The Washington Post no longer classifies whether the deceased was attacking police or not in its online database. That filter on its 2016 database has been removed. It is possible to filter the data to say whether particular weapons were present.
Looking up individual shooting reports in the database provides information on whether the unarmed suspect was doing in terms of resisting police or not. The seven undetermined cases involve disputed facts over whether the suspect was armed or was resisting the police..
The fatal error of the Left is to smear populists such as Hansen, Trump and UKIP as extreme right.
Hanson won the safest Labour seat in Queensland when first elected in 1996. Her 23% swing was mainly made up of Labour voters. Few in the media or commentariat like to remind of that.
Donald Trump defeated opposition on his right from Ted Cruz to win the Republican nomination. If moderate candidate Kasich had dropped out earlier, many of his voters would have gone to Trump, not to Cruz. Trump has appeal to working class Democrat party voters. The only group he seems to win is white men
UKIP is no longer a party out of the Tory shires, when it won 3% of the vote in 2010 in the UK. UKIP is slightly to the left of the LDP and came 2nd in 40 Labour seats in the last UK election. UKIP is a real threat to win seats from Labour or divide the working class work to allow the Tories to come through the centre.
All of these populists combine nationalism, an anti-immigration sentiment, a dislike of globalism and free trade because it involves dealing with foreigners, a preference for lower taxes but no particular opposition to extensive economic and social regulation. In many ways they are Alf Garnett Labour voters.
The work-horses of rational irrationality – antimarket bias, pessimism bias is, anti-foreign bias and make-work bias – are strong among these populist politicians and their voting base.
So few Labour Party MPs, present and upcoming, are working class in origin now that they have simply no experience of the anti-immigration and nationalist settlements of the working class. Until labour parties they work out how to deal with that and meet those concerns, they will keep losing votes to populists.
There is a wonderful quote about how a voter explained he did not vote Labour anymore because he was a white working class Englishman not on the benefit – Labour was no longer interested in him. Identity politics is not just the preserve of the left.
My two cents on the sharp rise of partisanship and congressional polarisation is they are driven by the great restraint in the growth of government spending in the 1980s.
From 1950 to 1980 the size of government doubled but then stopped dead in the 1980s. This great restraint on the growth of government happened everywhere. It was not just Thatcher’s Britain or Reagan’s America. It was everywhere, France and Germany, and even Scandinavia.
Peltzman’s data which I have charted has government spending in the USA, Britain, France and Scandinavia doubling between 1950 and 1980, and then nothing much happened between 1980 and 2007 – the size of government was pretty flat as a share of GDP for 27 years.
Governments everywhere hit a brick wall in terms of their ability to raise further tax revenues. Political parties of the Left and Right recognised this new reality.
Government spending grew in many countries in the m-d-20th century because of demographic shifts, more efficient taxes, more efficient spending, a shift in the political power from those taxed to those subsidised, shifts in political power among taxed groups, and shifts in political power among subsidised groups Importantly for explaining later political polarisation, that growth of government was concentrated in four programs – defence, health, education and income security
The median voter in all countries was alive to the power of incentives and to not killing the goose that laid the golden egg which underwrote the initial growth in the size of government. The rising deadweight losses of taxes, transfers and regulation limit inefficient policies and the sustainability of redistribution.
After 1980, the taxed, regulated and subsidised groups had an increased incentive to converge on new lower cost modes of redistribution to protect what they had. More efficient taxes, more efficient spending, more efficient regulation and a more efficient state sector reduced the burden of taxes on the taxed groups. Reforms ensued after 1980 led by parties on the Left and Right, with some members of existing political groupings benefiting from joining new coalitions.
A lot more is at stake when the main political battleground is dividing a relatively fixed revenue pie post-1980 than a growing pie Between 1950 and 1980. Fiscally conservative voters will elect parties strongly committed to no new taxes. Their opponents will look for equally ideologically committed parties. Peltzman makes the very interesting point that:
There is no new program in the political horizon that seems capable of attaining anything like the size of any of these four. For the time being the future government rest on the extent of existing mega programs.
