Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Krugman Endorses Insanity

Bill Anderson explains:

In 2004 at a session of the Southern Economic Association meetings in New Orleans, Paul Krugman was the speaker and in the Q&A (with Dr. Joe Salerno sitting next to me), I asked Krugman if he supported the 70 percent tax rates that existed before the tax cuts of 1981. "No!" he exclaimed, and added (these exact words), "Those rates were insane!"
Today, we can say that Krugman now has endorsed insanity with a recent blog post, as he lavishes praise on a paper that endorses...70 percent tax rates:
Now, this doesn’t imply a 100% tax rate, because there are going to be behavioral responses – high earners will generate at least somewhat less taxable income in the face of a high tax rate, either by actually working less or by pushing their earnings underground. Using parameters based on the literature, D&S suggest that the optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%. (Emphasis mine)
In the next paragraphs, the guy who once called 70 percent an "insane" rate now attacks anyone who might say, well, what Krugman told me in 2004. Krugman goes on to make a textbook appeal for the 70 percent rates and excoriates anyone who might disagree. So, I guess Krugman was against those rates before he was for them, or maybe he just wants us to forget what he told a group of academic economists.



7 comments:

  1. It's not insanity if Herr Krugman recommends it.

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  2. Krugman thinks he owns other people.
    This is a sign of a violent psychopath...A Statist Psychopath. These parasites need to be removed from civil society.

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  3. Anderson forgets that, according to Keynesians, we're in a liquidity trap, so everything is opposite. Insanity is sane, 70% taxes are now equal to what would be their reciprocal in normal economic times, and Krugman is perfectly consistent. We're living in bizarro world.

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  4. Today's age can be summed up mostly in the Money Speech in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

    Excerpt (Francisco d'Anconia):

    Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods.

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  5. I could go on and one giving more excerpts about how Krugman is, as described in the Money Speech, a pure, unadulterated looter, a hitchhiker of virtue, a man of the double-standard, a criminal, an aristocrat of the bureau, a tool. A destroyer.

    "When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

    http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/economics/money/1826-francisco-s-money-speech-excerpt-from-ayn-rand-s-best-selling-novel-atlas-shrugged.html

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  6. I wish he would come and try to take 70% of my stuff....Bratty little Runt.

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  7. Krugman is (almost) sane next to Mark Ames
    http://mindbodypolitic.com/2011/11/23/ames-tax-the-1-at-91/

    Maybe that's the idea. Have one lot come up with absurd statements, so that Kruggers looks human in comparison.

    Maybe the right should take a leaf out of that strategy

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