The Best of State Tax Expenditure Disclosure

President Obama proposed comprehensive corporate tax reform in the State of the Union.  An crucial first step is disclosing who benefits from expenditures.  Currently the federal government offers no insight into where an estimated $1 trillion in tax breaks go every year.  Some states are beginning to provide information about which corporations benefit from local tax spending programs. None of their state websites are perfect, but their strong suits could be combined to create a powerful tool for disclosing federal corporate tax expenditures. Here are some highlights from state tax expenditure websites:

Best Graphics: Michigan

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s Project website literally shows users where their tax dollars are going. They can zoom in on their community and see who got what. As beautiful as the site is, it would be nice to have a database mode for easy access to the raw data. Besides, showing private investments on the front page, while requiring a click through to see how much in taxes a company avoided is burying the lead.

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Searching for Oskar Schindler

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

I considered titling this post a more academic "Rejoinders to a Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion" but thought better when I realized how many lines that would take up.  

First, I'd like to say thank you to Erik Kain at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen for agreeing to guest-post my recent offerings on abortion to that excellent blog and allowing me to receive excellent feedback from its excellent commentariat (167 responses as of press time).  

I'd also like to thank Jeremy Stangroom for setting up a forum to examine this and other difficult ethical dilemmas with some philosophical rigor and for engaging my argument and providing the kind of feedback that allowed me to refine it for publication.  Now on to the rejoinders:

1.  The first concern, raised by many many commenters, which I would like to address here is that the pro-life movement is generally dastardly and underhanded and engages in rhetorical bait-and-switch, moving of goalposts, demonizing their opponents, and all sorts of other trickery and tomfoolery.

This is true.  Some of them do, and these elements usually command a disproportionate amount of media attention, just as some in the pro-choice camp debate dishonestly as well and are well-publicized for it.  One of the many fundamental problems with the abortion issue in the United States is in the way it is construed: one side hates life, the other side hates choice.  This leads to one side arguing as if life is the only consideration when de facto it isn't and one side arguing that choice is the only consideration when de facto it isn't.  I constructed my matrix under the assumption that both positions were valid (by virtue of being widely held) and that any thoughtful, democratic examination of the issue required weighing the concerns of each party against each other.

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A Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion

<This post is cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.>

Jeremy Stangroom is a British author, philosopher, co-founder of The Philosopher's Magazine Online - one of the premiere philosophy publications on the Internet - and the director of Philosophy Experiments - where users can participate in a variety of interactive thought experiments.  One of the more popular experiments is called Whose Body Is It Anyway; it is about the taboo taboo, touchy touchy subject of abortion.   

I strongly recommend completing the experiment before continuing to read this blog post.

The Whose Body Is It Anyway experiment thus far has had two particularly interesting results: the first is that opposition to abortion tends to come disproportionately from the religious:

(B)y far the biggest predictor of whether a person is going to be opposed to abortion is religious belief. So, for instance, 83% of people with no religion support the right of a woman to have an abortion, compared to only 37% of Christians.  

The second interesting result - a significant result indeed - is that people opposed to abortion tended to be generally inconsistent in their attitudes towards the medical seriousness of miscarriage:

Near the beginning of Whose Body Is It Anyway?...you’re asked to rank the following medical issues in order of seriousness (focusing only on numbers of deaths): cancer, multiple sclerosis, miscarriage, stroke, heart disease and housemaid’s knee. Then, if it turns out that you’re against abortion, the activity complains if you haven’t ranked miscarriage as being a serious medical problem (since, for example, in the United States alone there are estimated to be more than a million miscarriages each year).

I have many problems with this interpretation, but let's focus on only the most substantial ones - those related not to the particulars of the way in which Mr. Stangroom framed his experiment but to the issue itself: first, miscarriage is a natural phenomenon, similar to death by old age, whereas abortion is the direct and predictable result of human action, such as euthanasia. 

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Walking the Federal Pot Plank: Time for More Mutiny

Gwen Florio wrote in the Missoulian on December 19th:

A funny thing happened on the way to Missoula County District Court last week.  Jurors – well, potential jurors, staged a revolt.  They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they weren’t about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana...’

...The tiny amount of marijuana police found while searching Touray Cornell’s home on April 23 became a huge issue for some members of the jury panel.  No, they said, one after the other.  No way would they convict somebody for having a 16th of an ounce.  In fact, one juror wondered why the county was wasting time and money prosecuting the case at all...

...“I thought, ‘Geez, I don’t know if we can seat a jury,” said (District Judge Dusty) Deschamps.  The judge and former Missoula County attorney said he's "more or less" convinced that marijuana should be legalized in some form, despite being "much alarmed at what I consider to be rampant abuse of what I think was a well-intentioned initiative"...

...On Friday (December 17th), (Defendant Touray) Cornell entered an Alford plea, in which he didn’t admit guilt.  He briefly held his infant daughter in his manacled hands, and walked smiling out of the courtroom...“A mutiny,” said (Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew) Paul.  “Bizarre,”...defense attorney (Martin Elison) called it.  In his nearly 30 years as a prosecutor and judge, Deschamps said he’s never seen anything like it.