Health and income security account for 55% of total government spending in the OECD. It is in these two programs where the future of the growth of government lie.
The pressure for that growth in government will come from the elderly. Governments will have to choose between high taxes on the young to fund the current generosity of social insurance, healthcare and old-age pensions or find other options. Peltzman explains this political tension for programs benefiting the elderly in his essay The Socialist Revival:
Deficit financing of future growth in these programs becomes increasingly problematic. So we now have the seeds of political conflict rather than consensus.
These very large programs confer substantial benefits on some. These beneficiaries resist any change in the status quo. But the benefits have to be financed at substantial cost to today’s workers. Many of them will not benefit on balance from these programs over their lifetimes. It is by no means clear whether the number of winners exceeds the number of losers today.
Policies that were once unthinkable now can be discussed and even implemented here and there. These include increased retirement ages, less generous public health care programs, more reliance on private saving for retirement and so forth.
Given that intergenerational and other struggles over who is taxed and who faces benefit cuts, middle-of-the-road politicians lose their appeal to the electorate.
Another reason for greater political polarisation is the rising cost of time. Sound-bites news programs and current affairs are now a couple of seconds long when they used to be 15 seconds long maybe 30 years ago.
People have less time to pay attention to politics so they want to work out quickly from short sound-bites whether the politicians they are contemplating supporting are made of the right stuff. For voters in a hurry, conviction politicians are more appealing be they of the left or of the right. Voters want someone who will hold fast against new taxes or for new taxes as the case may be. Much is at stake as Sam Peltzman explained in his 2012 essay The Socialist Revival:
The steady growth of the old age population share is on the verge of a substantial acceleration… This means that government health care and public pension spending growth will also have to accelerate merely to keep the promises implicit in present programs.
The political economy will have to choose between higher taxes on the young to keep these promises, an accelerated shrinkage of the rest of the budget or less generous public health and pension programs. It is not clear yet which way the decision will go.
What is clear is that for the first time since the invention of the welfare state the magnitude and generosity of its signature programs is at political risk.
In this stand-off between those who might have to pay more in taxes and those who might receive less in old age pensions, welfare benefits and services including healthcare, neither side wants a politician naturally inclined to blink and compromise. They will elect politicians who hang tough for their side of the argument and their share of the budget.
It is unfortunate that the Australia Institute today misspoke when it claimed that every economist agrees that the effect of a company tax rate cut is small.
— Australia Institute (@TheAusInstitute) June 24, 2016
The top economists in the field of public economics disagree. Their views are freely available on the Internet. They are easiest to find by googling the words abolish the corporate tax. Optimal rate of tax on capital is zero are other good words to Google.
Paul Krugman responds to my post about a recent column of his. He is correct that not all economists agree that low capital taxation is desirable; he appropriately cites Diamond and Saez, who are on the high-capital-tax side of this debate. FYI, here is another recent paper, written in part as a response to Diamond and Saez, which finds that optimal rates of capital taxation, while positive, are quite low.
But that is not really the issue. If Paul had said “reasonable economists disagree, here are the arguments, and here is why I tend to favor one side rather than the other” I would not have objected.
Instead, in his original column, he wrote as if there were no reasonable arguments for the policy pursued by the Bush administration, and he attributed the most vile motives to those who advanced the policy.
This episode illustrates a fundamental difference between Paul and me. I try not to assume the worst in other people, just because they disagree with me.
Taxes on incomes from capital should be much lower because capital migrates from high-tax to low-tax locations, reducing capital-to-labour ratios in the higher company tax countries.
