Things to Read on the Afternoon of March 4, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- : Uncertainty means that the Fed should wait a while before shifting course. Given the current situation, this would mean waiting a while to raise interest rates and then rapidly raising rates when the time comes…”
- : On Trevon Logan: Chicago: Highly Segregated By Any Measure
- : “The U.S. tax code is now the main vehicle for social policy in retirement, college savings, and housing. How well has this ‘submerged state’ worked? At least in these three areas, the effectiveness of the tax code, via deductions and credits, is questionable…”
- : “Historians [will] look back on… ‘Obamacare’ [as] encourag[ing] a wave of innovation that gradually tamed the spiraling costs of a dysfunctional system, even as millions of previously excluded Americans gained access to health insurance…”
- “When 2,000 People Take a Daily Aspirin for Two Years: 1 Heart Attack is Prevented… about 3.6 people have heart attacks…”
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: Hospital Stocks Surge After Justice Kennedy Criticizes Obamacare Challenge: “Tenet Healthcare Corp. and HCA Holdings Inc. led a rally among hospital companies as a Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare’s insurance subsidies drew questions from a pivotal justice. Anthony Kennedy… said Wednesday there is a ‘powerful’ point to the Obama administration’s argument that the health-care law would fall apart if the subsidies were ruled unlawful. ‘There is a serious constitutional problem,’ Kennedy said, if the court rules for the challengers’ attack on tax credits designed to help people afford insurance…. As of 11:28 a.m. in New York. Tenet was up 7.4 percent to $50.52, and HCA rose 7 percent to $75.71. Community Health Systems Inc. advanced 6.3 percent to $52.70.” -
: Riches and Perils of the Fossil-Fuel Age: “In 2035, emissions of CO2 are forecast [by BP] to be 18bn tonnes above levels suggested by the International Energy Agency’s ‘450 Scenario’…. Improvements in energy efficiency are a… more important driver of the relatively low growth in emissions than shifts in the fuel mix…. These forecasts… imply a faster rise in energy efficiency than between 2000 and 2013…. Could we do better?… We need an accelerated technological revolution…. The sense of the BP report… is that… obstacles are many: costs, technological limits, slow turnover of the capital stock, inability to implement policy globally and natural inertia…. If governments could agree to implement a tax on carbon, they would give a big impulse towards an energy future that is more efficient and less polluting…” -
: Tariff Incidence: Evidence from U.S. Sugar Duties, 1890-1930: “Direct empirical evidence on whether domestic consumers or foreign exporters bear the burden of a country’s import duties is scarce. This paper examines the incidence of U.S. sugar duties using a unique set of high-frequency (weekly, and sometimes daily) data on the landed and the duty-inclusive price of raw sugar in New York City from 1890 to 1930, a time when the United States consumed more than 20 percent of world sugar production and was therefore plausibly a ‘large’ country. The results reveal a striking asymmetry: a tariff reduction is immediately passed through to consumer prices with no impact on the import price, whereas about 40 percent of a tariff increase is passed through to consumer prices and 60 percent borne by foreign exporters. The apparent explanation for the asymmetric response is the asymmetric response of demand: imports collapse upon a tariff increase, but do not surge after a tariff reduction.” -
: Taxes and Fairness in an Era of High Inequality: “(1) As inequality has increased, the tax code has not kept pace with this change. The tax code does less to reduce inequality than it did in the late 1970s. (2) Efforts to reduce inequality are not in tension with economic growth…. (3) There are policy options that can make the tax code more progressive that will have broad benefits for everyone…. There are many examples of changes that would be consistent with the literature. Two that are on the table right now would be Eliminating the “stepped-up basis” for taxation of bequests and expanding the Child Tax Credit…. Families passing along large estates to children… the potential damages that could have on the vitality of the economy… a loophole we should close… eliminating the carried interest loophole… transfer taxes, raising the ordinary income tax rates or limiting deductions and exclusions. We can also do a variety of things at the low end…. The Child Tax Credit… partially refundable for a set percentage of income (15 percent) over a set threshold (currently $3,000). The value of the tax credit has been increased and the threshold decreased, both temporarily, in recent years. I recommend making these reforms permanent…”
Should Be Aware of:
- : “Some A+ whataboutism here” https://t.co/XLTB8dG1me http://t.co/ysoKaQmruQ
- : The First Victims of the First Crusade
- : Hangtown Fry
- South Coast Portuguese Fish Chowder Recipe
- : “[Michael Schmidt’s New York] Times piece… says that there were ‘new’ regulations that Clinton was supposed to abide by…. So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly?…. The [New York] Times has some questions to answer to: Did you know that the new regs went into effect after Clinton left office? And if you didn’t, why not? And if you did, why did you leave that fact out of the story?…”
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: Star Trek is great, and Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was the greatest thing about it: “Spock was not only a hero. He was a particular kind of hero. Someone the wrong kind of people would call a villain. I am always struck, as a longtime Star Trek fan, by the fact that many media figures seem to think it’s a dis on President Obama to compare him to Spock. The ease with which some deride Spock makes him truly unusual for a television character. Spock is someone who some of us can eminently identify with, but also someone who others find so alien that they are compelled to castigate him. That, in turn, makes him a dozen times more relatable than a more conventional and universally admired hero.”