Utopia, you are standing in it!

When studying the economic of taxation, one of the most important lessons is that there should be low marginal tax rates on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

That’s also the core message of this video from Prof. John Cochrane.

I wrote a primer on marginal tax rates back in 2018. I wanted to help people understand that the incentive to engage in additional productive behavior is impacted by how much people get to keep if they earn additional income.

So what matters isn’t the tax on income that’s already been generated. The key variable is the marginal tax on the additional increment of income. As illustrated by the accompanying visual.

I’ve shared real-life examples of how the American tax system can result in very high marginal tax rates, especially when you include the extra layers of tax on income that is saved and invested (producing extremely high effective marginal…

I see there has been some ruction here in New Zealand about a high school activist group (School Strike For Climate Auckland or SSFCA) breaking itself up because of its inherent White Supremacy.

Apparently the group was “advised” about this problem by Maori and Pasifika groups also engaged in “fighting Climate Change”. I was amused that Chris Trotter covered this story with the title, Losing The “Struggle-Session” Over Climate Change:

The statement released by SSFCA was heart-breaking. To find an historical precedent for the document’s abject self-negation and unqualified acknowledgement of guilt it is necessary to go back to the “struggle sessions” of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s. Or, even further back, to the “confessions” tremulously delivered by the broken victims of Joseph Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The shaming and vilification required to reduce these idealistic young people to a state of such utter…

The pro wind and solar camp have made every effort to conceal the cause of mass blackouts in California, Texas, Germany and South Australia. With a pliant mainstream press complicit in the cover-up, it’s little wonder that the average Joe has no idea what’s going on.

Well, that’s what sites like STT and Master Resource are for. Wayne Lusvardi provides a detailed synopsis of why California’s power grid is in such chaos.

As he puts it, the growing burden of renewable energy on the power grid is near or at maximum levels in some key states such as California and Texas. A product that was once ‘firm’ is now precarious with central planning by regional transmission organizations (RTOs) or Independent System Coordinators (ISOs). Expect a reliability index to be introduced for state-by-state analysis as the cancer grows and spreads.

California Summer Blackouts? (Bureaucratic Green Doublespeak)
Master Resource
Wayne Lusvardi
24…

Edward Nelson’s name is one of those widely known brands in monetary economics that need no special introduction. He has been a fixed star of the profession for decades. Right after earning his PhD degree at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Bennett T. McCallum and Allan H. Meltzer, household names in the field, he started his professional career as a central bank economist at the Bank of England, then proceeded to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. His current position is at the Division of Monetary Affairs of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington DC, where now as a senior advisor (and former assistant director, and former senior economist of the monetary studies section) he is responsible for supporting the decision makers at the Board and the Federal Open Market Committee.

An outstanding publication record comes with this high impact in monetary policy…