The Australia Institute manages to put itself in the contradictory position of saying a company tax rate just means more revenue for the IRS in the USA but Google, Facebook and other multinationals managed to avoid tax on a massive stale through tax havens. If the former is correct, their less company tax in Australia means more company tax paid in the USA means multinationals must be rather unsuccessful at avoiding tax through tax havens.
Multinationals are both avoiding company tax in Australia and offshore and paying it in full in the USA if Australia’s company taxes cut if the Australian Institute is to be believed today.
The Australia Institute obviously has not picked up on the relentless bullying that Ireland was subject to by the rest of the European Union over its 12.5% company tax.
The Irish company tax rate of 12.5% was initially on export profits. To finesse European Union member state complaints about that 12.5% company tax rate on discrimination grounds,the Irish government extended that low rate to all companiesin 1995.
I am yet to see a minister of finance welcoming a company tax cut in a competing jurisdiction, rubbing his hands in anticipation of greater tax revenues on the foreign profits of multinationals that are headquartered in his country.
If there is an ounce of sense in what the Australia Institute said about foreign taxmen benefiting from low company taxes in Australia, high corporate tax rate countries such as Germany, France and the USA should welcome low company tax rates in destination countries for foreign investment originating in those countries but they do not.
Rather than seek tax harmonisation, high tax country should welcome low company taxes in competing investment destinations but they do not. Why is this so if the Australia Institute is making sense?
The Nordics are alert to not killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Company taxes are relatively low in Scandinavian countries as compared to the USA so that businesses do not flee to other jurisdictions.
A large welfare state such as those in the Nordic countries require a significant amount of revenue, so the tax base in these countries must be broad. This also means higher taxes on consumption through the VAT or GST and higher taxes on middle-income taxpayers.
Business taxes are a less reliable source of revenue because of capital flight and disincentives to invest. Thus, the Nordics do not place above-average tax burdens on capital income and focus taxation on labour and consumption. All those nuances are lost if you are to believe the Australia Institute today.
The Greens this week has decided to offer every support short of real help to those being massacred and brutalised by ISIS
“The NZDF deployment to Iraq does not make us safer, but puts New Zealand troops at risk and makes New Zealanders unnecessary targets of ISIL.
“We condemn the horrific violence of ISIL. New Zealand should be using its leverage as a member of the UN Security Council to curb ISIL’s access to funding and arms, not keeping our troops in danger for another year and a half,” said Mr Shaw.
This is straight out of the Yes Prime Minister episode on how the Foreign & Commonwealth Office explains how it helps foreign nations in trouble from invasion and tyranny. A 4 stage plan on how to do nothing.
In his recent speech before the House of Commons on further assistance to those fighting ISIS since Syria, Labour Party foreign office spokesman Hilary Benn described this as walking to the other side of the road.
Firing the entire welfare state bureaucracy does not save the day for a universal basic income as Robert Greenstein explains
Suppose UBI provided everyone with $10,000 a year. That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years.
This single-year figure equals more than three-fourths of the entire yearly federal budget — and double the entire budget outside Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. It’s also equal to close to 100 percent of all tax revenue the federal government collects…
Where would the money to finance such a large expenditure come from? That it would come mainly or entirely from new taxes isn’t plausible.
We’ll already need substantial new revenues in the coming decades to help keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and avoid large benefit cuts in them. We’ll need further tax increases to help repair a crumbling infrastructure that will otherwise impede economic growth. And if we want to create more opportunity and reduce racial and other barriers and inequities, we’ll also need to raise new revenues to invest more in areas like pre-school education, child care, college affordability, and revitalizing segregated inner-city communities.
A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far, especially given the tax increases we’ll already need for Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other needs.
If you want fewer mass shootings, reduce the supply of gun free zones where even the craziest gunmen have been able to find despite being tormented by the voices as John Lott explains
Time after time, we see that these killers tell us they pick soft targets. With just two exceptions, from at least 1950, the mass public shootings have occurred in these gun-free zones. From last summer’s mass public killers in Santa Barbara and Canada, to the Aurora movie theatre shooter, these killers made it abundantly clear in their diaries or on Facebook how they avoided targets where people with guns could stop them.
