Bernie Sanders

I dislike overstatement

pnrj core principles, ethics, personal, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 10 JDN 2459225

I was originally planning on titling this post “I hate overstatement”, but I thought that might be itself an overstatement; then I considered leaning into the irony with something like “Overstatement is the worst thing ever”. But no, I think my point best comes across if I exemplify it, rather than present it ironically.

It’s a familiar formula: “[Widespread belief] is wrong! [Extreme alternative view] is true! [Obvious exception]. [Further qualifications]. [Revised, nuanced view that is only slightly different from the widespread belief].”

Here are some examples of the formula (these are not direct quotes but paraphrases of their general views). Note that these are all people I basically agree with, and yet I still find their overstatement annoying:

Bernie Sanders: “Capitalism is wrong! Socialism is better! Well, not authoritarian socialism like the Soviet Union. And some industries clearly function better when privatized. Scandinavian social democracy seems to be the best system.”

Richard Dawkins: “Religion is a delusion! Only atheists are rational! Well, some atheists are also pretty irrational. And most religious people are rational about most things most of the time, and don’t let their religious beliefs interfere too greatly with their overall behavior. Really, what I mean to say that is that God doesn’t exist and organized religion is often harmful.”

Black Lives Matter: “Abolish the police! All cops are bastards! Well, we obviously still need some kind of law enforcement system for dealing with major crimes; we can’t just let serial killers go free. In fact, while there are deep-seated flaws in police culture, we could solve a lot of the most serious problems with a few simple reforms like changing the rules of engagement.”

Sam Harris is particularly fond of this formula, so here is a direct quote that follows the pattern precisely:

“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.”

Somehow in a single paragraph he started with the assertion “It is permissible to punish thoughtcrime with death” and managed to qualify it down to “The Afghanistan War was largely justified”. This is literally the difference between a proposition fundamentally antithetical to everything America stands for, and an utterly uncontroversial statement most Americans agree with. Harris often complains that people misrepresent his views, and to some extent this is true, but honestly I think he does this on purpose because he knows that controversy sells. There’s taking things out of context—and then there’s intentionally writing in a style that will maximize opportunities to take you out of context.

I think the idea behind overstating your case is that you can then “compromise” toward your actual view, and thereby seem more reasonable.

If there is some variable X that we want to know the true value of, and I currently believe that it is some value x1 while you believe that it is some larger value x2, and I ask you what you think, you may not want to tell me x2. Intead you might want to give some number even larger than x2 that you choose to try to make me adjust all the way into adopting your new belief.

For instance, suppose I think the probability of your view being right is p and the probability of my view being right is 1-p. But you think that the probability of your view being right is q > p and the probability of my view being right is 1-q < 1-p.

I tell you that my view is x1. Then I ask you what your view is. What answer should you give?


Well, you can expect that I’ll revise my belief to a new value px + (1-p)x1, where x is whatever answer you give me. The belief you want me to hold is qx2 + (1-q)x1. So your optimal choice is as follows:

qx2 + (1-q)x1 = px + (1-p)x1

x = x1 + q/p(x2-x1)

Since q > p, q/p > 1 and the x you report to me will be larger than your true value x2. You will overstate your case to try to get me to adjust my beliefs more. (Interestingly, if you were less confident in your own beliefs, you’d report a smaller difference. But this seems like a rare case.)

In a simple negotiation over dividing some resource (e.g. over a raise or a price), this is quite reasonable. When you’re a buyer and I’m a seller, our intentions are obvious enough: I want to sell high and you want to buy low. Indeed, the Nash Equilibrium of this game seems to be that we both make extreme offers then compromise on a reasonable offer, all the while knowing that this is exactly what we’re doing.

But when it comes to beliefs about the world, things aren’t quite so simple.

In particular, we have reasons for our beliefs. (Or at least, we’re supposed to!) And evidence isn’t linear. Even when propositions can be placed on a one-dimensional continuum in this way (and quite frankly we shoehorn far too many complex issues onto a simple “left/right” continuum!), evidence that X = x isn’t partial evidence that X = 2x. A strong argument that the speed of light is 3*108 m/s isn’t a weak argument that the speed of light is 3*109 m/s. A compelling reason to think that taxes should be over 30% isn’t even a slight reason to think that taxes should be over 90%.

To return to my specific examples: Seeing that Norway is a very prosperous country doesn’t give us reasons to like the Soviet Union. Recognizing that religion is empirically false doesn’t justify calling all religious people delusional. Reforming the police is obviously necessary, and diverting funds to other social services is surely a worthwhile goal; but law enforcement is necessary and cannot simply be abolished. And defending against the real threat of Islamist terrorism in no way requires us to institute the death penalty for thoughtcrime.

I don’t know how most people response to overstatement. Maybe it really does cause them to over-adjust their beliefs. Hyperbole is a very common rhetorical tactic, and for all I know perhaps it is effective on many people.

But personally, here is my reaction: At the very start, you stated something implausible. That has reduced your overall credibility.

If I continue reading and you then deal with various exceptions and qualifications, resulting in a more reasonable view, I do give you some credit for that; but now I am faced with a dilemma: Either (1) you were misrepresenting your view initially, or (2) you are engaging in a motte-and-bailey doctrine, trying to get me to believe the strong statement while you can only defend the weak statement. Either way I feel like you are being dishonest and manipulative. I trust you less. I am less interested in hearing whatever else you have to say. I am in fact less likely to adopt your nuanced view than I would have been if you’d simply presented it in the first place.

And that’s assuming I have the opportunity to hear your full nuanced version. If all I hear is the sound-byte overstatement, I will come away with an inaccurate assessment of your beliefs. I will have been presented with an implausible claim and evidence that doesn’t support that claim. I will reject your view out of hand, without ever actually knowing what your view truly was.

Furthermore, I know that many others who are listening are not as thoughtful as I am about seeking out detailed context, so even if I know the nuanced version I know—and I think you know—that some people are going to only hear the extreme version.

Maybe what it really comes down to is a moral question: Is this a good-faith discussion where we are trying to reach the truth together? Or is this a psychological manipulation to try to get me to believe what you believe? Am I a fellow rational agent seeking knowledge with you? Or am I a behavior machine that you want to control by pushing the right buttons?

I won’t say that overstatement is always wrong—because that would be an overstatement. But please, make an effort to avoid it whenever you can.

Bernie Sanders may be our next President

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , ,

Feb 16 JDN 2458896

It’s too early to say who will win the election, of course. In fact, we’re not even entirely sure what the results of the Iowa caucuses were, because there were so many errors that they are talking about doing a recount.


