Enlighten Radio:The Moose Turd Cafe AND The Halloween Poetry Show -- MONDAYS!!

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Blog: Enlighten Radio
Post: The Moose Turd Cafe AND The Halloween Poetry Show -- MONDAYS!!
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2017/10/the-moose-turd-cafe-and-halloween.html

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Paul Krugman: Trump’s Deadly Narcissism

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Paul Krugman: Trump's Deadly Narcissism // Economist's View
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/09/paul-krugman-trumps-deadly-narcissism.html

"Trump truly is unfit for this or any high office":

Trump's Deadly Narcissism, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: According to a new Quinnipiac poll, a majority of Americans believe that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. That's pretty remarkable. But you have to wonder how much higher the number would be if people really knew what's going on.

For the trouble with Trump isn't just what he's doing, but what he isn't. In his mind, it's all about him — and while he's stroking his fragile ego, basic functions of government are being neglected or worse.

Let's talk about two stories that might seem separate: the deadly neglect of Puerto Rico, and the ongoing sabotage of American health care. What these stories have in common is that millions of Americans are going to suffer, and hundreds if not thousands die, because Trump and his officials are too self-centered to do their jobs.

Start with the disaster in Puerto Rico and the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands.

When Hurricane Maria struck ... it knocked out power to the whole of Puerto Rico, and it will be months before the electricity comes back. Lack of power can be deadly..., but what's even worse is that ... much of the population still lacks access to drinkable water. How many will die because hospitals can't function, or because of diseases spread by unsafe water? Nobody knows. ...

So have we seen the kind of full-court, all-out relief effort such a catastrophe demands? No. ...

Trump spent days after Maria's strike tweeting about football players. When he finally got around to saying something about Puerto Rico, it was to blame the territory for its own problems.

The impression one gets is of a massively self-centered individual who can't bring himself to focus on other people's needs, even when that's the core of his job.

And then there's health care.

Obamacare repeal has failed again, for the simple reason that Graham-Cassidy, like all the other G.O.P. proposals, was a piece of meanspirited junk. But while the Affordable Care Act survives, the Trump administration is openly trying to sabotage the law's functioning. ...

Why are the Trumpists doing this? ... A.C.A. sabotage is best seen not as a strategy, but as a tantrum. We can't repeal Obamacare? Well, then, we'll screw it up. It's not about achieving any clear goal, but about salving the president's damaged self-esteem.

In short, Trump truly is unfit for this or any high office. And the damage caused by his unfitness will just keep growing.


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Re: [socialist-econ] International evidence shows that low corporate tax rates are not strongly associated with stronger investment

Very important srticle!!  Thanks very much. JOHN!!!

On Oct 29, 2017 7:00 AM, "John Case" <jcase4218@gmail.com> wrote:

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International evidence shows that low corporate tax rates are not strongly associated with stronger investment // Blog | Economic Policy Institute
http://www.epi.org/blog/international-evidence-shows-that-low-corporate-tax-rates-are-not-strongly-associated-with-stronger-investment/

The Trump administration's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a paper last week arguing that cuts in the statutory corporate tax rate would lead to gains in business investment, productivity, and wages. I noted in a piece released yesterday why this was unlikely to be true.

The key piece of evidence the CEA claimed was "highly visible in the data" and showed the wage-boosting effect of corporate tax cuts was simply a graph that showed faster unweighted wage growth in just two years in a set of "low-tax" countries relative to a set of "high-tax" countries. I noted in my paper yesterday why this was so unconvincing: a serious test of this claim would look at corporate tax rate changes (not levels), would look over a longer time-period than four years, and would not allow three countries with a combined national income that is less than 0.4 percent of American national income to drive the results.

But, the CEA report did make me curious if we would see anything "highly visible in the data" linking changes in statutory corporate tax rates to nations' capital stocks. The key theory behind claims that corporate rate cuts will boost wages is the idea that these rate cuts will lead to substantially faster investment in productivity-enhancing plants and equipment, boosting the nation's capital stock and making workers more productive. We can assess the first link in that chain of causation below, asking simply "are lower corporate tax rates associated with a larger capital stock"? Figure A shows a scatterplot of the relationship between the average statutory corporate tax rate between 2000 and 2014 the capital-to-labor ratio in 2014. The hypothesis is that low-tax countries should have attracted more capital investment and hence should have accumulated a large stock of capital relative to their workforce by the end of the period. (The data on capital stocks and employment comes from the Penn World Table 9.0.)

Figure A

As the trendline through the scatter indicates, the relationship actually goes the wrong way—countries with higher corporate tax rates over this period had larger capital stocks by 2014. This positive relationship is not particularly significant, either statistically or economically, but that's largely the point: tax cuts are an extremely weak lever with which to attempt to move capital investment.

Some might argue that looking at the average rate over a 14 year period might hide the fact that some countries went from high rates at the beginning of the period to low rates in the end. In this case, the large change in rates could likely have affected capital investment, but this would be obscured by our long-run averages. This is fair enough—though it highlights once again the CEA report's inappropriate use of averages over a short-run period. But Figure B below shows the change in corporate tax rates versus the growth rate of capital inputs into production (a measure of capital investment used in productivity analysis).

Figure B

Again, the correlation here goes the wrong way for sustaining claims that slashing corporate rates would increase capital investment; countries that saw larger reductions in the statutory rate saw slower growth of capital inputs.

