Or maybe this post should have been titled “The Return of the Laffer Curve”. The editors of the Wall Street Journal, predictably, argue that the Republicans should just ignore balancing the budget in favor of a revenue-decreasing tax cut:

The problem is that under the arcane rules of “reconciliation,” legislation cannot raise the deficit beyond the budget “window” that is usually 10 years. Tax writers thus feel obliged to “pay for” any tax cut based on estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office, though such estimates are notoriously unreliable predictors of growth and tax receipts.

The GOP might trap itself inside this budget box. House Speaker Paul Ryan has already conceded publicly that cutting the corporate tax rate to 15% from 35% is unrealistic and the rate might have to be in “the mid-to-low 20s.” House Republicans have already abandoned a cut in the top individual tax rate, and death-tax repeal could also be on the chopping block.

The risk is that Congress ends up passing a tax cut that is a damp squib for economic growth—amid an expansion that is already long by historical standards and needs a capital investment boost.

Congress can increase its pro-growth running room by eliminating tax loopholes, and we hope they do. But some of the biggest money savers are politically difficult—even among Republicans. Repealing the state and local tax deduction gins up more than $1 trillion over 10 years, but will the GOP delegations in high-tax California and New York buy that? Deductions for charitable giving and mortgage interest have been declared untouchable.

The Joint Tax Committee is also supposed to offer a dynamic “score,” or an estimate that considers how a reform would influence behavior and growth. But Joint Tax makes highly debatable assumptions: One is that deficits increase borrowing costs for Treasury and “crowd out” private investment, as the Tax Foundation has detailed. That argument should have been repudiated in the 1980s when deficits rose but interest rates fell and growth soared. But Joint Tax persists, and the effect is to mute its growth estimates and thus any revenue gains from reform.

The best way to escape the budget trap is to have the courage of GOP tax convictions and assume reform will restore the economy to faster growth. CBO predicts average GDP growth over the next decade of a mere 1.9% a year—far below the historical norm. It assumes this will yield some $43 trillion in revenue. But if growth merely averaged 3% a year, that would add some $2.5 trillion more in government revenue over a decade.

There is good reason to believe that our corporate income tax, the highest in the OECD, is driving companies away and creating an environment in which its worth it for companies to spend billions avoiding the tax. There is also good reason to believe that our rising level of public debt is impeding economic growth. There is no equally good reason to believe that a cut in the marginal tax rates of the rich, who pay most of the taxes, will result in a spurt of business investment or even personal consumption that will boost economic growth.

The only big ticket items in the federal budget are defense, Social Security, and health care. If the Congress can’t or won’t trim any of those and it refuses to suspend FICA, the taxes paid by the poor and, in fact, the majority of Americans, in the interests of fund accounting, its only alternatives are either increasing the deficit or trading a decrease in the corporate income tax for an increase in the taxes paid by those in the dizzying heights of the economy. It should do the latter even if it makes the editors of the Wall Street Journal unhappy.

In his op-ed at the Washington Post Alex Yablon reflects on the factors that unite mass murders with little else in common:

The Trace launched just 48 hours after the 2015 Charleston church massacre. Since then, my colleagues and I have covered similar shootings perpetrated by failed business owners, wayward veterans, troubled teenagers, jihadist dabblers, disgruntled employees, antiabortionists, estranged spouses, Black Lives Matter supporters, sovereign citizens and many others. It’s usually difficult to decide just which label best describes the perpetrator: Often, several seem to apply, or none at all. The difficulty of interpreting motivations is compounded by the fact that at the end of these rampages, the shooter is typically among the dead.

What is clear, however, is that regardless of ideological motivation, or even in the complete absence of any such drive, these kinds of attacks are usually presaged by some clear warning signs.

As Duke University psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Swanson told me in the wake of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, “Most people who commit serious crimes, that’s not where they began. They didn’t just start committing gun homicides.”

Is it possible that plea deals and general failure to enforce the law contribute to an escalating pattern that may lead with mass murder? That the broken window strategy of law enforcement is actually correct and undermined by prosecutors more interested in clearing their dockets than enforcing the law?

Ever hopeful, the editors of the Washington Post are actually pleased that the repeal of the overbroad and superannuated Authorization to Use Military Force failed to attract enough votes in the Senate to pass:

The Senate must now do the hard work of following through — particularly the Foreign Relations Committee, which Mr. Kaine has asked to take up the debate. Mr. Kaine and Mr. Flake’s draft AUMF provides a place from which the committee can begin its work. Now that the vote on Mr. Paul’s amendment has opened the door for a bipartisan effort to reform the authorization, there is no excuse not to walk through it.

What puzzles me is why they don’t think the matter is closed? The Senate has seen fit to delegate unconstitutional power to presidents to fight wars wherever and whenever they want for sixteen years now. Doesn’t past experience suggest that they’re more likely to stick with their core competency and do nothing?

At the New Yorker Jonathan Chait castigates Sen. Bernie Sanders’s single-payer legislation as hand-waving and posturing:

In reality, single payer has always been, and remains, a political dilemma that nobody has been able to resolve, and there is no evidence the resolution has grown any easier. What looks like a large step forward is actually a party edging closer to a cliff it has no intention of going over.

The barrier to single payer is that the American health-care system has been built, by accident, around employer-based insurance. The rhetoric of single payer concentrates its moral emphasis on people who lack insurance at all. (“Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right?” writes Sanders today.) But the barrier to single-payer health care is the people who already have coverage. Designing a single-payer system means not only covering the uninsured, but financing the cost of moving the 155 million Americans who have employer-based insurance onto Medicare.

That is not a detail to be worked out. It is the entire problem. The impossibility of this barrier is why Lyndon Johnson gave up on trying to pass a universal health-care bill and instead confined his legislation to the elderly (who mostly did not get insurance through employers), and why Barack Obama left the employer-based system intact and created alternate coverage for non-elderly people outside it.

The basic problem, no minor detail, is that as in the old joke, you can’t get there from here.

The most generous possible interpretation of the bill is that Sen. Sanders is attempting to move the Overton Window. Somewhat less generous is that he’s trying to establish a litmus test for Democratic candidates for the 2018 and 2020 elections. That would be disastrous. However vocal and visible they may be, progressives are still a minority of the Democratic Party. Moderates and conservatives hold a narrow majority.

And they account for only about 15% of voters. Appealing more strongly to progressives is the key to becoming a clique rather than a functioning political party.

By far the greatest likelihood is that Sen. Sanders and his cosponsors are merely trying to tell us that their hearts are in the right place.

Quite some time ago I was asked to put together one of these little collections for epics. Maybe I’ll tackle that later but in this post, I’ll tell you what my favorite movie swashbucklers are.

First, let’s define our terms. For me the “swashbuckler” genre consists of movies with the following characteristics:

• Costume drama
• Action
• Features swordplay
• Set between about the Middle Ages to roughly 1850 in Europe or the Americas.

Additionally, swashbucklers frequently have a strong humorous component although that isn’t required.

Consequently, Seven Samurai isn’t a swashbuckler because of its setting. The Magnificent Seven isn’t a swashbuckler because it doesn’t include swordplay. Mutiny on the Bounty is an adventure (maybe even an epic) but not a swashbuckler.

Here are my favorites. Following my custom I only include one picture each with the same leading actor.

The Black Pirate (1926)

No list of swashbucklers would be complete without a Douglas Fairbanks movie.

The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)

IMO this is the best movie version of the Dumas novel although the Jim Caviezel/Guy Pearce version is probably truer to the source material. What can I say? Robert Donat is probably my favorite actor.

The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)

Leslie Howard and the incomparable Merle Oberon make for very appealing leads in this best version of the novel.

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

As a kid I fell in love with Madeleine Carroll as Princess Flavia in this movie. What a cast! Ronald Coleman, Madeleine Carroll, Raymond Massey, Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith (the greatest profile in show business), David Niven but Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. stole the show as the roguish Rupert of Hentzau.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Picking just a single Errol Flynn movie is a severe handicap. IMO this is his best all-’round movie but in honesty you could populate a list of best swashbucklers containing only the movies of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.

The Black Swan (1942)

It was hard deciding on which of Tyrone Powers’s swashbucklers to include in this list. I picked this over the excellent The Mark of Zorro because I didn’t want to have a list consisting entirely of Zorro movies.

The Spanish Main (1945)

You might not think of him as an action hero but Paul Henreid, probably better known to you as Victor Laszlo in the classic Casablanca, made quite a few swashbucklers. This was probably his best.

The Three Musketeers (1948)

The Three Musketeers is probably the most-filmed story of its type and maybe of any source material. I know of at least eight different adaptations. Of all of them this version, featuring Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, Van Heflin, June Allyson, Angela Lansbury (!), Frank Morgan, Vincent Price, and Keenan Wynn, just to name the top-billed cast members, is the most fun.