But Bernie Sanders has taken a commanding lead in polls, and forecasts now have him as the clear front-runner. If we’d had range voting, Sanders probably would have won last time. But even with our voting system as terrible as it is, there’s a good chance he’ll actually win this time.

I would honestly prefer Elizabeth Warren; she shares Bernie’s idealism, but tempers it with a deep understanding of our political and economic system. Her policy plans are spectacularly good; she doesn’t just come up with a vague idea, she lays out a detailed roadmap of how it will be accomplished and how it will be paid for. Her plans cover a wide variety of issues, including a lot of things that most people aren’t even aware of yet nevertheless affect millions of people. Who else is talking about universal child care programs, the corruption in our trade negotiation system, antitrust action against tech monopolies, or reducing corporate influence in the military? Who else includes in their plan for corporate taxes detailed reforms to the accounting system? And who else has a plan for forgiving student debt that actually calculates the effective marginal tax rate induced by the phase-out? Elizabeth Warren is the economist’s candidate: Unlike almost everyone else in politics, she actually knows what she’s doing.

Bernie Sanders, by comparison, has an awful lot of laudable goals, but is often quite short on the details of how they will be achieved. His healthcare plan, in particular, “Medicare for All”, doesn’t seem to include any kind of cost estimate or revenue support. I’m all for single-payer healthcare, but it’s not going to get done for free. And at least in the past, he has made economic forecasts that are wildly implausible.

But we could certainly do a lot worse than Bernie. His most unrealistic ideas will be tempered by political reality, while his unflinching idealism may just shift our Overton Window in a much-needed leftward direction. He is a man of uncommon principle, and a politician of uncommon honesty—he does not have even one “Pants on Fire” rating on Politifact.

To say that he would obviously be better than Trump is a gross understatement: Almost anyone would obviously be better than Trump, and definitely any of the leading Democratic candidates would be.

In fact, Warren is the only candidate I unambiguously prefer to Sanders. Biden is too conservative, too willing to compromise with an uncompromising right wing. As historic as it would be to have an openly gay President, I’m not sure Buttigieg is the one I’d want. (On the other hand, the first gay President is almost certainly going to have to be extremely privileged and milquetoast to break through that glass ceiling—so maybe it’s Buttigieg or nothing.) Yang has some interesting ideas (like his basic income proposal), but no serious chance of winning. Bloomberg would be a good Libertarian Party candidate, but he’s no Democrat. The rest have fallen so far in the polls they aren’t worth talking about anymore.

Like I said, it’s really too early to say. Maybe Biden will make a comeback. Maybe Warren will win after all. But it does mean one thing: The left wing in America has been energized. If one good thing has come of Trump, perhaps it is that: We are no longer complacent, and we are now willing to stand up and demand what we really want. The success of Sanders so far proves that.

Trump is finally being impeached

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Post 310 Oct 6 JDN 2458763

Given that there have been efforts to impeach Trump since before he took office (which is totally unprecedented, by the way; while several others have committed crimes and been impeached while in office, no other US President has gone into office with widespread suspicion of mass criminal activity), it seems odd that it has taken this long to finally actually start formal impeachment hearings.

Why did it take so long? We needed two things to happen: One, absolutely overwhelming evidence of absolutely flagrant crimes, and two, a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

This is how divided America has become. If the Republicans were really a mainstream center-right party as they purport to be, they would have supported impeachment just as much as the Democrats, we would have impeached Trump in 2017, and he would have been removed from office by 2018. But in fact they are nothing of the sort. The Republicans no longer believe in democracy. The Democrats are a mainstream center-right party, and the Republicans are far-right White-nationalist crypto-fascists (and less ‘crypto-‘ all the time). After seeing how they reacted to his tax evasion, foreign bribes, national security leaks, human rights violations, obstruction of justice, and overall ubiquitous corruption and incompetence, by this point it’s clear that there is almost nothing that Trump could do which would make either the voter base or the politicians of the Republican Party turn against him—he may literally be correct that he could commit a murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. Maybe if he raised taxes on billionaires or expressed support for Roe v. Wade they would finally revolt.

Even as it stands, there is good reason to fear that the Republican-majority Senate will not confirm the impeachment and remove Trump from office. The political fallout from such a failed impeachment is highly uncertain. So far, markets are taking it in stride; it may even turn out to be good for the economy. (Then again, a good economy may be good for Trump in 2020!) But at this point the evidence is so damning that if we don’t impeach now, we may never impeach again; if this isn’t enough, nothing is. (The Washington Examiner said that months ago, and may already have been right; but the case is even stronger now.)

So, the most likely scenario is that the impeachment goes through the House, but fails in the Senate. The good news is that if the Republicans do block the impeachment, they’ll be publicly admitting that even charges this serious and this substantiated mean nothing to them. Anyone watching who is still on the fence about them will see how corrupt they have become.

After that, this is probably what will happen: The impeachment will be big news for a month or two, then be largely ignored. Trump will probably try to make himself a martyr, talking even louder about ‘witch hunts’. He will lose popularity with a few voters, but his base will continue to support him through thick and thin. (Astonishingly, almost nothing really seems to move his overall approval rating.) The economy will be largely unaffected, or maybe slightly improve. And then we’ll find out in the 2020 election whether the Democrats can mobilize enough opposition to Trump, and—just as importantly—enough support for whoever wins the primaries, to actually win this time around.

If by some miracle enough Republicans find a moral conscience and vote to remove Trump from office, this means that until 2020 we will have President Mike Pence. In a sane world, that in itself would sound like a worst-case scenario; he’s basically a less-sleazy Ted Cruz. He is misogynistic, homophobic, and fanatically religious. He is also a partisan ideologue who toes the party line on basically every issue. Some have even argued that Pence is worse than Trump, because he represents the same ideology but with more subtlety and competence.

But subtlety and competence are important. Indeed, I would much rather have an intelligent, rational, competent ideologue managing our government, leading our military, and controlling our nuclear launch codes than an idiotic, narcissistic, impulsive one. Pence at least can be trusted to be consistent in his actions and diplomatic in his words—two things which Trump has absolutely never been.

Indeed, Pence’s ideological consistency has benefits; unlike Trump, he reliably supports free trade and his fiscal conservatism actually seems genuine for once. Consistency in itself has value: Life is much easier, and the economy is much stronger, when the rules of the game remain the same rather than randomly lurching from one extreme to another.

Pence is also not the pathological liar that Trump is. Yes, Pence has lied many times (only 22% of his statements were evaluated by PolitiFact as “Mostly True” or “True”, and 30% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”). But Trump lies constantly. A mere 14% of Trump’s statements were evaluated by Trump as “Mostly True” or “True”, while 48% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”. For Bernie Sanders, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 11% were “False”, with no “Pants on Fire” at all; for Hillary Clinton, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 10% were “False”, with 3% “Pants on Fire”. People have tried to keep running tallies of Trump’s lies, but it’s a tall order: The Washington Post records over 12,000 lies since he took office less than three years ago. Four thousand lies a year. More than ten every single day. Most people commit lies of omission or say ‘white lies’ several times per day (depending on who you ask, I’ve seen everything from an average of 2 times per day to an average of 100 times per day), but that’s not what we’re talking about here. These are consequential, outright statements of fact that aren’t true. And these are not literally everything he has said that wasn’t true; they are only public lies with relevance to policy or his own personal record. Indeed, Trump lies recklessly, stupidly, pointlessly, nonsensically. He seems like a pathological liar, or someone with dementia who is confabulating to try to fill gaps in his memory. (Indeed, a lot of his behavior is consistent with dementia, and similar to how Reagan acted in the early days of his Alzheimer’s.) At least if Pence takes office, we’ll be able to believe some of what he says.

Of course, Pence won’t be much better on some of the most important issues, such as climate change. When asked how important he thinks climate change is and what should be done about it, Pence always gives mealy-mouthed, evasive responses—but at least he doesn’t make up stories about windmills getting special permits to kill endangered birds.

I admit, choosing Pence over Trump feels like choosing to get shot in the leg instead of the face—but that’s really not a difficult choice, is it?

The Amazon is burning.

pnrj current events, ethics, market failure, public policy , , , ,

Sep 1 JDN 2458729

As you probably already know, the Amazon rainforest is currently on fire. You can get more details about the fires from The Washington Post, or CNN, or New York magazine, or even The Economist; but I think the best coverage I’ve seen has been these two articles from Al-Jazeera.

I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: If we lose the Amazon, we lose everything. The ecological importance of the Amazon is basically impossible to overstate. The Amazon produces 20% of the oxygen on Earth. 25% of the carbon absorbed on land is absorbed by the Amazon. We must protect the Amazon, at almost any cost: Given how vital preserving the rainforest will be to resisting climate change, millions of lives are at stake.

The good news is there is still a lot of Amazon left.

This graph shows the total cumulative deforestation of the Amazon, compared against its current area and its original area. The units are square kilometers; the Amazon rainforest has been reduced from 4.1 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) to 3.3 million hectares (1.3 million square miles), a decline of about 20% (21 log points). We still have four-fifths of the rainforest remaining—less than we should, but a lot more than we might.

Amazon_cumulative

This graph shows the annual deforestation of the Amazon, with results that are even more encouraging. While the last few years have had faster deforestation than previously, we are still nowhere near the peak deforestation rates of the early 2000s. At peak deforestation, the Amazon was projected to last no more than 150 years; but at current rates of deforestation, the Amazon would not be completely destroyed in more than 400 years.

Amazon_annual

Of course, any loss of the Amazon is bad. We should actually be trying to restore the Amazon—that extra 800,000 square kilometers of high-density forest would sequester a lot of carbon. We probably can’t actually add the 9 million square kilometers (3.4 million square miles) of forest it would take to stop climate change; but any reforestation we do manage will help.

And a number of ecologists have been sounding the alarm that the Amazon is approaching some sort of tipping point where it will stop being a rainforest and become a savannah. If this happens, it may be irreversible. It sounds crazy to me—80% of the forest is still there!—but that’s what ecologists are saying, and I’ll defer to their expertise.

On the other hand, ecologists have been panicking about “irreversible tipping points” on almost everything for the past century. We really can’t be blamed for not taking their word as gospel: They’ve cried wolf about “population bombs” and shortages of food and water for a very long time now. So far their projections on the rates of temperature rise, species extinction, and deforestation have been quite accurate; but their predictions of dire human consequences have always suspiciously failed to materialize. Humans are quite creative and resilient, as it turns out. This is part of why I’m not actually afraid climate change will cause the collapse of human civilization (much less the utterly laughable claim of human extinction); but tens of millions of deaths is still plenty of reason to take drastic action.

Indeed, I think panicking is precisely what we need to avoid. If we exaggerate the problem to the point where it sounds hopeless, that won’t encourage people to take action; it may actually cause them to throw in the towel.

What do we actually need to do here? We need to restore as many forests as possible, and we need to cut carbon emissions as rapidly as possible.

This doesn’t require a revolution to overthrow capitalism. It doesn’t require exotic new technologies (though fusion power and improved electricity storage would certainly help). It simply requires a real commitment to bear real economic costs today in order to prevent much higher costs in the future.

Bernie Sanders has a climate change plan that is estimated to cost $16 trillion over the next ten years. Make no mistake: This is an enormous amount of money. US GDP is about $20 trillion, growing at about 3% per year, so we’re looking at about 6% of GDP over that interval. This is about twice our current military budget, or about our military budget in the 1980s. Notably, it is nowhere near the levels of military spending we reached in the Second World War, which exceeded 40% of GDP. That’s what happens when America really commits to something.

Would this be enough? The UN seems to think so. They estimate that it would cost about 1% of global GDP to keep global warming below 2 C. Even if that’s an underestimate, 6% of the GDP of the US and EU would by itself account for twice that amount—and I have no doubt that if America committed to climate change mitigation, Europe would gladly follow.

And it’s not as if this money would be set on fire. (Military spending, on the other hand, almost literally is that.) We would spending this money mainly on infrastructure and technology; we would be paying wages and creating millions of jobs.

So far as I know Sanders’s plan doesn’t include paying Brazil to restore the Amazon, but it probably should. Part of why Brazil is currently burning the Amazon is the externalities: The ecological benefit of the Amazon affects us all, but the economic benefit of clear-cutting and cattle ranching directly benefits Brazil. We should set up some sort of payment mechanism to ensure that it is more profitable for Brazil to keep the rainforest where it is than to burn it down. How can we afford such a thing, you ask? No: How can we afford not to?

This is a battle for the soul of America

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 9, JDN 2457944

At the time of writing, I just got back from a protest march against President Trump in Santa Ana (the featured photo is one I took at the march). I had intended to go to the much larger sister protest in Los Angeles, but the logistics were too daunting. On the upside, presumably the marginal impact of my attendance was higher at the smaller event.

Protest marches are not a common pastime of mine; I am much more of an ivory-tower policy wonk than a boots-on-the-ground political activist. The way that other people seem to be allergic to statistics, I am allergic to a lack of statistics when broad claims are made with minimal evidence. Even when I basically agree with everything being said, I still feel vaguely uncomfortable marching and chanting in unison (and constantly reminded of that scene from Life of Brian). But I made an exception for this one, because Trump represents a threat to the soul of American democracy.

We have had bad leaders many times before—even awful leaders, even leaders whose bad decisions resulted in the needless deaths of thousands. But not since the end of the Civil War have we had leaders who so directly threatened the core institutions of America itself.

We must keep reminding ourselves: This is not normal. This is not normal! Donald Trump’s casual corruption, overwhelming narcissism, authoritarianism, greed, and utter incompetence (not to mention his taste in decor) make him more like Idi Amin or Hugo Chavez than like George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. (Even the comparison with Vladimir Putin would be too flattering to Trump; Putin at least is competent.) He has personally publicly insulted over 300 people, places, and things—and counting.

Trump lies almost constantly, surrounds himself with family members and sycophants, refuses to listen to intelligence briefings, and personally demeans and even threatens journalists who criticize him. Every day it seems like there is a new scandal, more outrageous than the last; and after so long, this almost seems like a strategy. Every day he finds some new way to offend and undermine the basic norms of our society, and eventually he hopes to wear us down until we give up fighting.

It is certainly an exaggeration, and perhaps a dangerous one, to say that Donald Trump is the next Adolf Hitler. But there are important historical parallels between the rise of Trump and the rise of many other populist authoritarian demagogues. He casually violates democratic norms of civility, honesty, and transparency, and incentivizes the rest of us to do the same—a temptation we must resist. Political scientists and economists are now issuing public warnings that our democratic institutions are not as strong as we may think (though, to be fair, others argue that they are indeed strong enough).

It was an agonizingly close Presidential election. Even the tiniest differences could have flipped enough states to change the outcome. If we’d had a better voting system, it would not have happened; a simple plurality vote would have elected Hillary Clinton, and as I argued in a previous post, range voting would probably have chosen Bernie Sanders. Therefore, we must not take this result as a complete indictment of American society or a complete failure of American democracy. But let it shake us out of our complacency; democracy is only as strong as the will of its citizens to defend it.

We need to be honest about free trade’s costs, and clearer about its benefits

pnrj core principles, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 6, JDN 2457607

I discussed in a post awhile ago the fact that economists overwhelmingly favor free trade but most people don’t. There are some deep psychological reasons for this, particularly the loss aversion which makes people experience losses about twice as much as they experience gains. Free trade requires change; it creates some jobs and destroys others. Those forced transitions can be baffling and painful.

The good news is that views on trade in the US are actually getting more positive in recent years—which makes Trump that much more baffling. I honestly can’t make much sense of the fact that candidates who are against free trade have been so big in this election (and let’s face it, even Bernie Sanders is largely against free trade!), in light of polls showing that free trade is actually increasingly popular.

Partly this can be explained by the fact that people are generally more positive about free trade in general than they are about particular trade agreements, and understandably so, as free trade agreements often include some really awful provisions that in no way advance free trade. But that doesn’t really explain the whole effect here. Maybe it’s a special interest effect: People who hate trade are much more passionate about hating trade than people who like trade are passionate about liking trade. If that’s the case, then this is what we need to change.

Today I’d like to focus on what we as economists and the economically literate more generally can do to help people understand what free trade is and why it is so important. This means two things:

First, of course, we must be clearer about the benefits of free trade. Many economists seem to think that it is simply so obvious that they don’t even bother to explain it, and end up seeming like slogan-chanting ideologues. “Free trade! Free trade! Free trade!”

Above all, we need to talk about how it was primarily through free trade that global extreme poverty is now at the lowest level it has ever been. This benefit needs to be repeated over and over, and anyone who argues for protectionism needs to be confronted with the millions of people they will throw back into poverty. Most people don’t even realize that global poverty is declining, so first of all, they need to be shown that it is.

American ideas are often credited with fighting global poverty, but that’s not so convincing, since most of the improvement in poverty has happened in China (not exactly a paragon of free markets, much less liberal democracy); what really seems to have made the difference is American dollars, spent in free trade. Imports to the US from China have risen from $3.8 billion in 1985 to $483 billion in 2015. Extreme poverty in China fell from 61% of the population in 1990 to 4% in 2015. Coincidence? I think not. Indeed, that $483 billion is just about $1 per day for every man, woman, and child in China—and the UN extreme poverty line is $1.25 per person per day.

We need to be talking about the jobs that are created by trade—if need be, making TV commercials interviewing workers at factories who make products for export. “Most of our customers are in Japan,” they might say. “Without free trade, I’d be out of a job.” Interview business owners saying things like, “Two years ago we opened up sales to China. Now I need to double my workforce just to keep up with demand.” Unlike a lot of other economic policies where the benefits are diffuse and hard to keep track of, free trade is one where you can actually point to specific people and see that they are now better off because they make more selling exports. From there, we just need to point out that imports and exports are two sides of the same transaction—so if you like exports, you’d better have imports.

We need to make it clear that the economic gains from trade are just as real as the losses from transition, even if they may not be as obvious. William Poole put it very well in this article on attitudes toward free trade:

Economists are sometimes charged with insensitivity over job losses, when in fact most of us are extremely sensitive to such losses. What good economics tells us is that saving jobs in one industry does not save jobs in the economy as a whole. We urge people to be as sensitive to the jobs indirectly lost as a consequence of trade restriction as to those lost as a consequence of changing trade patterns.

Second, just as importantly, we must be honest about the costs of free trade. We need to stop eliding the distinction between net aggregate benefits and benefits for everyone everywhere. There are winners and losers, and we need to face up to that.

For example, we need to stop saying thinks like “Free trade will not send jobs to Mexico and China.” No, it absolutely will, and has, and does—and that is part of what it’s for. Because people in Mexico and China are people, and they deserve to have better jobs just as much as we do. Sending jobs to China is not a bug; it’s a feature. China needs jobs particularly badly.

Then comes the next part: “But if our jobs get sent to China, what will we do?” Better jobs, created here by the economic benefits of free trade. No longer will American workers toil in factories assembling parts; instead they will work in brightly-lit offices designing those parts on CAD software.

Of course this raises another problem: What happens to people who were qualified to toil in factories, but aren’t qualified to design parts on CAD software? Well, they’ll need to learn. And we should be paying for that education (though in large part, we are; altogether US federal, state, and local governments spend over $1 trillion a year on education).

And what if they can’t learn, can’t find another job somewhere else? What if they’re just not cut out for the kind of work we need in a 21st century economy? Then here comes my most radical statement of all: Then they shouldn’t have to.

The whole point of expanding economic efficiency—which free trade most certainly does—is to create more stuff. But if you create more stuff, you then have the opportunity to redistribute that stuff, in such a way that no one is harmed by that transition. This is what we have been failing to do in the United States. We need to set up our unemployment and pension systems so that people who lose their jobs due to free trade are not harmed by it, but instead feel like it is an opportunity to change careers or retire. We should have a basic income so that even people who can’t work at all can still live with dignity. This redistribution will not happen automatically; it is a policy choice we must make.

 

In theory there is a way around it, which is often proposed as an alternative to a basic income; it is called a job guarantee. Simply giving everyone free money for some reason makes people uncomfortable (never could quite fathom why; Donald Trump inherits capital income from his father, that’s fine, but we all inherit shared capital income as a nation, that’s a handout?), so instead we give everyone a job, so they can earn their money!

Well, here’s the thing: They won’t actually be earning it—or else it’s not a job guarantee. If you just want an active labor-market program to retrain workers and match them with jobs, that sounds great; Denmark has had great success with such things, and after all #ScandinaviaIsBetter. But no matter how good your program is, some people are going to not have any employable skills, or have disabilities too severe to do any productive work, or simply be too lazy to actually work. And now you’ve got a choice to make: Do you give those people jobs, or not?

If you don’t, it’s not a job guarantee. If you do, they’re not earning it anymore. Either employment is tied to actual productivity, or it isn’t; if you are guaranteed a certain wage no matter what you do, then some people are going to get that wage for doing nothing. As The Economist put it:

However, there are two alternatives: give people money with no strings attached (through a guaranteed basic income, unemployment insurance, disability payments, and so forth), or just make unemployed people survive on whatever miserable scraps they can cobble together.

If it’s really a job guarantee, we would still need to give jobs to people who can’t work or simply won’t. How is this different from a basic income? Well, it isn’t, except you added all these extra layers of bureaucracy so that you could feel like you weren’t just giving a handout. You’ve added additional costs for monitoring and administration, as well as additional opportunities for people to slip through the cracks. Either you are going to leave some people in poverty, or you are going to give money to people who don’t work—so why not give money to people who don’t work?

Another cost we need to be honest about is ecological. In our rush to open free trade, we are often lax in ensuring that this trade will not accelerate environmental degradation and climate change. This is often justified in the name of helping the world’s poorest people; but they will be hurt far more when their homes are leveled by hurricanes than by waiting a few more years to get the trade agreement right. That’s one where Poole actually loses me:

Few Americans favor a world trading system in which U.S. policies on environmental and other conditions could be controlled by foreign governments through their willingness to accept goods exported by the United States.

Really? You think we should be able to force other countries to accept our goods, regardless of whether they consider them ecologically sustainable? You think most Americans think that? It’s easy to frame it as other people imposing on us, but trade restrictions on ecologically harmful goods are actually a very minimal—indeed, almost certainly insufficient—regulation against environmental harm. Oil can still kill a lot of people even if it never crosses borders (or never crosses in liquid form—part of the point is you can’t stop the gaseous form). We desperately need global standards on ecological sustainability, and while we must balance environmental regulations with economic efficiency, currently that balance is tipped way too far against the environment—and millions will die if it remains this way.

This is the kernel of truth in otherwise economically-ignorant environmentalist diatribes like Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything; free trade in principle doesn’t say anything about being environmentally unsustainable, but free trade in practice has often meant cutting corners and burning coal. Where we currently have diesel-powered container ships built in coal-powered factories and Klein wants no container ships and perhaps even no factories, what we really need are nuclear-powered container ships and solar-powered factories. Klein points out cases where free trade agreements have shut down solar projects that tried to create local jobs—but neither side seems to realize that a good free trade agreement would expand that solar project to create global jobs. Instead of building solar panels in Canada to sell only in Canada, we’d build solar panels in Canada to sell in China and India—and build ten times as many. That is what free trade could be, if we did it right.

If we had range voting, who would win this election?

pnrj core principles, current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 16, JDN 2457586

The nomination of Donald Trump is truly a terrible outcome, and may be unprecedented in American history. One theory of its causation, taken by many policy elites (reviewed here by the Brookings Institution), is that this is a sign of “too much democracy”, a sentiment such elites often turn to, as The Economist did in the wake of the Great Recession. Even Salon has published such a theory. Yet as Michael Lind of the New York Times recognized, the problem is clearly not too much democracy but too little. “Too much democracy” is not an outright incoherent notion—it is something that I think in principle could exist—but I have never encountered it. Every time someone claims a system is too democratic, I have found that deeper digging shows that what they really mean is that it doesn’t privilege their interests enough.

Part of the problem, I think, is that even democracy as we know it in the real world is really not all that democratic, especially not in the United States, where it is totally dominated by a plurality vote system that forces us to choose between two parties. Most of the real decision-making happens in Senate committees, and when votes are important they are really most important in primaries. To be clear, I’m not saying that votes don’t count in the US or you shouldn’t vote; they do count, and you should vote. But anyone saying this system is “too democratic” clearly has no idea just how much more democratic it could be.

Indeed, there is one simple change that would both greatly expand democracy, weaken the two-party system, and undermine Trump in one fell swoop, and it is called range voting. I’ve sung the praises of range voting many times before, but some anvils need to be dropped; I guess it’s just this thing I have when a system is mathematically proven superior.

Today I’d like to run a little thought experiment: What would happen if we had used range voting this election? I’m going to use actual poll data, rather than making up hypotheticals like The New York Times did when they tried to make this same argument using Condorcet voting. (Condorcet voting is basically range voting lite, for people who don’t believe in cardinal utility.)

Of course, no actual range voting has been conducted, so I have to extrapolate. So here’s my simple, but I think reasonably reliable, methodology: I’m going to use aggregated favorability ratings from Real Clear Politics (except for Donald Trump, whom Real Clear Politics didn’t include for some reason; for him I’m using Washington Post poll numbers, which are comparable for Clinton). Sadly I couldn’t find good figures on favorability ratings for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, though I’d very much like to; so sadly I had to exclude them. Had I included them, it’s quite possible one of them could have won, which would make my point even more strongly.

