y'know, just cuz it might damage your national brand to have your ethnic kinsmen blowing up chunks of the capital city of your wealthy and well-connected neighbor nation. Israel certainly isn't helping the matter, but still, look at how corporations are scrambling to get into Gaza and the West Bank, for example.

Let's see how much I can bait them.

Ireland, the island, is, according to wikipedia, roughly 32,600 square miles in size. That's midway between the sizes of Maine and Indiana, for comparison. Northern Ireland is 1/6th of the island. I think maybe the Troubles were relevant to the whole island, just possibly.