At The Conversation Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez react to the Democrats’ tax plan. Here’s the meat of the piece:

In 1950, when looking at all federal, state and local taxes, the top 0.01% of earners paid almost 70% of their income in taxes. In the postwar decades, corporate profits – the main source of income for the rich – were subject to an effective corporate tax rate of 50%. Meanwhile, the rich were subject to high tax rates on wages, dividends, interest and income from partnerships.

The progressivity of the U.S. tax system has dramatically declined over the past seven decades. The upshot is that for most income levels the U.S. tax system now resembles a flat tax that becomes regressive at the very top end, meaning the super-rich pay proportionately less. Today, virtually all income groups pay roughly 28% of their income in taxes – except for the 400 richest Americans, who each own more than $2 billion in wealth today and pay around 25% in taxes.

Working-class and middle-class Americans pay a substantial amount of taxes because of payroll taxes, which are high and barely affect the rich, and state and local sales taxes, which are regressive – they take a bigger chunk out of a smaller wage than out of a large income. Even households that pay no federal income tax because of low earnings hand over a percentage similar to that of wealthier households, because of these other taxes.

The super-rich’s low tax rates of today are in part aided by the collapse of federal corporate taxation. In the 1950s, 5% to 7% of national income came from corporate taxes. By 2018, that figure had fallen to just 1.5%.

The effective tax rate collapses for billionaires further because they can avoid reporting individual income by instructing their companies not to pay dividends and holding on to their shares without realizing their gains.

and here’s their conclusion:

The proposal unveiled by House Democrats would increase taxes on millionaires significantly. But it would largely leave billionaires off the hook, despite the explosion of their wealth during the pandemic. More ambitious proposals in the Senate would tax their unrealized capital gains. In our view, this would be a bold addition that would help the United States reconnect with its tradition of tax justice.

Drs. Zucman and Saez are both French which renders all of their instincts about the United States wrong. There is a simple way to make the U. S. system of taxation more progressive: subject all wage income to payroll taxes.

I do find the term “tax justice” amusing. A flat tax, i.e. subject everyone’s income to a single tax rate without any deductions would be just. Taxing the rich is expedient. As the bank robber Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, it’s where the money is. By what definition of justice is a 70% effective tax rate just and how does that differ from expedience?

They must surely know corporate taxes are inefficient. They fall on employees in the form of lower wages and customers in the form of higher prices. Besides the U. S. corporate tax rate is just a little below that of Germany or France, practically identical to that of Canada, and higher than that of the UK. The main effect of raising U. S. corporate taxes is neither to raise revenues nor to increase income equality but to offshore corporate headquarters.

Neither of those measures would touch the ultra-rich who have proven very difficult to tax not just in the U. S. but in European countries as well, most of which have abandoned the wealth taxes they once used. Our problem is not the ultra-rich but the Congress. They know which side their bread is buttered on. Higher marginal taxes on the rich are unlikely to raise much revenue or improve income equality but they will increase the opportunities for graft in various forms.

My own preferred strategy for improving income equality is not by increasing the marginal tax rates on either the well-to-do or the rich but by improving the lots of the ultra-poor in the United States and for goodness sake not importing more poor people into the country. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation should illustrate pretty clearly to you how that renders greater income equality impossible.

The United States has political, social, and geopolitical problems that would give the French nightmares. Policies that might be good for France are not the right path for the U. S.

At RealClearPolicy the organization No Labels presents “five facts” on community college. They are:

1. Trade school attendees often earn more than those who graduated from community college.
2. Three out of five students who start community college do not complete a degree program within six years.
3. Twenty states already offer some sort of free community college.
4. Community college applicants are already eligible for the same federal financial available to applicants to four-year programs.
5. One-third of community college students have incomes or access to parental incomes of $50,000 per year or more.

It’s not just that trade school attendees often earn more than those who graduated from community college it’s that on average trade school attendees do better. Add that the great demand for employees is for people with skills rather than degrees and the Biden Administration’s insistence on subsidizing community colleges looks even more puzzling. Under the circumstances it’s hard to justify. I can only see three explanations.

It may just be inertia on their part. For thirty years there has been a political consensus in favor of getting a college degree and that’s been the policy. Maybe the Biden Administration is just coasting on the failed policies of the past.

Maybe it’s just cargo cult thinking. Because people with degrees have higher lifetime incomes having a degree produces higher incomes. That’s not a particularly good reason, either.

Maybe the purpose of advocating “free community college” is not to help the students but to help the colleges, their administrators, and the people with advanced degrees who teach in them. Higher education has become a self-licking lollipop. It produces people with advanced degrees to produce more people with advanced degrees. That should end in favor of a policy that actually helps young people. Maybe advocating trade school attendance is a better strategy for doing that.

I don’t recall who said it but since the world began old ladies have always claimed that the strawberries tasted sweeter when they were girls. I don’t know how much of that is reflected in Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column:

I want to stay with 9/11 to say something that struck me hard after the ceremonies last Saturday. The grief felt and expressed had to do with more than the memories of that day 20 years ago. It also had to do with right now.

It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of 20 years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.

Rather than recapping her litany of “lost threads” I want to focus on this:

The country we are experiencing now is one of people in different groups ganging up on each other. We all see this. It’s all division, driven by identity politics, race, gender, class. Twenty years ago we were grateful for cops, now we denigrate them and they leave and we argue about why they left. A rising generation of voters who were children when 9/11 happened and who became conscious of history during the 2008 economic crisis see (and have been well taught!) the imperfections, mistakes and sins of their own country but have no human memory of the abuses of other systems, of how damaging deep socialism, and communism, have been. The passion of their emerging beliefs will engender opposing passions. They already are.

Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?

Following the trauma and drama of 9/11 we started discovering in some new way our nation’s meaning—what it was in history, meant in history, meant to us. We talked about it. We saw: The first thing the firemen did after the towers fell was put up the flag.

Do you see how she’s romanticizing our national response after the attacks? The problem is that it evaporated much, much more quickly than she remembers. One of the departed blogs in my emeritus list on the right, American Future, documented meticulously the rapidity with which major media outlets, especially the New York Times, went from national solidarity to the same old partisan bickering and division. It was a matter of weeks.

As to the balance of her point, what would you expect? Different people have different experiences. Approaching 20% of the population is from somewhere else and, contrary to the Disney-fied version of the world in which some believe, whether you’re from Azerbaijan or Mexico or Zambia you undoubtedly have notably different values, views, and expectations than if you’re a WASP from Kansas. And those WASPs from Kansas have different values, views, and expectations than people who live in Lawndale on the South Side of Chicago. As the bullets whiz by their ears every evening things don’t look so rosy. It’s amazing they’re as positive as they are.

It would be possible to inculcate some of those values, views, and expectations in the children of those recent immigrants and people from out-groups. Believe it or not the public school system was created with just that objective. Read John Dewey if you don’t believe me. His approach to public education was received wisdom for several generations of public educators. But those days are long gone and as long the public school system no longer has that mission which it manifestly does not, it’s not going to happen.

In his regular Washington Post column Josh Rogin expresses dismay at the continuity between the Trump foreign policy and the Biden foreign policy:

senior European diplomat noted that, in dealings with Washington on everything from vaccines to travel restrictions, the Biden policies were “’America First’ in logic, whatever the rhetoric.” A Canadian politician said that if followed, Biden’s “Buy America” plans are actually more protectionist than Trump’s. Despite having criticized Trump’s tariffs repeatedly, Biden has kept nearly all of them. (In fact, many have been expanded since most exemptions to them have been allowed to expire.) Key Asian allies keep pressing Biden to return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership — much praised by him when the Obama administration negotiated it. Instead, it has been shelved.

Another striking example of Biden’s surprisingly Trumpian foreign policy is the Iran deal, one of the landmark accomplishments of the Obama administration. Throughout his election campaign, Biden argued that Trump’s withdrawal from that agreement had been a cardinal error and that, as president, he would rejoin it as long as Iran would also move into compliance. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, described Trump’s reimposing of secondary sanctions against Tehran despite opposition from U.S. allies as “predatory unilateralism.”

But since he took office, Biden has failed to return to the deal and has even extended some sanctions. Having long argued against trying to renegotiate the deal, Biden officials now want to “lengthen and strengthen” it. So far, this Trump-Biden strategy has not worked. Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium went from less than 300 kilograms in 2018 to more than 3,000 kilograms in May.

Or consider policy toward Cuba. The Obama administration was bold enough to tackle one of the most glaring failures in U.S. foreign policy. Having isolated and sanctioned Cuba since 1960 to produce regime change in that country, the United States had instead strengthened Cuba’s Communist government. Fidel Castro sparked nationalist fervor by blaming all of Cuba’s problems on the embargo and, far from being toppled, he ended up staying in power longer than any nonroyal leader on the planet.

It has been observed time and again that there is a remarkable continuity in American foreign policy regardless of president, regardless of party. There’s a simple reason for that. U. S. foreign policy is not created from whole cloth every four or eight years but is an emergent phenomenon crafted by balancing a number of competing even conflicting forces. Presidents may change and the letters behind their names may change but the competing interests don’t change other than to become more entrenched.