I score the ratings as follows: Every “unfavorable” rating counts as a 0. Every “favorable” rating counts as a 1. Other ratings will be ignored, and I’ll add 10% “unfavorable” ratings to every candidate as a “soft quorum” (here’s an explanation of why we want to do this). Technically this is really approval voting, which is a special case of range voting where you can only vote 0 or 1.

All right, here goes.

Candidate Favorable Unfavorable Overall score
Bernie Sanders 48.4% 37.9% 50.5%
Joe Biden 47.4% 36.6% 50.4%
Elizabeth Warren 36.0% 32.0% 46.2%
Ben Carson 37.8% 42.0% 42.1%
Marco Rubio 36.3% 40.3% 41.9%
Hillary Clinton 39.6% 55.3% 37.7%
Scott Walker 23.5% 29.3% 37.4%
Chris Christie 29.8% 44.5% 35.3%
Mike Huckabee 27.0% 40.7% 34.7%
Rand Paul 25.7% 41.0% 33.5%
Jeb Bush 30.8% 52.4% 33.0%
Mike O’Malley 17.5% 27.0% 32.1%
Bobby Jindal 18.7% 30.3% 31.7%
Rick Santorum 24.0% 42.0% 31.6%
Rick Perry 21.0% 39.3% 29.9%
Jim Webb 10.3% 15.0% 29.2%
Donald Trump 29.0% 70.0% 26.6%

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren aren’t actually running, but it would be great if they did (and of course people like them, what’s not to like?). Ben Carson does surprisingly well, which I confess is baffling; he’s a nice enough guy, I guess, but he’s also crazypants. Hopefully if he’d campaigned longer, his approval ratings would have fallen as people heard him talk, much like Sarah Palin and for the same reasons—but note that even if this didn’t happen, he still wouldn’t have won. Marco Rubio was always the least-scary Republican option, so it’s nice to see him come up next. And then of course we have Hillary Clinton, who will actually be our next President. (6th place ain’t so bad?)

But look, there, who is that up at the top? Why, it’s Bernie Sanders.

Let me be clear about this: Using our current poll numbers—I’m not assuming that people become more aware of him, or more favorable to him, I’m just using the actual figures we have from polls of the general American population right now—if we had approval voting, and probably if we had more expressive range voting, Bernie Sanders would win the election.

Moreover, where is Donald Trump? The very bottom. He is literally the most hated candidate, and couldn’t even beat Jim Webb or Rick Perry under approval voting.

Trump didn’t win the hearts and minds of the American people, he knew how to work the system. He knew how to rally the far-right base of the Republican Party in order to secure the nomination, and he knew that the Republican leadership would fall in line and continue their 25-year-long assault on Hillary Clinton’s character once he had.

This disaster was created by our plurality voting system. If we’d had a more democratic voting system, Bernie Sanders would be narrowly beating Joe Biden. But instead Hillary Clinton is narrowly beating Donald Trump.

Trump is not the product of too much democracy, but too little.

Super PACs are terrible—but ineffective

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457516

It’s now beginning to look like an ongoing series: “Reasons to be optimistic about our democracy.”

Super PACs, in case you didn’t know, are a bizarre form of legal entity, established after the ludicrous Citizens United ruling (“Corporations are people” and “money is speech” are literally Orwellian), which allows corporations to donate essentially unlimited funds to political campaigns with minimal disclosure and zero accountability. This creates an arms race where even otherwise-honest candidates feel pressured to take more secret money just to keep up.

At the time, a lot of policy wonks said “Don’t worry, they already give tons of money anyway, what’s the big deal?”

Well, those wonks were wrong—it was a big deal. Corporate donations to political campaigns exploded in the era of Super PACs. The Citizens United ruling was made in 2010, and take a look at this graph of total “independent” (i.e., not tied to candidate or party) campaign spending (using data from OpenSecrets):

SuperPAC_spending

It’s a small sample size, to be sure, and campaign spending was already rising. But 2010 and 2014 were very high by the usual standards of midterm elections, and 2012 was absolutely unprecedented—over $1 billion spent on campaigns. Moreover, the only reason 2016 looks lower than 2012 is that we’re not done with 2016 yet; I’m sure it will rise a lot higher than it is now, and very likely overtake 2012. (And if it doesn’t it’ll be because Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump made very little use Super-PACs, for quite different reasons.) It was projected to exceed $4 billion, though I doubt it will actually make it quite that high.

Worst of all, this money is all coming from a handful of billionaires. 41% of Super-PAC funds comes from the same 50 households. That’s fifty. Even including everyone living in the household, this group of people could easily fit inside an average lecture hall—and they account for two-fifths of independent campaign spending in the US.

Weirdest of all, there are still people who seem to think that the problem with American democracy is it’s too hard for rich people to give huge amounts of money to political campaigns in secret, and they are trying to weaken our campaign spending regulations even more.

So that’s the bad news—but here’s the good news.

Super-PACs are ludicrously ineffective.

Hillary Clinton is winning, and will probably win the election; and she does have the most Super-PAC money among candidates still in the race (at $76 million, about what the Clintons themselves make in 3 years). Ted Cruz also has $63 million in Super-PAC money. But Bernie Sanders only has $600,000 in Super-PAC money (actually also about 3 times his household income, coincidentally), and Donald Trump only has $2.7 million. Both of these are less than John Kasich’s $13 million in Super-PAC spending, and yet Kasich and Cruz are now dropped out and only Trump remains.

But more importantly, the largest amount of Super-PAC money went to none other than Jeb Bush—a whopping $121 million—and it did basically nothing for him. Marco Rubio had $62 million in Super-PAC money, and he dropped out too. Martin O’Malley had more Super-PAC money than Bernie Sanders, and where is he now? In fact, literally every Republican candidate had more Super-PAC money than Bernie Sanders, and every Republican but Rick Santorum, Jim Gilmore, and George Pataki (you’re probably thinking: “Who?” Exactly.) had more Super-PAC money than Donald Trump.

Indeed, political spending in general is not very effective. Additional spending on political campaigns has minimal effects on election outcomes.

You wouldn’t immediately see that from our current Presidential race; while Rubio raised $117 million and Jeb! raised $155 million and both of them lost, the winners also raised a great deal. Hillary Clinton raised $256 million, Bernie Sanders raised $180 million, Ted Cruz raised $142 million, and Donald Trump raised $48 million. Even that last figure is mainly so low because Donald Trump is a master at getting free publicity; the media effectively gave Trump an astonishing $1.89 billion in free publicity. To be fair, a lot of that was bad publicity—but it still got his name and his ideas out there and didn’t cost him a dime.