And even when concealed handgun permit holders don’t deter the killers, the permit holders stop them. Just a couple of weeks ago, a mass public shooting at a liquor store in Conyers, Ga., was stopped by a concealed handgun permit holder.
The USA is in an arms race between criminals and law-abiding citizens. Both have lots of guns so the only people who gain from disarmament to those who obey the law to have fewer guns. They are in a high gun equilibrium where it very difficult to get out of this arms race.
Demands for more gun control and bans on specific weapons postpone the hard work of how to reduce mass shootings in a society with easy gun access. It is expressive politics at its worse.
An Australian politician today in an unrelated context regarding universal health insurance in Australia called Medicare made this point about politics is hard work, not political theatre
It’s so much easier today to be a cynical poseur than a committed democrat, it’s easier to retreat to observer status than convince your friends of the merits of incremental change.
It required hard slog to ensure those institutions could survive the heat of adversarial politics. Then it took election campaign after election campaign, tough political negotiation, administrative effort, and the making and breaking of careers and governments to finally make Medicare stick,” she said.
The creation of Medicare took more than a hollow-principled stand, it took more than just wishful thinking, it took more than slogans, it took more than protests. It took real, tough politics. It took idealists who were prepared to fight to win government.
Expressive politics is about what voters boo and cheer, not whether policies actually work if adopted. Voters want to feel good about what they voted for and find a sense of identity in who they oppose and what they support. After a mass shooting, voters feel they must do something, cheer for something better and cheering for more gun control is an easy way to feel better.
Gun control is not going to happen in the USA because of the poor incentives for law-abiding individuals to retreat from high levels of legal private gun ownership when criminals will keep their guns. Harry Clarke pointed out that:
The political popularity of guns is strengthened by Prisoner’s Dilemma disincentives for individuals to retreat from high levels of gun ownership.
Accepting a gun buyback would be unattractive to citizens who would recognize high levels of overall gun ownership in the community and, hence, their own personal increased vulnerability if those with criminal intent acted rationally and kept their weapons.
If you want fewer mass shootings, fewer gun free zones is the way to go. That might have other unintended consequences but more mass shootings is not likely to be one of them. Ready access to guns in moments of despair increases suicide rates. Suicides in the Israeli Defence Force fell 40% when young soldiers were not allowed to take their guns home at the week-end. Suicides do not increase during the week so the lack of weekend access to guns got them through dangerous moments of despair where ready access to a firearm would have led to a suicide.
The last thing spree killers want is to be quickly shot down like the dogs they are such as at an American church in 2007. The last wannabe jihadist to try it on in Texas died in a hail of gunfire.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey showed the risk of serious injury from a criminal attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a gun. 97% of murders are by men. Any arguments about gun control should be about gun control for men.
The sharemarket perception of gun control is every time there are calls for more gun controls, the share prices of gun manufacturers surge of the back of an anticipated spike in sale. Buying two gun shares on the first trading day after 12 recent mass shootings and selling them 90 days later produces a return of 365% over a nine-year period compared to 66 percent for the S&P 500 Index. A buy-and-hold bet on Smith & Wesson stock starting in January 2007returns 137%.
The key to the success of Australian and New Zealand gun laws was low levels of gun crime and minimal use of guns for self-defence. There was no arms race as compared to the USA where criminals and civilians are both armed. It is easy to control an arms race that has not started. The New Zealand, Australian and even the British police rarely have to discharge their weapons.
Martin Luther King was a gun owner for obvious reasons. Tom Palmer was the lead litigant in the recent Supreme Court case on gun control in the USA. He saved himself and a fellow gay man from a severe beating in 1987 by gang of 20 men by pulling a gun on them. Pink pistols has been in the thick of anti-gun control litigation in the USA.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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