Mr. Rogin might consider that the possibility that presidents are responding to the events and political imperatives of the day and frequently, much to their surprise, whatever he or she said on the campaign trail simply does not fit with those events and imperatives, viz. Candidate Biden’s invitation to those who wanted to come to the U. S. and his rather obvious need to reverse course to something that more closely resembles what the Trump Administration was doing. You can’t step in the same foreign policy river twice.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal physician Joseph A. Ladapo makes some remarks about President Biden’s vaccine mandate, some of which strike me as sensible and some of which risk his being shunned in the contemporary form that the “shunning” of the Amish community takes at Facebook, Google, et al. for spreading disinformation. Here’s what strike me as interesting and pretty good sense:

The common argument for vaccine mandates is: You have no right to infect me. But cases are partly driven by asymptomatic and presymptomatic spread—people who are unaware that they even are infected. It isn’t practical to punish adults who have no symptoms. This is why other diseases that can be spread by people without symptoms—such as influenza, genital herpes and hepatitis C—are met with policies like voluntary vaccination drives, screening protocols for sexually transmitted diseases, and clean needle exchange programs for intravenous drug users. Doctors and public health officials used to understand that stopping spread is usually not practical.

Here’s another problem: The vaccines reduce but don’t prevent transmission. Protection from infection appears to wane over time, more noticeably after three to four months, based on a large study of more than 300,000 people in the United Kingdom. As clinical studies from the U.S., Israel, and Qatar show—and many Americans can now personally attest—there is substantial evidence that people who are vaccinated can both contract and contribute to the spread of Covid-19.

qualified by this:

The data still show that people who are vaccinated against Covid-19 are less likely to become infected than people who aren’t vaccinated. People who have recovered from Covid-19 appear to have the most protection of all.

Taken together that’s why I believe that COVID-19 is here to stay and we have reached the point in which we are learning to live with the risks it presents. And this strikes me as making a good point:

But these realities aren’t informing vaccine policy. When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul discussed expanding vaccine mandates to state-regulated facilities, she said: “We have to let people know when they walk into our facilities that the people that are taking care of them” are “safe themselves and will not spread this.” In fact, the data say they can and will spread it.

while this echoes a point I’ve made around here:

The response from many vaccine advocates has been to promote boosters, and the momentum behind third shots is outpacing the limited data available. The reality is that a more practical approach to managing Covid requires a diverse set of strategies, including using outpatient therapies.

Yep, medicine is hard and complicated. One size does not fit all. That’s why physicians exist and their jobs haven’t been automated away. This is the part that I think risks getting him “shunned”:

Other medications like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, on which health officials seem determined to close the book, are, in reality, unsettled. Controlled clinical trials have yielded conflicting results, but many physicians with substantial experience treating patients with Covid-19—including members of the Early COVID Care Experts group—have reported low rates of hospitalization and death when using these therapies. Some of these patient cohorts are large and have been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as one study of 717 outpatients published in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease.

That leaves us with his conclusion which strikes me as combative but not entirely without reason:

Vaccine mandates can’t end the spread of the virus as effectiveness declines and new variants emerge. So how can they be a sensible policy? Is it sensible to consign tens of millions of people to an indeterminate number of boosters and the threat of job loss if it isn’t clear more doses will stop the spread, either?

He neglects to make a point I have made repeatedly here and cannot be answered on an a priori basis but only based on a more empirical approach. Which strategy will actually result in fewer cases of COVID-19 here? A third booster inoculation here for people who’ve already received inoculations, contracted the disease and recovered, or both? Or ensuring that people in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, etc. and the Afghan refugees who are coming here inter alia are inoculated against the disease? I also wonder if we have enough information at this point about the experience with the mRNA vaccines to know whether an inoculation once a year, multiple times per year, or once a month has adverse effects.

I don’t believe that making that decision based on purely political considerations serves us well.

There’s a thought-provoking essay on progressivism in the guise of a book review at City Journal by Mike Sabo. Read the whole thing—it’s not particularly long. Here’s a snippet:

The Progressives’ strong belief in the notion of historical progress also guided their foreign policy. History had demonstrated that modern democracy was the “permanent and most advanced form of government,” Wilson once wrote. To make the world safe for democracy, the Progressives’ idealistic foreign policy necessitated an aggressive series of interventions in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

History had chosen the United States to lead the “children” (as Wilson described other sovereign nations) so that they could someday reach the heights of democratic governance. And should certain “barbaric races” fail to do what they were told, Progressive historian Charles Merriam wrote in a particularly appalling passage, they “may be swept away.”