So, just from the overall spending figures, it looks like maybe total campaign spending is important, even if Super-PACs in particular are useless.

But empirical research has shown that political spending has minimal effects on actual election outcomes. So ineffective, in fact, that a lot of economists are puzzled that there’s so much spending anyway. Here’s a paper arguing that once you include differences in advertising prices, political spending does matter. Here are two papers proposing different explanations for why incumbent spending appears to be less effective than challenger spending:This one says that it’s a question of accounting for how spending is caused by voter participation (rather than the reverse), while this one argues that the abuse of incumbent privileges like franking gives incumbents more real “spending” power. It’s easy to miss that both of them are trying to explain a basic empirical fact that candidates that spend a lot more still often lose.

Political advertising can be effective at changing minds, but only to a point.

The candidate who spends the most usually does win—but that’s because the candidate who spends the most usually raises the most, and the candidate who raises the most usually has the most support.

The model that makes the most sense to me is that political spending is basically a threshold; you need to spend enough that people know you exist, but beyond that additional spending won’t make much difference. In 1996 that threshold was estimated to be about $400,000 for a House election; that’s still only about $600,000 in today’s money.

Campaign spending is more effective when there are caps on individual contributions; a lot of people find this counter-intuitive, but it makes perfect sense on a threshold model, because spending caps could hold candidates below the threshold. Limits on campaign spending have a large effect on spending, but a small effect on outcomes.

Does this mean we shouldn’t try to limit campaign spending? I don’t think so. It can still be corrupt and undesirable even if isn’t all that effective.

But it is good news: You can’t actually just buy elections—not in America, not yet.

The surprising honesty of politicians

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457509

The stereotype that politicians are dishonest is so strong that many people use “honest politician” as an example of an oxymoron. There is a sense that politicians never keep their campaign promises, so what they say is basically just meaningless noise.

This impression could scarcely be further from the truth. Politicians are quite honest, and they usually try to keep their campaign promises. On average, about 2/3 of campaign promises are kept. Most of those that aren’t are largely given up under heavy opposition, not simply ignored because they weren’t real objectives. Politicians are distrusted, while clergy are trusted—despite the fact that clergy quite literally make their entire career out of selling beliefs that are demonstrably false and in most cases outright absurd.

Along similar lines, most people seem to have an impression that democracy is largely a show, and powerful oligarchs make most of the real decisions behind the scenes—even Jimmy Carter has been saying this recently. While there is evidence that the rich have disproportionate power over politicians, this is largely only true of Republicans; and furthermore the theory that democracy is meaningless can’t explain two rather important facts:

1. Economic prosperity is strongly correlated with democracy—more strongly correlated than most economists believed until quite recently. Even the “Miracle of Chile” didn’t actually occur when Pinochet reformed the economy—it occurred in the 1990s, after Pinochet ceded power to a democratic government. Stronger democracy is also strongly linked to better education, though surprisingly has little correlation with inequality.

2. Democratic states almost never go to war with one another. Democracies go to war with non-democracies, and non-democracies go to war with one another; but with a few exceptions (and largely limited to young, unstable democracies), democracies do not go to war with other democracies.

If democracy meant nothing, and were all just a sideshow that the elites use to manipulate us, these results would simply be impossible. If voting did not actually shape policy in some fashion, policy outcomes for democracies and non-democracies would have to be identical. In fact they are wildly different, so different it’s actually kind of hard to explain. Apparently similar policies simply seem to work better when they are implemented by democracies—perhaps because in order to be passed in the first place they must have a certain amount of buy-in from the population.

In fact, politicians are more honest than we’d expect them to be based on the incentives provided by elections—they seem to either be acting out of genuine altruism or to advance their reputation in other ways.

Neoclassical economic theory actually has trouble explaining why politicians are so honest—which may have something to do with the fact that politicians who were trained as neoclassical economists are more likely to be corrupt. A similar effect holds for undergraduate students in experiments. Teaching people that human beings are infinite identical psychopaths seems to make them behave a bit more like psychopaths! (Though some of this may also be selection bias: Psychopaths may find economics appealing either because the ideology justifies their behavior or because it’s a pretty lucrative field.)

Part of this false impression clearly comes from the media, and from politicians slandering each other. Hillary Clinton has an almost impeccable fact-check rating—comparable to or arguably even better than Bernie Sanders and John Kasich, both of whom have majority “Mostly True” or “True” ratings. All three are miles ahead of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom are over 60% “Mostly False”, “False”, or “Pants on Fire” (the latter is 18% of what Donald Trump says). And yet, Hillary Clinton is widely perceived as dishonest and Donald Trump is widely perceived as “speaking his mind”. Maybe people think Trump is honest because he keeps saying he is. Or maybe it’s because he’s honest about his horrible motivations, even though he gets most of the facts wrong.

These facts should give us hope! Our votes are not meaningless, and our voices do make a difference. We are right to be obsessed with keeping our politicians honest—but it’s time we recognize that it’s working. We are doing something right. If we can figure out what it is, maybe we can do even better.The last thing we want to do right now is throw up our hands and give up.

Whose tax plan makes the most sense?

pnrj current events, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457496

The election for the President of the United States has now come down to four candidates; the most likely winner is Hillary Clinton, but despite claims to the contrary Bernie Sanders could still win the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side Donald Trump holds a small lead over Ted Cruz, and then there’s a small chance that Kasich could win or a new candidate could emerge if neither can win a majority and they go to a brokered convention (I’ve heard Romney and Ryan suggested, and either of them would be far better).

There are a lot of differences between the various candidates, and while it feels partisan to say so I really think it’s pretty obvious that Clinton and Sanders are superior candidates to Trump and Cruz. Trump is a plutocratic crypto-fascist blowhard with no actual qualifications, and Cruz seems to extrude sleaze from his every pore—such that basically nobody who knows him well actually likes him.

In general I’ve preferred Sanders, though when he started talking about trade policy the other day it actually got me pretty worried that he doesn’t appreciate the benefits of free trade. So while I think a lot of Clinton’s plans are kind of lukewarm, I wouldn’t mind if she won, if only because her trade policy is clearly better.

But today I’m going to compare all four candidates in a somewhat wonkier way: Let’s talk about taxes.

