Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

This kind of debate is absolutely and endlessly fascinating to me.  Go ahead, read ‘em all.  I’ll admit that the original Landsburg example was very counter-intuitive to me, even though I generally agree with him.  But that’s not the interesting part — it’s that there is such an amazing divide.  And not a polite one either, Krugman actually implies that Landsburg doesn’t really deserve his Ph.D.

That there can be such a debate over (what seems to me) to be a very basic principle of the field is totally astonishing.  Physicists might argue over whether string theory is valid or not, but that’s pretty advanced stuff — they all basically agree on how simple stuff like inclined planes work.  Now, I understand that there are no political implications in the area of inclined planes — if there were, (is friction conservative or progressive?) there might be more debate.  But even in fields with heavily charged issues — take climatology or evolutionary biology — the tendency seems to be for the field to develop a consensus and then mock the outsiders who disagree.  But this seems to be a pretty bedrock disagreement amongst a number of well-respected (though politically opposed) industry insiders.

This seems to have pretty scary implications for the science.  And even if the debate is not over the actual theory and definitions, but rather over the potentially implied policies of that theory, that brings up an equally uncomfortable conclusion: that at least one side of this debate thinks that the theory must be presented in a way that supports their policy goals.

I really wanted to title this post: “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Tax Forms.”

Very Nice.  Follow the link for a zoom-able version.

Tyler Cowen believes that the government will use a consumption tax to make up for social security and Medicare shortfalls:

Today’s report is this:

“The financial outlook for Medicare and Social Security has significantly worsened, as the bad economy and mounting job losses have pushed both programs years closer to insolvency, according to a grim report issued Tuesday by the Obama administration.”

Maybe you once argued that “Social Security is fine,” but dollars are fungible and the budget must be judged as a whole.  The consumption tax is coming, I am sorry to say.

While I think he’s definitely right that taxes will increase, I think they will not increase as much as is actually necessary to cover these programs.  This is because I think politicians will take what they perceive to be the easier way out — a combination of excluding high-cost individuals from eligibility for healthcare as well as laws that seek to prevent unhealthy actions.

As an example, take many of the nanny-state laws we have now: seatbelts, bicycle helmets, banning of fatty foods.  The rationale for limiting behavior that only harms oneself is that we all bear the burden of your injuries — and if we increase the scope of our current national healthcare programs, this will only enhance these arguments.  An alternative choice the government could have made would’ve been: “Well, we don’t want to restrict the freedoms of our citizens to choose to not wear seatbelts, so instead we’ll just increase taxes to pay for the medical care they will inevitably require” — which is basically the decision that Cowen is describing.  I can’t think of any time this actually happened.  The government always chose the path of punishing or restricting the actions of  ”bad-decision-makers” instead of socializing the costs to the “good” people.

So my guess is that as national healthcare costs rise to unsustainable amounts, the government will exclude high cost (and assuredly politically powerless) individuals from coverage (drug users would be the logical start) as well as outlaw high cost activities (not exercising, eating anything listed at thisiswhyyourefat.com).  Eventually these two policies will have a certain amount of synergy —  if you’re convicted of any high-cost-prevention laws, you get booted from the healthcare system.