The Trunka tumblelog

Re: One more thing about the pet tax break vs. personal freedom argument

robot-heart-politics:

One of these is an argument about legitimate problems and one of these is an argument about a philosophical problem.

The truth is, the economy is bad. Not only have many lost jobs and homes, many others have experienced reduce incomes, loss of assets. People are having to make sacrifices and prioritize things that they would not otherwise have to prioritize. For many people, pets come in low on the list of priorities. So if the issue is make your mortgage bill or pay for Fluffy’s medications, you’re probably going to pick your mortgage.

What this has resulted in is a rise in pet abandonments. Many responsible pet owners take their pets to shelters, because there they have the hope that their pet will be cared for, possibly adopted, and if all else fails, they will be put down with a little bit of dignity and comfort. It’s not a great situation, but most pet owners would agree it is preferable to dropping your dog off on a sidewalk somewhere and saying, “Best of luck, old friend.” Although plenty of people are doing that, too

… .

So what is your solution? And please, no nonsense about “People who can’t afford their pets shouldn’t have them.” …

Look, I don’t like the fact that people are abandoning pets.  But your mistake, I think, is in thinking that we have to, or even can, solve every problem with Government force.

Think about the lunacy of this proposed bill.  Currently, people cannot deduct their own health care expenses from their taxes.[1]  Consider this for a second.  Your proposed tax break would prioritize pet care over human care.  This is insane!

There are countless, endless problems.  We have kids in failing schools.  Should we give a tax break for parents who send their kids to private schools?  We have kids who are hungry; should we give tax breaks for food for our children?  For children’s clothes?  For children’s books?  For a computer for every family, so they aren’t deprived of vital information?  What about exercise equipment and sporting goods?—don’t we need to be healthy?  What about transportation?  You need transportation for a job.  Isn’t this vital?  Is pet care more important that being able to go to your job?

You can’t hand out tax breaks like they are trinkets.  You can’t dole them out like candy.  There are too many things that are GOOD—we can’t subsidize them all.

Consider two possible laws:

1.  Everyone with pets gets to pay $10 less in taxes.

2.  Everyone without pets must pay $10 more in taxes.

You seem to think that there is some real, appreciable difference in these scenarios.  But in either scenario, people with pets pay less than others, and people without pets pay more than others.  To give a tax break for behavior you like is to penalize behavior you don’t like.  Maybe that’s sensible if we’re talking about gas consumption, which spews pollution into the environment, and thus, hurts everyone.  But you cannot do this for every human activity—you can’t do this because it’s unfair, and you can’t do this because it tries to make everyone the same.  I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is a house-buying, straight-marrying, child-having, pet-owning automaton. If you add on a tax break for white picket fences (gotta help the fence industry in these hard economic times), then you can penalize everyone right back to the 1950s.  This is creepy.

I’m not saying that your concerns about pets are wrong—they are real and legitimate and honest and true.  But we cannot legislate away every problem that is real and legitimate and honest and true.

___

1.  The law allows employees to set aside some sums in advance, but this is limited.

posted 1 week ago

The Stepford Lives

robot-heart-politics:

So now you’re complaining about tax cuts?

I’m sorry, it’s just hard to take a person seriously when they are shouting tyranny(!!!!) over giving people a tax break on their vet bills.

You want to be “more free,” presumably by having a lower tax burden? (I can’t even type that without snorting.) Get a dog. Spend thousands of dollars on that dog over the course of a year just to keep that dog alive and from suffering, and then have the government maybe give you a tax break that will cover a fraction of the total cost of owning a dog. You’ll still be out several hundred dollars, but hey! The government gave you a tax break, so you’re more free!!! Woohoo!!!!

…

Someone has to make up the shortfall every time there is a tax break.  Thus, every tax break for one person is a tax increase on another.   When homeowners get tax breaks, it’s essentially a tax on us renters.  When parents get tax breaks, it’s a tax on the childless.  And when pet owners get a tax break, it’s a tax on the pet-less.

None of these individually seem particularly like tyranny.  But in each of them, the Government isn’t just helping one behavior; it’s penalizing another.  And the more the Government does this, the more the Government uses its power to homogenize us.  It’s one thing for someone to say:  You should get married and have kids, buy a house and a dog.  It’s another thing to say:  We’ll penalize you if you don’t.

posted 1 week ago

Everyone Has a Pet Project

robot-heart-politics:

“(HR 3501 IH) The Happy Act, which stands for Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years, is a bill that would allow pet owners to deduct up to $3,500 off their yearly taxes for qualified pet care expenses. And in today’s crappy economy, who couldn’t use an extra $3,500 in their pocket? Although the best part of all is that this will actually save pet’s lives! How you ask? Well think about it. Money is tight for everyone these days and the sad truth is that many people who are struggling to stay afloat look at their pet as an extra “unneeded” (ouch, that word makes me cringe) expense. They see their beloved pet as disposable income and simply dispose of them. That is why so many animal shelters are becoming overrun with unwanted, or rather unaffordable, pets. Pets are being put to sleep everyday and it’s simply heartbreaking. So if the Happy Act can’t help struggling pet owners deal with the cost associated with properly caring for a pet, I’m all for it!”