Death and Taxes Magazine's Andrew Belonsky reacted to the story as follows:

County Attorney Andrew Paul described the jury’s insistence as a “mutiny,” while defense attorney Martin Elison described it as bizarre. Deschamps, however, took a more expansive view, and called the impasse “a reflection of society as a whole on the issue.”

There’s every indication average Americans are mellowing to the idea of legalizing marijuana.  A Gallup survey from October, for example, found that 46% of Americans support legalizing the drug, a two-point increase from last year.  And though the AP-CNBC poll from April showed less favorable numbers for legalization — only 33% in favor, while 55% opposed — it showed an overwhelming support for medical marijuana: 60% of Americans think cannabis should be used as part of prescription plan.

Founding Father and President Thomas Jefferson said:

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

John Adams said of the juror:

It is not only his right, but his duty – to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.

So, the obvious question, ever-looming over our collective heads, why isn't pot legal?  I mean lots of other things are legal, and lots of people seem to want to make pot legal, and I myself can't seem to come up with much if any reasons not to make pot legal.  It’s a real head-scratcher.  Marijuana is essentially illegal across all of the United States (except for Breckenridge, Colorado, those rebels); but in many places the drug has been decriminalized to the point that getting caught with an ounce or less of pot is the same as getting a speeding ticket for doing ten miles over. 

You could almost call the war against marijuana the oxymoron of laws: proscriptions against the possession of pot aren’t really much more than symbolic at this point; enforcement of them serves to clog up the courts and costs money and time law enforcement officials could be putting to much more productive use. 

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The U.S. Healthcare System is Going to Hell

It's no secret to anybody that the U.S. healthcare system is bad, but it's important to point out from time to time just how bad it is.  I am an asthmatic and have had asthma since I was five or six years old.  Around age ten, I began taking regular medicine, which I have taken daily since then and will likely have to take for the rest of my life.

Part of my motivation in deciding to become a doctor is to work on seemingly "intractable" problems like asthma, because every time I really think about it, it pisses me off.  Despite the genetic reductionism gripping our society (in stark contrast to the scientific community), asthma is a disease having near entire environmental causality.  There was recently a study conducted in China where the rate of asthma decreased in predictable fashion the farther one was from an urban center.  People who lived near factories and cars had mathmatically modelable high rates of asthma correlated with ppm of various pollutants, while people who were farmers and lived in the countryside had near zero incidence of asthma.  The patterns produced matched the patterns produced by of infectious diseases, suggesting strong environmental correlation.  

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They Were Never Planning on Televising the Revolution

art by Jack Jerz. Click on photo for link.Fake Steve Jobs and blogosphere hater Dan Lyons speculates that the latest FCC net neutrality ruling ushers in the age of consolidation for the Internet:

No matter what you think about the new rules, however, they signal an important turning point in the development of the Internet. We are going from Phase One, where everything is free and open and untamed, into Phase Two, which is all about centralization, consolidation, control—and money.

Because don’t kid yourself. Money is driving all of this. As in: Hey, we’ve created this marvelous new platform for communicating with each other. We’ve demonstrated that very large sums of money can be generated by sending stuff over these wires. Now let’s figure out who gets what.

Tuesday’s new FCC rules grant two big concessions to carriers. First, the rules will apply to wired broadband connections, but they will pretty much leave wireless alone. Second, carriers remain free to create “fast lanes” on the Internet. They can charge Internet companies to ride on the faster pipes, and perhaps also charge consumers more money to get access to those speedy services.

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Introducing the Green Tea Party

One tea to rule them allA reader mentions that media coverage of the Food Safety and Modernization Act has been conflicting.  On the one hand, it seems like the uneducated hicks of the Tea Party are behind the opposition, but on the other hand, the loudest denouncers of the bill seem to be dirty hippies.  Perplexing indeed.  

I imagine the Tea Party would be against the food bill because it increases central government control over food production, which - let's face it - is about as Soviet as you can get. We might as well rename Nebraska "Украина", set quotas, and send Grandma to the Gulag for violating provision 6655321 with her latest batch of steak-fried steak.

Hippies and their black sheep cousins, Whole Foods shoppers, would be against the food bill because it requires "safety standards" which would probably just entrench corporate food by making it prohibitively expensive to produce locally and organically and perhaps jeopardize hippie access to the crunchier and more bizarre varieties of honey, cheese, hummus, and dried fruit. (America has already suffered so much for so many years without unpasteurized cheese. If only we could be more like France.)

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Lying with Math

I lie to and manipulate my students all the time using basic math, but it's okay because I'm better than them.  Here is how I did it today with my class of three eight-year-olds:  

We had some extra time at the end of class, so I let the kids each choose a game they wanted to play.  One of the students chose Crazy Eights.  One of the students chose Old Maid.  One of the students chose Go Fish.  

Normally, I'd just have the students play paper, rock, scissors if they couldn't agree on what game to play, but I really didn't want to play Crazy Eights, since I've been playing way too much Crazy Eights recently, and a regular game of Old Maid usually clocks in at twenty-five minutes or so and we just didn't have that much time, plus, I thought the kids could use a bit of work on using the verb "have", so I really wanted to play Go Fish.  The real dilemma for me was how could I force the kids to play Go Fish without appearing arbitrary and despotic?