The international evidence presented above just re-confirms what we already know: no binding constraint on American economic growth exists today that would be helped at all by cutting corporate income taxes. Instead, such cuts would simply boost incomes for owners of corporations—a group that is already overwhelmingly among the richest households in America. Promises of gains to investment, productivity and wage growth that will force these tax cuts to trickle down to typical American households are completely empty.


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International evidence shows that low corporate tax rates are not strongly associated with stronger investment

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International evidence shows that low corporate tax rates are not strongly associated with stronger investment // Blog | Economic Policy Institute
http://www.epi.org/blog/international-evidence-shows-that-low-corporate-tax-rates-are-not-strongly-associated-with-stronger-investment/

The Trump administration's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a paper last week arguing that cuts in the statutory corporate tax rate would lead to gains in business investment, productivity, and wages. I noted in a piece released yesterday why this was unlikely to be true.

The key piece of evidence the CEA claimed was "highly visible in the data" and showed the wage-boosting effect of corporate tax cuts was simply a graph that showed faster unweighted wage growth in just two years in a set of "low-tax" countries relative to a set of "high-tax" countries. I noted in my paper yesterday why this was so unconvincing: a serious test of this claim would look at corporate tax rate changes (not levels), would look over a longer time-period than four years, and would not allow three countries with a combined national income that is less than 0.4 percent of American national income to drive the results.

But, the CEA report did make me curious if we would see anything "highly visible in the data" linking changes in statutory corporate tax rates to nations' capital stocks. The key theory behind claims that corporate rate cuts will boost wages is the idea that these rate cuts will lead to substantially faster investment in productivity-enhancing plants and equipment, boosting the nation's capital stock and making workers more productive. We can assess the first link in that chain of causation below, asking simply "are lower corporate tax rates associated with a larger capital stock"? Figure A shows a scatterplot of the relationship between the average statutory corporate tax rate between 2000 and 2014 the capital-to-labor ratio in 2014. The hypothesis is that low-tax countries should have attracted more capital investment and hence should have accumulated a large stock of capital relative to their workforce by the end of the period. (The data on capital stocks and employment comes from the Penn World Table 9.0.)

Figure A

As the trendline through the scatter indicates, the relationship actually goes the wrong way—countries with higher corporate tax rates over this period had larger capital stocks by 2014. This positive relationship is not particularly significant, either statistically or economically, but that's largely the point: tax cuts are an extremely weak lever with which to attempt to move capital investment.

Some might argue that looking at the average rate over a 14 year period might hide the fact that some countries went from high rates at the beginning of the period to low rates in the end. In this case, the large change in rates could likely have affected capital investment, but this would be obscured by our long-run averages. This is fair enough—though it highlights once again the CEA report's inappropriate use of averages over a short-run period. But Figure B below shows the change in corporate tax rates versus the growth rate of capital inputs into production (a measure of capital investment used in productivity analysis).

Figure B

Again, the correlation here goes the wrong way for sustaining claims that slashing corporate rates would increase capital investment; countries that saw larger reductions in the statutory rate saw slower growth of capital inputs.

The international evidence presented above just re-confirms what we already know: no binding constraint on American economic growth exists today that would be helped at all by cutting corporate income taxes. Instead, such cuts would simply boost incomes for owners of corporations—a group that is already overwhelmingly among the richest households in America. Promises of gains to investment, productivity and wage growth that will force these tax cuts to trickle down to typical American households are completely empty.


----

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Enlighten Radio Podcasts:Podcast: The Moose Turd Cafe-- "No Live Frogs Allowed"

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Enlighten Radio Podcasts
Post: Podcast: The Moose Turd Cafe-- "No Live Frogs Allowed"
Link: http://podcasts.enlightenradio.org/2017/10/podcast-moose-turd-cafe-no-live-frogs.html

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Enlighten Radio Podcasts:Podcast: Winners and Losers: Dr Keith Alexander and the 2st Century Humanities Symposium

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Enlighten Radio Podcasts
Post: Podcast: Winners and Losers: Dr Keith Alexander and the 2st Century Humanities Symposium
Link: http://podcasts.enlightenradio.org/2017/10/podcast-winners-and-losers-dr-keith.html

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Wall Street wins big as Senate votes to roll back regulation allowing consumers to sue their banks [feedly]

Wall Street wins big as Senate votes to roll back regulation allowing consumers to sue their banks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/24/wall-street-wins-big-as-senate-votes-to-roll-back-regulation-allowing-consumers-to-sue-their-banks/

Vice President Pence cast a tie-breaking vote late Tuesday to block new regulations allowing U.S. consumers to sue their banks, handing Wall Street and other big financial institutions their biggest victory since President Trump's election.

The rules would have cost the industry billions of dollars, according to some estimates. With the Senate's vote, Wall Street is beginning to reap the benefits of the Trump administration focus on rolling back regulations it says are strangling the economy. The vote is also a major rebuke of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which wrote the rules, and has often found itself at odds of Republicans in Congress and the business community.

At issue is the fine print in many of the agreements that consumers sign when they apply for credit cards or bank accounts. These agreements typically require them to settle any disputes they have with the company through arbitration, in which a third party rules on the matter, rather than going to court or joining a class-action lawsuit.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed