2012-03-15
post/19357164033
Another snippet from Lexington’s Economist column on the President and the pump.
There’s actually a little irony there. When taxes make up a small part the cost of fuel, a 50% change in the price of crude will push up pump prices by roughly that amount. However, for Europeans (who typically see a large, but consistent, part of the price of a litre going to their governments), the same rises and falls are hidden under the flattening effect of that fixed price.
Personally, I’d love to see a flat price dictated by government, with the taxes shrinking when petrol is cheap, and rising when it’s cheap. Given the volatility in crude prices since 2005 or so, that would have done a nice job in making the economics of recovery far more stable. (Lexington says that oil prices might not hurt the President directly ”unless they inflict much broader damage on the recovery”, but I’ve a suspicion that rising energy costs earlier in the recession helped stifle what ‘green shoots’ there were.)
2012-03-14
post/19292062454
2010-08-08
post/923737354
Economic Crisis Forces Local Governments to Let Asphalt Roads Return to Gravel - WSJ.com
Americans suffer from some weird cognitive dissonance.
2009-11-30
Tax
What if we threw out of all of the existing [personal] taxes, allowances, credits, and bands, and replaced them with a aflat 35% income tax?
I’d be interested to see if anybody’s actually run the numbers and modelled this.
Flat taxes aren’t exactly a new idea, and they’ve been tried, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). They’ve been proposed for the UK, and criticised, too, for cutting the overall government budget (albeit at a 22% above £12,000 rate, not 35% (on everything, presumably, which would surely only increase the size of the poverty trap)).
In the end, though. it just seems like so much geek-friendly “wouldn’t it be great if…” reinvention, when the real world just doesn’t work like that.
