Category: Blithe Spirit

The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times

Bill O’Reilly gets millions for bombast, but . . .

. . . oil companies should not export?

You’re paid so handsomely [writes Donald J. Boudreaux, of Cafe Hayek and Geo. Mason U.] because there’s a large nation-wide demand for your commentary and bombast. In your career you’ve worked for broadcasters in Boston, Dallas, Denver, Hartford, and elsewhere. And before moving to Fox you were a correspondent for ABC News.

You apparently never hesitated to sell your product to the highest bidder; you never hesitated to export yourself from one market to another in search of higher pay; you never resisted the bidding for your services by buyers (i.e., employers) far and wide which put upward pressure on the amounts of money that you are paid, both to appear on television and to deliver lunch and dinnertime speeches.

As the nation’s best-known populist, can we expect less?

How Taxing the Rich Harms the Middle Class

If Obama knows this, why does he talk like he does? If he doesn’t, why doesn’t he?

Using data on more than 100 countries, we found that higher corporate taxes lead to lower wages. In fact, workers shoulder a much larger share of the corporate tax burden (more than 100 percent) than had previously been assumed. The reason the incidence can be higher than 100 percent is neatly explained in a 2006 paper by the famous economist Arnold Harberger. [Arnold C. Harberger, “Corporate Tax Incidence: Reflections on What
is Known, Unknown, and Unknowable,” in Fundamental Tax Reform: Issues,
Choices, and Implications, ed. John W. Diamond and George R. Zodrow
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)]

Simply put, when taxes are imposed on a corporation, wages are lowered not only for the workers in that firm, but for all workers in the economy since otherwise competition would drive workers away from the low-wage firms. As a result, a $1 corporate income tax on a firm could lead to a $1 loss in wages for workers in that firm, but could also lead to more than a $1 loss overall when we look at the lower wages across all workers.

Leftist-cocoon syndrome of he doesn’t, vote-scavenging if he does.