Don’t look down: The poor like taxing the rich less than you would think
Paradoxically, as the share of the population that receives benefits in a given area rises, support for welfare in the area falls. A new NBER paper finds evidence for an even more intriguing and provocative hypothesis. Its authors note that those near but not at the bottom of the income distribution are often deeply ambivalent about greater redistribution.
The recent stubborn politicking over the U.S.’s need to raise its debt ceiling struck me as worrisome in its Tea Party-fueled churlishness. The Economist hits the nail on the head with this assessment of S&P’s decision to downgrade its opinion of America’s credit-worthiness. While I’m no fan of the ratings agencies, hoicking such a serious issue around for political gain shows a potentially disastrous lack of maturity in America’s current political climate.
Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic
The newspaper business has always been a funny one: bundling celebrity and football news with the “serious” news of the way the world was headed in order that the former support the latter. The profit margin generated by watching a football match and writing a bit about what you saw during a single day is always going to be higher than watching for corrupt patterns of government over months or years. But the latter is, arguably, the more important for keeping society healthy.
At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation.
The patent system, the US’s especially, makes me feel both sad and angry. Another system systematically abused to ensure the powerful remain powerful and the weak remain weak.
Dave Winer:
I’m not telling you to turn the Internet off. God knows I haven’t been able to do that myself. But also don’t delude yourself into thinking that tweeting and facebooking are revolutionary acts. They’re about as revolutionary as watching CNN.