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Baby Step To Better Immigration Policy

A Coyote Crossing the Line, by emdot in flickr.com/creativecommonsPresently, substantial improvement on the dismal status quo of immigration in the United States is effectively impossible.  There is too much vitriol to allow comprehensive reform legislative action. Absent real overhaul, we should look for changes at the margin that might improve the welfare of that vulnerable population, especially if targeted policies can also disadvantage the organized criminal organizations that profit from illegal immigration.  A small policy tweak that could have big advantages is offering temporary amnesty to illegal immigrants that contact law enforcement about abusive coyotes.

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The Taxed and Unrepresented

A Mad Tea Party

"(With Democracy) No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of... democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Joe's post from Monday got me thinking about the Tea Party and our two-party system: 

It's tempting in a democracy to represent the policies of our elected officials as the center, but this is not an accurate picture of the American republic.  Extremists of every political and ideological stripe exist (I don't necessarily mean that in the pejorative sense).  The Tea Party's existence shows both that our politicians are out of touch with what the people want and that the people themselves are out of touch with what they want.  The Tea Party's anger may be justified, but it is incoherent.  Why should it be coherent?  Different people want different things.

I'd like to conduct a thought experiment to see if we can get any closer to the origins of the Tea Party movement: who is really unrepresented here in America?  Let's look at the three traditional policy axes under the presumption that the stated goals of policy are the actual goals of policy.

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That E.D. Kain is So Hot Right Now

I've been reading E.D. Kain for quite some time now (aren't I such a great hipster?), and I've had the opportunity to witness his meteoric rise from twelve posts a day at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to being profiled by Conor Friedersdorf for the Daily Dish during Andrew Sullivan's hibernation (Cause he's a bear, get it?).  I read Kain's posts on Capitalism, Anarchy & War today (I think that's the first time I've ever typed an ampersand.  Seriously, I had to look for it.) and was absolutely floored: it was as though Howard Beale had been crossed with Mikhail Bakunin, cloned by Norman Borlaug, and then grown by Dame Julie Andrews and John Valjean with Michel de Montaigne as a private tutor a la Aristotle.

Kain:

When our government wages a war overseas against terror or domestically against drugs (or overseas against drugs and domestically against terror) [extremely pithy, emphasis mine] or when they tell you that they’re trying only to stabilize Afghanistan or resolve the conflict in such a way as to make a graceful exit, etc. these are lies.

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A Pincer Movement in Higher Education

If wishes were horses... - image by Fibonnacci BlueRecently, in short succession I came accross two exposes on higher education in the United States: "The Long-Haul Degree," Patricia Cohen's April article for the New York Times about the hopeless economics of humanities PhDs, and then "College Dropout Factories," by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly for the Washington Monthly on the colleges with the worst graduation rates in the country.  In both cases students suffer from an information disparity before they embark on their education.  For very different reasons, many PhD candidates and low-income, high risk undergraduates are worth more to their institutions than the educations they are receiving.  These PhDs, earned in subjects that only allow for jobs in academia, take an average of over 9 year to obtain, yet afterwards finding any gainful employment proves elusive.  Meanwhile, the worst colleges in the country graduate less than fifteen percent of the students who enroll and treat incoming students as disposable assets that are easily replaced by fresh meat.  It is quite a system that fails to serve both the best and the most common equally- not quite the sort of equality we should aspire to.

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A Modest Proposal for Marriage

This is based on a comment of mine at a comment of mine at LoOG:

I’m one of two 26-year olds I know who has any children. I have two beautiful little girls with the same woman, and we’re unmarried. The reason we’re unmarried is not because we’re uncommited to each other. It is simply because we find the very concept of marriage to be absurd as it relates to our unique situation as members of two diferent cultures.

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Minipost: North's Comment on LoOG

Commenter "North" on League of Ordinary Gentlemen thread about gay marriage succinctly summarizes the only sane position on the issue:

To quickly fill in a hole that Jason skipped Bob, the accepted “librul” position as I understand it on both interspecies marriage, furniture marriage and child marriage is that one of the two entities married in such unions is inherently unable to give informed consent. Thus any of those aforementioned unions would be inherently acts of either despicable violence or meaninglessness (in the case of inert objects) perpetuated on the non-consenting entity.

Thowing Free Market Elbows

Free Parking as Always! - by netanIn a column in this week's New York Times, Tyler Cowen, perhaps the internet's most erudite libertarian, endorsed the "free parking isn't free" theory that has gained a lot of traction in liberal circles.  Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, lays out the case that minimum parking restrictions are actually a subsidy for drivers that makes biking and walking more difficult and thus: "Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist."  Cowen's solution is twofold, remove minimum parking requirements from zoning laws and, whenever appropriate, charge for parking.  Seems like a slam dunk for libertarians: remove market distorting government requirements and charge a free-market price for a service that has costly societal side-effects.  Naturally, Randall O'Toole at Cato Online immediately posted a rebuttal.  Why can't libertarians get behind a good idea that should have come from their neck of the policy woods?

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