—

The Rest Is Still Unwritten: The Happy Act - Rewarding Pet Owners With $3,500

I spent nearly $2000 on my dog this year. One surgery in January was $1200 all by itself. I could get behind this.

Everything sounds like a good idea.  Clothing for your kids—of course that’s a good thing to buy.  Should it be tax-deductable?  Fruits and vegetables—everyone should eat them.  Should we give a tax credit?  We like when people choose to take public transportation—how about that?  Self-help classes?  Haircuts?—we all need to get our hair cut now and then.  Books—reading is good!  Newspapers—we have to do something to save the industry.  What about indie-music stores?  Alt-comics?  Fair-trade coffee?  Yoga class?

Who decides what’s good?  If pet-owners decide, then we’ll get to deduct costs associated with our pets.  If realtors decide, then we’ll give even more tax credits for home purchases.  If newsmen decide, we’ll bailout the newspapers.  Who gets to decide depends largely upon who has the best lobby in Washington.  Of course, if you can afford a DC lobbyist, you probably don’t need much help at all.

Here’s a thought:  if you spend ten dollars on something you love and I spend ten dollars on something different that I love, this doesn’t mean that one of us did something noble while the other did something frivolous.  Every person is different.  Some people want to have kids that they’ll have to clothe.  Some people want to play video games that they’ll have to buy.  Freedom is choosing what makes us happy.  Tyranny is the state making some of us more free than others.

posted 1 week ago

The Point I Should Have Made

southpol:

“The University of Central Florida, where Jordan is a freshman basketball player, has a $1.9 million contract with Adidas that requires all Golden Knight athletes to wear its shoes and apparel. That includes Jordan, son of Nike icon Michael Jordan.”

—

Marcus Jordan needs to get with the Central Florida and wear Adidas, not Nike — chicagotribune.com

Forget the controversy over Jordan.  The shocking part of the story is that Adidas is paying $1.9 million to the University of Central Florida so that the team will wear Adidas shoes and apparel.  This isn’t UCLA, or Duke, or Indiana.  This isn’t the University of Florida.  It’s the University of Central Florida.

There is an insane amount of money available in the shoe industry.

(via jeffmiller)

And an insane amount of money available to NCAA programs on the backs of talented kids who don’t get paid.

CBS pays the NCAA $545 billion to broadcast their basketball games. Per year. And let’s not even start on football…

Southpol makes exactly the point I should have made.  As a good libertarian, I don’t care if private schools offer scholarships to athletes with the proviso that they don’t accept money for their play.  But when public schools do this, we’re all complicit in the deal.  Because these schools are established by the exercise of government power, denying athletes their market value is exploitation.  And for the most part, it’s exploitation of an economically-vulnerable class.  In light of the disproportionate racial composition of some of our most popular sports, this exploitation feels more than a little like racism.  I don’t mean to suggest that this racism was ever intended by those who set up this system.  But I wonder whether our indifference to the fairness of the arrangement has anything to do with race.

As I think more about this, I don’t think our indifference is a reflection of racism.  It’s a reflection, I think, of ageism.  We largely don’t care about the young.  We let them fight our wars; we make them pay our debts.  And we make them play games for our amusement.

posted 1 week ago

Irrational, Unpredictable, and Not Particularly Intelligent

robot-heart-politics:

If the argument were that the market should be purely dictated by government, I could see your point. But I think the argument that the market should be run by government and the argument that the market should be run by business people both have the same inherent flaw: they place too much faith in all the wrong people.

There are arguments for checks on both sides: the consumer corrects the business people, the voter corrects the politician. I would argue that in almost any society, the power of the consumer or the voter is actually pretty small, and that the vast majority of consumers and voters BOTH lack the resources to make a significant impact in either.

I guess which one you choose really depends on where you place your trust: an organization that exists purely to profit or an organization that exists, at least theoretically, to maintain order in society. And while I certainly don’t think an economy run entirely by the government is a wise choice, I do think that a degree of interference in the market is necessary in order to ensure that profits don’t become more important than people.

