Monday, March 12, 2018

Slate Star Codex: On Taxes

So I've started diving in on Slate Star Codex, an interesting blog, that covers mostly topics relating to politics, rationality, and psychology.

I've been told it has a bit of a reactionary tint, and that Slate Star Codex is dangerous because the author is a clever man, but writes on subjects he has no particular expertize in. So I thought I might poke through his archives and see what I think.

I wouldn't claim I'm an expert, but I do have degrees in international political theory and another in philosophy, specifically philosophy of science. and given my family background, I also have a lot of exposure to military issues and China. Anyways...

In one of his posts, Scott compares the GOP's Tax Bill to other "expensive" things. Analyzing a tax cut in such terms, however, is just fundamentally wrong. Tax bills change tax rates, not tax revenues. We won't know the true cost of the tax bill until it's implemented. The figures he works with are estimates.

You might say I'm sea-lawyering, but I'm not. These estimates are difficult to make. But the author commits a even deeper error.

The writer is committing a category-mistakes, which betrays his view of states and their relation to citizens. Tax cuts like the GOP Tax Bill and the Bush Tax cuts and things like the Apollo program and the Obama Stimulus are different types of things. It's misleading to compare them in terms of cost. We see this when we examine the figures more closely.

The numbers are just different. For the Apollo program, he just takes the budget figures. But that's not the true cost. It doesn't take into account the economic impact. But for the the GOP Tax Bill,  he does attempt to take into account economic impact.

In short, he's comparing the accounting costs of some government proposals to the economic costs of other government proposals proposals.

Finally, he's just wrong. Is it a great proposal? Probably not. Is it a terrible proposal that will trigger a crisis? No. The bill doesn't just benefits corporations. Even Krugman doesn't believe that.


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