this made me laugh. crook inserts a bit about the bush tax cuts, to show his centrist bona fides to a sceptical left, but only makes a fool of himself: the bush tax cuts will repeal themselves in 10 years because they were enacted with a sunset provision. the democrats don’t need to reverse them.

When Disraeli said “That sir, depends on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles” he was not exactly being gracious.

I thought that was John Wilkes.

But I still wish Henry and everybody else wouldn’t give in to the orwellian use of “centrism”. The “center” is somewhere to the right of where the right used to be.

Pretending there’s something congenitally wrong with leftwingers for not being “able” to admit Crook is right certainly preserves Crook from having to frame a rational argument. But it’s unconvincing.

Sadly, the job of selling regressive tax changes after the umpteenth failure of voodoo economics will fall to a more capable and imaginative fraud.

Nevertheless, the mere existence of a substantive left-ish approach to the question refutes Crook’s strawman.

He’s not arguing with the left, or seeking an accommodation. He’s strawmanning the left to push it out of the Overton Window. I don’t see that as very different from silencing or shouting down.

Let me be the first to explode Clive Crook’s head by saying that I’m on the left and I believe there could be circumstances in which it would be a good idea to lower taxes on the rich. We just aren’t presently in those circumstances, or likely to be in them any time in the foreseeable future.

Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of the Laffer Curve, and if you actually are on the descending part of it, then lowering tax rates is a good idea. What’s wrong with the Laffer Curve is the constant attempt to claim we are on the descending side when the evidence clearly shows otherwise.

I can think of three actual situations where it would be a good idea to cut taxes on the rich. The first is if the rich-and-productive (as an example I’ll use Steve Jobs) are actually being deterred from working by high tax rates. Do you see Steve Jobs working one day a week and taking the other four off because it just isn’t worth the effort when he only gets to keep 70% of his tens of thousands of dollars per hour gross pay? Me neither. (Actually, I doubt that a techie like Jobs is all that money motivated in the first place, especially after the first couple million. More study of the psychology of people like Jobs might produce a more realistic estimate of the effect of marginal tax rates on behavior.)

The second is if there are many potentially-productive opportunities to invest in means of production that would increase economic output in the future (e.g. building factories), but nobody is actually making the investments because there are no investable funds or because capital gains are being taxed at some extremely high rate that skews the risk-reward calculations. (1) What we have is, if anything, the opposite—lots of investment in risky and unproductive assets and loans to people with little capacity to repay who aren’t planning to do anything productive with the money, because it’s really not a good time to build factories but there’s tons of investment capital looking for someplace to park.

Finally, the third situation is where taxes are so high that a whole industry is pushed into the black market to avoid them. Most black markets arise from outright bans on the transaction in question, but a sufficiently high tax could have the same effect, which would eliminate it as a revenue measure (and also deliver money to organized crime). Theoretically a really high income tax could do this to the whole economy, but in practice that has never happened and seems almost impossible that it could ever happen.

(1) Limited liability skews risk-reward in favor of risky investments, because you can’t lose more than the equity invested but there’s no limit to the upside if the investment pays off. This results in investments with negative expected return being undertaken anyway because some of the costs can be externalized through bankruptcy if the venture fails. (This effect is even stronger if the founder expects to work as a manager, because then his/her managerial salary is a guaranteed return regardless of success or failure. Literally any failed business can be a profitable undertaking if you can convince someone else to pay you to manage it until it crashes. The only limiting factor is finding venture capitalists willing to buy shares in Newcastle Coal Importation, Ltd.)

In order for capital gains taxes to suppress valuable investment they have to be an even stronger effect in the opposite direction. It’s not sufficient to say they suppress investment that would have been undertaken otherwise if that investment would have had negative expected overall return including externalizable risk.

as Jamie Kenny puts it in a sort of version of Godwin’s Law, you can more or less guarantee that when someone starts out by saying “Communism was as bad as Nazism”, within finite time with probability one, he will end up expressing a preference for the Nazis.

A common ploy on the right, to deplore the excesses of both sides, but somehow, for some reason, there don’t seem to be too many examples on the right that get mentioned.

And what’s worse is that your garden-variety clueless liberal is only too happy, in discussions with “centrists”, to enable this scam by readily agreeing (seeking thereby to strengthen his or her own “mainstream” creds) that, sure, Michael Moore is crazy (or the like), thereby collaborating in the rightward movement of the Overton window.

Me, I make no bones about it. I don’t want to see a “middle ground” or “consensus” between liberalism – which, by the way, is not “the left” – and the extreme right politics of the modern Republican party. Why? Because it simply isn’t possible. We are talking about people who have made it quite clear they want even a moderate like Obama to fail and whose vision of America is so bizarre, they run their candidates in stealth mode so no one knows what they actually stand for.

I want to see the extremists on the right pushed back to the margins of American discourse, where they so clearly belong. It is utterly shameful that Crook makes a false equivalence between them and mainstream liberals, but it is not a new tactic.