My biggest concern now, though, is that government officials have become too entangled in the private market, are often business people themselves, and are using their positions to amass profit for themselves. I don’t think the solution is to do away with government interference in the market entirely, though. The solution is to fix the problem, which is too many government officials passing laws that affect the private market and then going into private practice where they benefit…or just flat out taking corporate dollars from the companies that profit from the legislation they pass.

As always, I enjoy reading your thinking on this.  We do see things very differently.

Whereas you see business people running the market, I see mutual collaboration between people.  I think business people only run the market when they buy the coercive force of government.   And when people expand the scope of government, it seems they inevitably expand the opportunity of business to exploit it.  Look at the proposed health insurance mandate, for example.  Or look at just about almost any other law.

I guess I also think that consumers do have significant power.  I think about the advertisers who have quit supporting the Glenn Beck show—they didn’t do this because they were high-minded; they did it because their consumers demanded it.  Amazon didn’t just lower the price on the Kindle because it wanted to be nice; competition for consumers forced Amazon to do it.

You can only really abuse consumers if you have monopoly power, and there’s really only one entity with monopoly power.  It’s not Microsoft, or Exxon, or General Electric.  The only entity with the monopoly power required to really abuse customers is the Government.

And yes, voters are a check on the politicans … but through gerrymandering and campaign restrictions and ballot limitations, politicians have a lot of coercive tools that they can use to minimize the power of the electorate.  Businesses only wish they had this power.  Actually, sometimes they do, but only when they buy it from politicians.

Maybe it’s possible to have a benevolent mixed-economy, but I don’t think we have one now.  And I think we ought to work on the benevolence thing before we give the government even more power.  It boggles my mind that people who spent the last eight years complaining (rightfully) about the reckless expansion and exercise of government power are so eager to grow the government.  Yes, they like some of the people in charge now, but these people won’t be in charge forever, and maybe not even for long.  Do you really want the people who blew Iraq to oversee your health care?

Finally, it’s not that I trust businesses to act well—frankly, I don’t.  It’s just that the market gives me options, so when a business violates my trust, I can choose someone else.  When the government violates my trust, my only option is to, I don’t know … move to another country I guess.

posted 2 weeks ago

Irrational, Unpredictable, and Not Particularly Intelligent

robot-heart-politics:

Economists are Irrational: What are free-market economists thinking? (Psychology Today)

psychotherapy:

I recently read an article by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in which he described the renewed battle between so-called freshwater economists (so named because they are largely based at the University of Chicago and other Midwestern universities) and saltwater economists (based primarily at Princeton, MIT, Berkeley and other coastal universities). The freshwater economists are disciples of Adam Smith and espouse the free-market and rational actor models. The saltwater economists align with John Maynard Keynes and his belief in the need for regulation in financial markets and that people aren’t rational actors.

The past 50 years have been dominated by freshwater economists who had a reverential faith in the power of free markets (Smith’s “invisible hand”) and the rationality of people in their financial decisions. Given what has happened to our economy in the last decade, noted for its multiple bubbles (e.g., Internet, housing, mortgage), it’s hard to believe that any of these “efficient market” adherents still have jobs, much less credibility in how the economy actually works.

I would love to put these economists on the couch and explore what is going on in their heads that enables them to observe the objective reality of the recent economic devastation, yet still hold as sacred their most basic, yet obviously flawed, beliefs about a free-market-driven financial system.

As I have read more about the Smith followers, what seemed like pretty obvious questions kept popping out of my head:

• What universe do these people live in?
• Do these economists live in complete isolation without interaction with actual human beings?
• Have they never been in love, been gambling, or had sex?
• Have they never seen people get angry, frustrated, depressed, excited, or joyful and then observed their subsequent behavior?

If we ever had answers to these questions, we would understand the how of their devotion to an economic mindset that is clearly not supported by economic reality. These questions then led me to ponder the why of their delusional dedication:

• Are these economists such number-crunching automatons that they never even consider actual human behavior in the real world of finance?
• Are they so doctrinaire as to miss the obvious?
• Are they so enamored of the sheer elegance of their mathematical theorems that they reject outright and without consideration what is clear even to laypeople?

What I find ironic is that, by rejecting the irrationality of human behavior, they are in fact affirming its irrationality. To see ourselves as rational beings is the epitome of irrationality.

Of course we aren’t rational, and you don’t need a Ph.D. to realize that (though an advanced degree from the University of Chicago seems to have the opposite effect). Human beings, for all their cerebral development, still act most of the time the way animals and humans have for millions of years, namely, as irrational, unpredictable, and not particularly intelligent creatures.

What I find so remarkable is that there is any debate at all. As a former psychology professor of mine once noted, “All psychology does is label things that we already know to be true.” In the Bizarro world of freshwater economics, that adage would be modified to, “All economics does is reject things that we already know to be true.”

