The United Network for Organ Sharing on its website provides a running total of the number of people waiting for an organ transplant. Today that number is at 98,059. Next Thursday, Cato is holding a policy forum “Human Organs for Sale?” where solutions for solving the U.S. organ shortage will be discussed by well known advocates both for and against the sale of organs. Also under discussion will be Iran’s organ vending system which some say is so successful that Iran has been without an organ waiting list for almost a decade. To join us, please register at events@cato.org.
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Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s continuing crusade to manage every aspect of his constituents’ lives has generated another perverse consequence: Customers of Wendy’s in New York will now get less information on nutrition than they did before the newest regulations. Wendy’s has posted this notice “For NYC Customers” on its Nutrition website:
Special notice to inquiries originating from New York City:
We regret that Wendy’s cannot provide product calorie information to residents or customers in New York City. The New York City Department of Health passed a regulation requiring restaurants that already provide calorie information to post product calories on their menu boards — using the same type size as the product listing.
We fully support the intent of this regulation; however, since most of our food is made-to-order, there isn’t enough room on our existing menu boards to comply with the regulation. We have for years provided complete nutritional information on posters inside the restaurant and on our website. To continue to provide caloric information to residents and customers of our New York City restaurants on our website and on our nutritional posters would subject us to this regulation. As a result, we will no longer provide caloric information to residents and customers of our New York City restaurants.
We regret this inconvenience. If you have questions about this regulation, please contact the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and refer to Health Code Section 81.50.
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Whaddaya Know? Pangloss Was Right after all!
All these years I was thinking that Voltaire’s Pangloss was a credulous ignoramus for claiming that “we live in the best of all possible worlds.” But then I turn on the TV while making coffee this morning to find the Congress of the United States of America spending its limited time chatting with grown men who play a game for a living.…
Fantastic! If this is the most important issue for our elected representatives to be dealing with, our nation and the world must be in far far better shape than I imagined.
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The first blogger to put up a list of every elected representative who participated in this foolishness, along with the districts they represent, gets a hotlink. Just e‑mail me at ACoulson-at-cato-dot-org.
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Bush’s Dismal Fiscal Record
Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute crunches a few numbers to estimate what would have happened to government spending if George Bush had simply maintained Bill Clinton’s non-defense budget. The sad answer is that the federal government would be about $400 billion smaller. The implications, particularly for tax policy, are staggering:
Bush has outspent Clinton by a mile. …If we now had the lower spending levels that Bush inherited, we could extend his tax cuts, repeal the alternative minimum tax, enact the current stimulus package, and still have a 10-year budget surplus of $1.9 trillion. And, remember, that allows spending to be adjusted up for the Iraq war and the war against terrorists. …It makes you sick to think about it. All that money wasted on ethanol and bridges to nowhere has accumulated into a pile that massive. Uncle Sam ate a whopping helping of apple pie every day for seven years, and now he is obese. This is important to bear in mind as we move forward to the general election. We don’t have a deficit because of Iraq, or the tax cuts, or the drug benefit. We have a deficit because the government grew fat. We can’t fix that with tax increases. Uncle Sam must go on a diet.
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Puncturing the Two-Americas Myth
John Edwards has dropped out of the presidential race, but the left continues to trumpet his class-warfare arguments. The two-Americas theme is endlessly regurgitated, particularly the notion that the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer (with the obvious implication that the rich are somehow causing greater poverty). These assertions have been repeatedly discredited (most recently by a Treasury Department study), but practitioners of the politics-of-envy seem impervious to factual arguments. So it highly unlikely that they will bother to read – much less understand – a powerful op-ed in the New York Times by Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. Cox and Alm look at consumption data rather than income data and they find that there is only a modest difference in the living standards of the rich and poor:
…renewed attention is being given to the gap between the haves and have-nots in America. Most of this debate, however, is focused on the wrong measurement of financial well-being. …Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society. The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. …they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings. The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. How is that possible? …those lower-income families have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. While some of these families are mired in poverty, many (the exact proportion is unclear) are headed by retirees and those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn’t accurately reflect their long-term financial status. So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. …Let’s take the adjustments one step further. Richer households are larger — an average of 3.1 people in the top fifth, compared with 2.5 people in the middle fifth and 1.7 in the bottom fifth. If we look at consumption per person, the difference between the richest and poorest households falls to just 2.1 to 1.