Now what’s being “swept away” are the underpinnings of the most prosperous, happiest, most benign country in the history of the world to be replaced by what? Progress, we are told. I don’t believe that any 19^th century Progressive would recognize the technocratic aristocracy being promoted today as progress.

The editors of the Washington Post oppose protesting at the homes of judges or politicians (to the extent that those are two different groups):

Monday night’s demonstration was organized by the liberal group ShutDown DC to demand Justice Kavanaugh’s resignation because of his recent vote not to block a Texas law banning abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy. “Another blatant attempt to intimidate the judiciary,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). Notably, and to their credit, two Democratic senators who opposed Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), also denounced the protest. “Politics ain’t beanbag. We all know that you have to have a tough mental hide to be in this business,” Mr. Durbin said Tuesday at the start of a Judiciary Committee hearing. “But it’s absolutely unacceptable, from my point of view, to involve any major public figure’s family or their home or to involve yourself in criminal trespass in the name of political freedom of speech.” Those not happy with the court’s action, he and Mr. Leahy said, should express themselves at the ballot box or outside the courthouse.

We agree. Leave spouses, children and homes out of it. If that appeal for basic civility and decency isn’t persuasive, those who engage in these reprehensible tactics should realize they are only hurting their cause when it is overshadowed by their tactics.

I disagree with them or, more precisely, I consider this two distinct questions:

1. Should people be allowed to protest at the homes of judges?
2. Should they be allowed to protest at the homes of elected officials?

I’m actually chary of protests at anybody’s home since I think that all demonstrations carry implied threats of violence. Mob action is hard to contain. But I distinguish between Supreme Court justices and elected federal officials. The Supreme Court is supposed to be the technocratic wing of the federal government, not serving at the pleasure of the executive or even of the people. They are supposed to be legal scholars who arrive at rulings based on the law and precedent rather than ideology or politics. Rather than moving in the direction of a more politicized court we should be going in the opposite direction.

Therefore my answer is I don’t think they should be protesting at all and protests are uncivil by their nature but to the degree that such protests are their right protesting in front of homes is not out-of-bounds.

I would also submit some questions. Should people be allowed to protest in front of the White House? If your answer is “yes”, how do you square that with the editors’ view? I don’t think it can be done.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston does the same analysis I did, makes the same points I did, and reaches much the same conclusion I did:

In other words, President Biden’s proposal raises a real controversy. But it isn’t a moral controversy: Liberty is limited when the exercise of my liberty affects others. Nor is it a constitutional controversy, because the American system divides authority to promote health and safety between the states’ police powers and the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The controversy is over the interpretation of a federal law whose constitutionality is unchallenged. The courts will determine the proper application. Everything else is political theater.

Yes, the government has the authority to mandate vaccinations. State and local governments do and the scope is limited to their jurisdictions. Yes, the federal government has the authority to regulate interstate commerce. Is that enough to empower President Biden’s decree? I think it’s self-evident that the president cannot on his own authority produce such decrees under emergency powers. That’s too open-ended. It means he could do anything at any time to anyone which is rather clearly beyond his power.

That’s not a partisan pronouncement. It shouldn’t matter whether you agree with the president or not or like him or her or not. It’s a completely legitimate legal question and I hope the court will rule on it quickly.

Rather than commenting on the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s chortling about Europe’s self-inflicted energy production problems:

Energy prices are soaring in Europe, and the effects are rippling across the Atlantic. Blame anti-carbon policies of the kind that the Biden Administration wants to impose in the U.S.

Electricity prices in the U.K. this week jumped to a record £354 ($490) per megawatt hour, a 700% increase from the 2010 to 2020 average. Germany’s electricity benchmark has doubled this year. Last month’s 12.3% increase was the largest since 1974 and contributed to the highest inflation reading since 1993. Other economies are experiencing similar spikes.

Europe’s anti-carbon policies have created a fossil-fuel shortage. Governments have heavily subsidized renewables like wind and solar and shut down coal plants to meet their commitments under the Paris climate accord. But wind power this summer has flagged, so countries are scrambling to import more fossil fuels to power their grids.

I just want to make one point. We should ban the export of compressed wood pellets. Period. An outright ban. Heed Yogi Berra’s advice. Although in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory in practice there is.

In theory wood pellets, widely used for heating in Europe, particularly in Germany, can be carbon neutral. You cut down one tree; you plant ten. In practice we’re clear-cutting old growth U. S. (and Canadian and Brazilian) forests so that the Germans can burn them in their stoves and feel good about how green they are. It’s a lie.