Specifically, federal income tax. There are a lot of other types of taxes of course, but federal income tax is the chief source of revenue for the US federal government, as well as the chief mechanism by which the United States engages in redistribution of wealth. I’ll also briefly discuss payroll taxes, which are the second-largest source of federal revenue.
So, I’ve looked up the income tax plans of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz respectively, and they are summarized below. The first column gives the minimum income threshold for that marginal tax rate (since they vary slightly I’ll be rounding to the nearest thousand). For comparison I’ve included the current income tax system as well. I’m using the rates for an individual filing singly with no deductions for simplicity.

Current system Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders Donald Trump Ted Cruz
0 10% 10% 10% 0% 0%
9,000 15% 15% 15% 0% 0%
25,000 15% 15% 15% 10% 0%
36,000 25% 25% 25% 10% 10%
37,000 25% 25% 25% 10% 10%
50,000 25% 25% 25% 20% 10%
91,000 28% 28% 28% 20% 10%
150,000 28% 28% 28% 25% 10%
190,000 33% 33% 33% 25% 10%
250,000 33% 33% 37% 25% 10%
412,000 35% 35% 37% 25% 10%
413,000 39.6% 35% 37% 25% 10%
415,000 39.6% 39.6% 37% 25% 10%
500,000 39.6% 39.6% 43% 25% 10%
2,000,000 39.6% 39.6% 48% 25% 10%
5,000,000 39.6% 43.6% 48% 25% 10%
10,000,000 39.6% 43.6% 52% 25% 10%

As you can see, Hillary Clinton’s plan is basically our current system, with some minor adjustments and a slight increase in progressivity.In addition to these slight changes in the income tax code, she also proposes to close some loopholes in corporate taxes, but she basically doesn’t change the payroll tax system at all. Her plan would not change a whole lot, but we know it would work, because our current tax system does work.

Despite calling himself a social democrat and being accused of being a far more extreme sort of socialist, Bernie Sanders offers a tax plan that isn’t very radical either; he makes our income tax system a bit more progressive, especially at very high incomes; but it’s nothing out of the ordinary by historical standards. Sanders’ top rate of 52% is about what Reagan set in his first tax cut plan in 1982, and substantially lower than the about 90% top rates we had from 1942 to 1964 and the about 70% top rates we had from 1965 to 1981. Sanders would also lift the income cap on payroll taxes (which it makes no sense not to do—why would we want payroll taxes to be regressive?) and eliminate the payroll tax deduction for fringe benefits (which is something a lot of economists have been clamoring for).

No, it’s the Republicans who have really radical tax plans. Donald Trump’s plan involves a substantial cut across the board, to rates close to the lowest they’ve ever been in US history, which was during the Roaring Twenties—the top tax rate was 25% from 1925 to 1931. Trump also proposes to cut the corporate tax in half (which I actually like), and eliminate the payroll tax completely—which would only make sense if you absorbed it into income taxes, which he does not.

Ted Cruz’s plan is even more extreme, removing essentially all progressivity from the US tax code and going to a completely flat tax at the nonsensically low rate of 10%. We haven’t had a rate that low since 1915—so these would be literally the lowest income tax rates we’ve had in a century. Ted Cruz also wants to cut the corporate tax rate in half and eliminate payroll taxes, which is even crazier in his case because of how much he would be cutting income tax rates.

To see why this is so bonkers, take a look at federal spending as a portion of GDP over the last century. We spent only about 10% of GDP in 1915; We currently take in $3.25 trillion per year, 17.4% of GDP, and spend $3.70 trillion per year, 19.8% of GDP. So Ted Cruz’s plan was designed for an era in which the federal government spent about half what it does right now. I don’t even see how we could cut spending that far that fast; it would require essentially eliminating Social Security and Medicare, or else huge cuts in just about everything else. Either that, or we’d have to run the largest budget deficit we have since WW2, and not just for the war spending but indefinitely.

Donald Trump’s plan is not quite as ridiculous, but fact-checkers have skewered him for claiming it will be revenue-neutral. No, it would cut revenue by about $1 trillion per year, which would mean either large deficits (and concomitant risk of inflation and interest rate spikes—this kind of deficit would have been good in 2009, but it’s not so great indefinitely) or very large reductions in spending.

To be fair, both Republicans do claim they intend to cut a lot of spending. But they never quite get around to explaining what spending they’ll be cutting. Are you gutting Social Security? Ending Medicare? Cutting the military in half? These are the kinds of things you’d need to do in order to save this much money.

It’s kind of a shame that Cruz set the rate so low, because if he’d proposed a flat tax of say 25% or 30% that might actually make sense. Applied to consumption instead of income, this would be the Fair Tax, which is 23% if calculated like an income tax or 30% if calculated like a sales tax—either way it’s 26 log points. The Fair Tax could actually provide sufficient revenue to support most existing federal spending,

I still oppose it because I want taxes to be progressive (for reasons I’ve explained previously), and the Fair Tax, by applying only to consumption it would be very regressive (poor people often spend more than 100% of their incomes on consumption—financing it on debt—while rich people generally spend about 50%, and the very rich spend even less). It would exacerbate inequality quite dramatically, especially in capital income, which would be completely untaxed. Even a flat income tax like Cruz’s would still hit the poor harder than the rich in real terms.

But I really do like the idea of a very simple, straightforward tax code that has very few deductions so that everyone knows how much they are going to pay and doesn’t have to deal with hours of paperwork to do it. If this lack of deductions is enshrined in law, it would also remove most of the incentives to lobby for loopholes and tax expenditures, making our tax system much fairer and more efficient.

No doubt about it, flat taxes absolutely are hands-down the easiest to compute. Most people would probably have trouble figuring out a formula like r = I^{-p}, though computers have no such problem (my logarithmic tax plan is easier on computers than the present system); but even fifth-graders can multiply something by 25%. There is something very appealing about everyone knowing at all times that they pay in taxes one-fourth of what they get in income. Adding a simple standard deduction for low incomes makes it slightly more complicated, but also makes it a little bit progressive and is totally worth the tradeoff.

His notion of “eliminating the IRS” is ridiculous (we still need the IRS to audit people to make sure they are honest about their incomes!), and I think the downsides of having no power to redistribute wealth via taxes outweigh the benefits of a flat tax, but the benefits are very real. The biggest problem is that Cruz chose a rate that simply makes no sense; there’s no way to make the numbers work out if the rate is only 10%, especially since you’re excluding half the population from being taxed at all.

Hopefully you see how this supports my contention that Clinton and Sanders are the serious candidates while Trump and Cruz are awful; Clinton wants to keep our current tax system, and Sanders wants to make it a bit more progressive, while Trump and Cruz prize cutting taxes and making taxes simple so highly that they forgot to make sure the numbers actually make any sense—or worse, didn’t care.