Thankfully, the emerging field of behavioral economics, which is the melding of psychological and economic thinking, has generated a growing body of research demonstrating that we are, in fact, incredibly irrational beings who act in ways that are not only poorly conceived, but that are often counterproductive and sometimes even self-destructive. Examples of such irrational behavior can be found in a variety of well-researched cognitive biases (courtesy of Wikipedia.com):

• Bandwagon effect: we believe or do things because others believe or do them.
• Confirmation bias: seeking out information that supports our beliefs.
• Illusion of control: our belief that we have more control over outcomes than we actually do.
• Déformation professionnelle: looking at things through the lens of one’s profession while ignoring broader perspectives.

The last cognitive bias seems particularly fitting for freshwater economists who seem to have been so busy developing their fancy theories in their laboratories that they forgot to look outside and see what was actually happening in the real world. The list of cognitive biases that we succumb to goes on and on with most having direct implications for understanding our financial behavior.

Finally, it is instructive - and scary - to consider the degree of hubris or denial on the part of the freshwater economists, whom I would assume are very intelligent men and women. They continue to cling to now-discredited theories, even when confronted with overwhelming experimental and real-world evidence that demonstrates what just about everyone else in the world can see with their own two eyes: humans, including economists, are not rational!

I think this article by Jim Taylor is very bizarre.  Think about what this means:

Human beings, for all their cerebral development, still act most of the time the way animals and humans have for millions of years, namely, as irrational, unpredictable, and not particularly intelligent creatures.

Yes, human beings are irrational … so does that mean that we should give them tremendous powers over the lives of others?  Yes, human beings are unpredictable … so does that mean that we should allow them to use prosecution and jail for those who defy the choices imposed upon them?  Yes, human beings are not particularly intelligent … so does that mean that we should trust them to select good overlords?

What is government?  It is not some human-less, all-knowing, inherently-trustworthy creature that guides us with magnificent benevolence.  Government is made of up people who were selected by people.  If you think people are irrational when they buy products in the marketplace, do you think they are any more rational when they punch ballots at the polls?  If you think people aren’t rational when they buy a house, do you think they are any more rational when they write a law, or start a war, or ban a trade, or “stimulate” the economy.

As Milton Friedman once said:  “Where in the world do you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”

But what really bothers me about the diatribe quoted above is the complete refusal to acknowledge that the government has existed during the past ten years.  No one could reasonably characterize the American economy as a “free market”—not now, not twenty years ago, not ever.  When Jim Taylor baldly claims the free market caused recent ills, he is saying something simply because he wants it to be true in order to validate his worldview.  And that makes Jim Taylor seem irrational, unpredictable, and not particularly intelligent.

posted 2 weeks ago

Republicans, Democrats, and Rape

azspot:

Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human Girl

We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.

This isn’t science fiction. Just the other day 30 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate to deny justice to a human victim of rape in order to protect the so-called sovereign rights of corporations.

Without question, the United States should refuse to contract with companies that wish to arbitrate claims of rape when the companies are working on behalf of the government overseas.

And Republicans may have voted against the Democrats’ measure for all kinds of bad reasons.  Some Republicans probably voted to protect these contractors simply because Democrats oppose them.  This is a kind of partisan insanity.

That said … the Democrats played politics with this bill is a fairly disgusting way.

Here’s a description of the scope of the bill:

Offering Ms. Jones legal relief was Senator Al Franken of Minnesota who offered an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

Rape … sure.  Battery … sure.  Discrimination … wait, what?

Discrimination is a lot different than the other two.  I’m not saying discrimination isn’t bad.  I’m just saying it’s a lot different.  Rape and battery—these are violent crimes.  Discrimination is a civil wrong.  It’s different.

Employment discrimination cases undoubtedly arise at least 1,000 times more often than assault cases.  The vast majority of these cases are bogus.  I’m not saying that discrimination doesn’t happen (it does) or that discrimination isn’t a real problem (it is).  But if you run down to the courthouse and study the filings, you’ll see more employment discrimination cases than other other kind of civil matter, and most of them are bogus.  When people are fired, they tend to think it’s not on the merits.  And they are usually wrong.

Now, why did Democrats include discrimination in this bill?  It’s because the Supreme Court recently upheld the use of arbitration clauses for employment discrimination cases.  Thus, with this bill, Democrats were attempting to circumvent this recent Supreme Court ruling for companies contracting with the government.  This may or may not be good policy—but it is a policy that should be debated on its merits, instead of pretending that it has something to do with rape.

By including “discrimination” in the bill, Democrats were sneaking in a gift to trial lawyers under the guise of standing up against rape. That’s wrong.

posted 2 weeks ago