The Crimson Pirate (1952)

I’m not sure whether to classify this movie as a spoof of pirate movies or just as a broad comedy. However you classify it, it stars Burt Lancaster and it’s tremendous fun. The scene with Burt Lancaster doing his acrobatics in the rigging of his ship is not to be missed.

Scaramouche (1952)

Some of the greatest fencing in any movie.

The Princess Bride (1987)

Who says you can’t make a great swashbuckler any more in the age of irony? This movie, like the novel from which it was adapted, is one of the greats.

The Mask of Zorro (1998)

Among modern swashbucklers I think this is a standout. Antonio Banderas contributes a welcome goofy quality, Catherine Zeta Jones beauty and spirit, and Anthony Hopkins gravity.

And no, I don’t care for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

That’s my list. What are your favorite movie swashbucklers?

Update

Added The Princess Bride, Scaramouche, The Prisoner of Zenda and The Scarlet Pimpernel to my original list.

Yesterday the Census Bureau announced that real median income in the United States had reached its highest point ever:

SEPT. 12, 2017 — The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that real median household income increased by 3.2 percent between 2015 and 2016, while the official poverty rate decreased 0.8 percentage points. At the same time, the percentage of people without health insurance coverage decreased.

Median household income in the United States in 2016 was $59,039, an increase in real terms of 3.2 percent from the 2015 median income of $57,230. This is the second consecutive annual increase in median household income.

The nation’s official poverty rate in 2016 was 12.7 percent, with 40.6 million people in poverty, 2.5 million fewer than in 2015. The 0.8 percentage point decrease from 2015 to 2016 represents the second consecutive annual decline in poverty. The 2016 poverty rate is not statistically different from the 2007 rate (12.5 percent), the year before the most recent recession.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that we are presently in the eighth year of an economic expansion and it has taken that entire time for incomes to recover. That is very slow income growth.

The ugly is that the changes in real income vary sharply by race/ethnicity. Incomes for “Asians”, an extremely peculiar census classification since it clumps together people with tremendously varying profiles, have risen sharply. Incomes for Hispanics have risen somewhat. Incomes for whites (another peculiar classification for similar reasons) are a very small tick higher than the previous high back in 2000. The real median income of blacks is just what it was 17 years ago and lower than that for Asians, whites, or Hispanics.

Mickey Kaus has an op-ed in the Washington Post questioning the prudence of simply legalizing the admission to the United States of every youthful illegal immigrant. After noting how skewed the portrayal of these young illegal immigrants has been he observes:

Still, taking the dreamers as a whole, not just the dreamiest of them, they represent an appealing group of would-be citizens. So why not show compassion and legalize them? Because, as is often the case, the pursuit of pure compassion comes with harmful side effects.

First, it would create perverse incentives. Can you imagine a stronger incentive for illegal immigration than the idea that if you sneak into the country your kids will get to be U.S. citizens? Sure, the protections don’t currently apply to recent entrants — under Obama’s plan, you had to have come before 2007. But those dates can be changed — Obama himself tried to do it once. And the rationale for rewarding those who arrive when young — that they’re here through “no fault of their own” and know only America, etc. — can apply on into the future, with no apparent stopping point. What about the poor kids who came in 2008? 2018? There’s a reason no country has a rule that if you sneak in as a minor, you’re a citizen. We’d be inviting the world.

Second, it would have knock-on effects. Under “chain migration” rules established in 1965 — ironically as a sop to conservatives, who foolishly thought that they’d boost European inflows — new citizens can bring in their siblings and adult children, who can bring in their siblings and in-laws, until whole villages have moved to the United States. That means today’s 690,000 dreamers would quickly become millions of newcomers, who may well be low-skilled and who would almost certainly include the parents who brought them — the ones who, in theory, are at fault.

There are obvious, sensible ways to control these side effects. Pair any dreamer amnesty with a major upgrade to our system to prevent a new undocumented wave — such as a mandatory extension of E-Verify, the system that lets employers check on the legal status of hires. Curtail the right to bring in distant relatives. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has proposed such a compromise — and it would be easy to compromise on his compromise, say by cutting back on chain migration only by the number of people that the new Dream Act adds to the citizenry. The president could declare a one-time act of mercy for those who came here during the pre-Trump Era of Laxity, but make clear the game was changed for future entrants.

