Why do people hate QE2?

Tyler Cowen:

[T]he libertarian right is having a hard time seeing the Fed as a relative ally over the last three years, which it has been. That admission implies an unappetizing shift in the goal posts for what is possible, and that sounds like a intellectual surrender to a lot of people I know. I think they are in denial. One alternative to acceptance is to view the Fed as sinister, which then leads you to fear anything they do, including QEII, their current major monetary policy initiative."

Interest rate WTF

Tyler Cowen:

What's in your wallet? Less if you use Firefox or IE and more if you use Chrome. Here from J-Walk Blog are interest rates for a car loan from Capital One if you use IE.

and here are the rates if you use Chrome:

Consumerist: "Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used"

Here's one commenter:

These are driven by statistics. I work in a group that does statistical analysis of web traffic, and any piece of information that is collected during a browser session is subject to analysis--including what browser you use. If statistical analysis of web traffic, correlated to account history, indicates that users of browser X are more likely to default or be a problem payer on a loan than users of browser Y, then that goes into the mix, and has absolutely nothing to do with the browser itself.

We analyze EVERYTHING: What bank your credit card is with, where you live, how many seconds you spend on each web page, how long your fargin' name is. Everything that can be analyzed IS analyzed, and correlations that give any 'lift' are folded into the lending process.

This could have flown under the radar if Capital One had decided to cache a history of previously-presented offers by IP address that expired after, say, six hours.

I doubt it was intentional, but the publicity this has generated on economics blogs must be good for them.

Not serfdom

See Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein and David Frum.

Agora

Tyler Cowen:

I am surprised this film, set in ancient Alexandria, has not occasioned more controversy.  It is the most pro-science, pro-rationalist, anti-Christian movie I have seen -- ever. -- and it does not disguise the message in the slightest.  The director and scriptwriter is Spanish and Chilean, namely Alejandro Amenábar.  It offers a Voltairean portrait of Judaism, as an oppressed rabble, most of all responsible for the crime of having birthed Christianity.  There are some not-so-subtle parallels shown between the early Christians and current Muslim terrorists.
 
The visual rendering of antiquity is nicely done and without an excess of CGI.
Here is a positive New York Times review.  Here is a positive Guardian review.  Not everyone will like this movie.

I wouldn't call Agora anti-Christian in particular, but more broadly anti-fundamentalist.

It's my favorite since The Man From Earth (2007).

Link blag

Cato has the grim facts on public schooling since 1970.

League: Jason Kuznicki, Austin Bramwell, and Jaybird on gay marriage and Christianity.

MR: What political action are markets demanding?

NYT: Your Brain on Computers: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

Rand Paul editorializes on the CRA and individual rights in a local Kentucky paper.

Sentences to ponder

Via Tyler, discount babies edition:

The paper finds the cost of adopting a black baby needs to be $38,000 lower than the cost of a white baby, in order to make parents indifferent to race. Boys will need to cost $16,000 less than girls.

Presumably that holds at the margin only, not for all parents.  Here is more, from Allison Schrager.  It seems that most couples prefer to adopt non-black girls.

Photo of the day

Homeowners in China protest the demolition of their homes.

Thought of the day

"Facebook is the people you went to school with. Twitter is the people you wished you went to school with."

—Ben Casnocha

The art of taxation

Alex at Marginal Revolution:

In Mexico, visual artists can pay their taxes with art works.

That's the deal Mexico has offered to artists since 1957, quietly amassing a modern art collection that would make most museum curators swoon. As the 2009 tax deadline approaches, tax collectors are getting ready to receive a whole new crop of masterworks...

There's a sliding scale: If you sell five artworks in a year, you must give the government one. Sell 21 pieces, the government gets six. A 10-member jury of artists ensures that no one tries to unload junk.

Under the program, the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit now owns 4,248 paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Leonora Carrington and other masters.

Click on "Colecciones Pago en Especie" at apartados.hacienda.gob.mx/cultura/index.html to see the art works which have been used to pay taxes since the program began.

The Mexican government accepts all styles of painting for the program so, unlike in America, in Mexico you can have taxation without representation.

Groan.

Medical innovation during war

Marines often go on foot patrols with tourniquets loosely strapped high on their thighs, so they can begin cranking right away if a foot is blown off.

The article is interesting throughout. (via MR)

The signularity is near

Forget the iPad, I too want one of these:



(via MR)

Where's my tinfoil hat?!

Magnets can alter a person's sense of morality

(via)

One gaming machine per child

The punchline writes itself.

Equality shoes

(via MR — the woman on the right doesn't have hers on yet)

Quote of the day

"The way to get closer to the truth is to start with the conditions under which you're wrong, not to list all the reasons you think you are right." —Tyler Cowen

Elementary, but too often forgotten

Critique of The Phantom Menace

Via Tyler Cowen, a wonderfully genius 70-minute review...

Sentences to ponder

This comes via MR:

Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

The government’s interests, then, are naturally aligned with those of the plutocrats — and when that happens, the chances of change naturally drop to zero.

Even yet another reason to support a flat tax.

The limits of good vs. evil thinking

Tyler Cowen makes an, er, good point.

Quote of the day

"If this is [Sarah Palin's] game of Scrabble, you can only imagine what her foreign policy would be like."

—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

The dead zone: implicit marginal tax rates on the working poor

A look at our awful system:



Mises Daily explains:

At A, the marginal tax rate is quite high, essentially because of the generosity of the package of cash and noncash benefits provided to those on welfare. At B, the marginal tax rate is relatively low (!) because of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). From B to D, we (or, rather, the working poor) are in the Dead Zone, with implicit marginal tax rates mostly exceeding 100 percent.

How stupid and evil must our elected representatives be to do this to the working poor! Actually, this being a democracy, there is nobody to blame but the electorate. Especially the left-liberal do-gooders. Since Milton Friedman developed the negative income tax, waaay back in the 1950s, there can be no excuse for any educated person to not be aware of the fact that taxes and means-tested benefits destroy the lower classes' positive incentive to work.

At C, the implicit marginal tax rate is momentarily "only" 75 percent. This is because, in the face of losing other means-tested benefits while the federal income tax kicks in, the children of the household still qualify for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The lull in the onslaught is momentary, however, ending as soon as that prop is removed from the household.

At D, the family is finally done with jumping through the hoops to qualify and remain qualified for the give-away programs. Now all it has to concern itself with is paying taxes. But there is no rest for the weary because, at E, the child tax credit phases out.

In the above scenario, I describe the effects of the tax and subsidy programs of the government with respect to a hypothetical family of three, consisting of one adult and two minors, with a focus on the working poor. I could just as well have talked of a middle-class family with one or more children of college age, and how means-tested financial aid programs such as the Pell Grant and federally subsidized loans make fools of those who save for college; or how Medicaid's rules for nursing-home eligibility make those who save for retirement into fools; or how bringing back the pre-Reagan tax rates will make utter fools of families in which the wife and husband both work.

Everywhere, the government's desire (meaning the left-liberal do-gooders' desire) to be generous to the poor is destroying the positive incentives to work and to save that are so necessary for a well-functioning economy. What they have done to Detroit, and are doing to New Jersey, they will do to the entire country.

(via Marginal Revolution)