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Rev. Huckabee at CPAC
A Feb 8 memo from Mike Huckabee’s campaign chairman and manger, Ed Rollins and Chip Saltsman, explained how the Governor expected to win the Republican nomination. “Governor Huckabee has done best among hardcore Republicans, the activist base. That’s one reason why we are looking forward to Governor Huckabee.s speech to the legendary CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, in DC … You’d better believe that the folks gathered at the OmniShoreham hotel are the go-getters who make or break primary elections. Just wait till they get a load of Mike Huckabee! … And now, with the endorsement of Dr. James Dobson, who is the ‘gold standard’ of social conservatism, we fully expect that Movement Conservatives — those who fight the good fight on Life, on Marriage, on the Second Amendment — will increasingly rally to our cause.”
Gov. Huckabee, exuding all the charm of a southern preacher, told CPAC that he wasn’t schooled in math (or economics), he was schooled in miracles. But even miracles did not produce good math, even with that crowd. A straw poll of presidential favorites among 1705 attendees showed Mitt Romney first with 21% of the vote, followed by Rudy Giuliani at (17%), Sam Brownback (15%) and New Gingrich (14%). Huckabee was an also-ran among “go-getter conservatives who make or break primary elections,” even though he’s the only one running.
Stirring so much religion into politics seems to make even conservative activist nervous. Let the radical Islamists combine church and state –we prefer ours separate, thanks.
Or perhaps the CPAC activists were not persuaded that government agents trying to collect a 30% sales tax would be any gentler or less intrusive than IRS agents. Abolishing the IRS may sound great until you realize that collecting a huge sales tax at the retail level means the government would have to snoop into everything you buy or sell. And, no, the constitution does not grant feds the police power to force state tax collectors to do such dirty work.
There have been some excellent op eds questioning the Fair Tax in The Wall Street Journal by Bruce Bartlett last August 25 and Jerry Bower on January 8. Bartlett, a top Treasury tax official from 1988 to 1992, also wrote a solid longer paper on the topic. Disagree with them if you can, but don’t just shout them down. Logic and evidence tend to be more reliable than miracles.
I wrote to Bartlett and Bower saying they had courage to even mention the FairTax, since doing so always brings a flood of cultish email lecturing about the fairness of being fair and how unfair it is to say otherwise. Don’t bother sending such complaints to me, by the way – it now goes straight to my spam folder. Chances are, I’ve read a bit more about taxes than you have, and don’t really welcome any amateur lectures on the subject.
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Mr. Regnery’s Advice to John McCain
In today’s Wall Street Journal (Feb 7), Alfred S. Regnery opines as follows (with my comments) on “How McCain Can Convince the Right”:
1. “Take a firm no-new-taxes pledge. Mr. McCain … needs to promise that he won’t increase Social Security taxes — especially by lifting the earnings cap — or increase hidden taxes in regulatory schemes, and that he will try to eliminate the death tax.”
That seems to be asking too much in some respects and too little in others. Regnery is suggesting that McCain do nothing to improve the tax system (as though it’s perfect as is) other than to try to do something he cannot possibly accomplish with this congress. The best defense is a good offense. That doesn’t mean taxing less, in terms of lost loot, but taxing smarter.
McCain’s top economist told me that McCain favors taxing estates (after a large exemption) at the same rate as long-term capital gains. If so, he should not be shy about that — it’s a great idea. That would be much more effective than tilting at windmills until 2011, when the estate tax comes back in full force.
Lifting the earnings cap is indeed a huge threat, adding about 10 percentage points to marginal rates for everyone earning more than $100,000. Expiration of the 2003 tax rates would add another 5 points to that. That would bring the top tax rate to 50%, not to mention state taxes and surtaxes Congressional Democrats have proposed to pay for more health insurance subsidies and easing the alternative minimum tax.
If Democrats want to raise the Social Security tax rate to pay for rising benefits, let them have the courage to propose that. In terms of potential damage to the economy, that would be better than tapping general revenues — which means switching from a flat-rate payroll tax that exempts income from savings to a progressive income tax that applies higher tax rates to both labor and capital.