The profile of the “Dreamers” in the study cited by Mr. Kaus is very interesting and may be quite different than is imagined. If the study is to be believed, the typical “Dreamer” is a Mexican national, residing in one of just four states, working, earning less than $11 per hour, officially living in poverty, and lying about being in school (the number claiming to be in school far exceeds the estimates of the actual numbers).

Just as a reminder my position is that Congress should enact legislation granting some sort of legal status to at least some fraction, that the legislation should have some standards, and that the standards should be enforced.

In anticipation of the “unveiling” of his proposed legislation implementing a federally administered single-payer system for the United States, Vermont Sen. Bernie takes to the pages of the New York Times with an op-ed promoting the plan:

The transition to the Medicare for All program would take place over four years. In the first year, benefits to older people would be expanded to include dental care, vision coverage and hearing aids, and the eligibility age for Medicare would be lowered to 55. All children under the age of 18 would also be covered. In the second year, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45 and in the third year to 35. By the fourth year, every man, woman and child in the country would be covered by Medicare for All.

Needless to say, there will be huge opposition to this legislation from the powerful special interests that profit from the current wasteful system. The insurance companies, the drug companies and Wall Street will undoubtedly devote a lot of money to lobbying, campaign contributions and television ads to defeat this proposal. But they are on the wrong side of history.

Guaranteeing health care as a right is important to the American people not just from a moral and financial perspective; it also happens to be what the majority of the American people want. According to an April poll by The Economist/YouGov, 60 percent of the American people want to “expand Medicare to provide health insurance to every American,” including 75 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of independents and 46 percent of Republicans.

This will mark the first time in 40 years that any member of Congress has introduced legislation implementing a federal single-payer insurance system and the most ambitious reform to our health care system introduced in more than a half century. It will be interesting to see the details of the plan, particularly its assumptions. Not unexpectedly, opposition to the plan is already emerging. At the Wall Street Journal William Galston remarks:

In May 2016, the Urban Institute—not previously known as a hotbed of conservatism—released its analysis of the Medicare for All proposal Sen. Sanders offered during his presidential campaign. The study found that if the plan were enacted into law, the federal government would absorb the bulk of the current spending by states, localities, employers and households. Federal spending would rise by $2.5 trillion in the plan’s first year, and by $32 trillion over the first decade.

A parallel study conducted by the bipartisan Tax Policy Center found that Mr. Sanders’s revenue proposals would raise only $15.3 trillion over the first decade, leaving a gap of $16.6 trillion between expenditures and revenues. “The proposed taxes,” the Urban Institute observed, are “much too low to fully finance the plan,” and “additional sources of revenue would have to be identified.”

I supported a single-payer system for more than 20 years but as health care costs rose I came to question our willingness or ability to pay for such a plan. Most proposals for a single-payer system assume that substantial efficiencies of administration will be realized over our present system in which about 30% of health care spending is administration. Nearly all such proposals exaggerate the efficiencies that can be be realized and more recently I’ve come to doubt that efficiencies substantial enough to pay for the plan without tax increases which few will be willing to bear can be realized. The experience in the United Kingdom, France, or Germany is just not relevant here. We pay more for education than any other country in the world, more for defense than any other country in the world, and more per mile to build highways than any other country in the world despite these programs being “single-payer” systems for practical purposes. IMO government-run programs are more expensive here than in France because that’s the way we roll.

In addition I believe that supporters of “Medicare for All” would be prudent not to make claims they can’t back up. Sen. Sanders already does that in his op-ed by conflating a right to health care insurance with a right to health care. It may be true as some have claimed that you cannot obtain health care without insurance but it is definitely true that even with health care insurance you may not be able to receive care.

The United States has spent most of the last 50 years at war and all of the last 25 years at war. The wars in which we have been engaged included:

• Vietnam War
• Gulf War
• Operations in Somalia
• War against Serbia (including interventions in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Kosovo)
• War in Afghanistan
• Iraq War
• Intervention in Libya
• Interventions in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen

In practical terms what U. S. foreign policy objectives have been advanced by these and our other interventions over the period? Other than the vaguest and most abstract of foreign policy objectives, I don’t believe any have been.

In my view all of these wars, interventions, and operations have been undertaken for domestic political reasons and were mostly miscalculations but I’m open to arguments that they advanced our foreign policy objectives.

Your turn. Remember, practical terms not hypothetical or theoretical reasons or what might have happened if they had turned out differently.