Fiscal Policy Debates - Tax Cuts and Govt Spending Cuts

Medicaid May Face Big Cuts and Work Requirements
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/health/medicaid-cuts-republican-congress.html
Republicans in Congress are eyeing cuts to Medicaid, which could threaten health coverage for tens of millions of poor Americans.
 
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020

Why Some Tax Cuts Can Be Better Than Others
https://www.wsj.com/economy/why-some-tax-cuts-can-be-better-than-others-507717cb
Biggest potential payoffs for economic growth come from creating incentives for businesses to make new investments 

Historical Perspective on 'Laffer Curve':

https://qz.com/895785/laffer-curve-everything-trump-and-republicans-get-wrong-about-trickle-down-economics-and-reaganomics/

Gwynn Guilford notes:

“Laffer’s supply-side logic served as the intellectual cornerstone for Reagan’s tax cuts, marking a turning point in conservative ideology. Up until this point, Republican orthodoxy was mostly focused on avoiding fiscal deficits. The GOP was even fine with raising taxes as long as the government covered its expenses. Economists and liberal politicians saw tax cuts as a way to tuck some extra cash into workers’ pockets, encouraging them to consume—which, in turn, boosted growth. But many old-school Republicans scoffed at Laffer’s trickle-down theories. The most famous example of this came during the GOP primary, when George H.W. Bush dubbed Reagan’s supply-side ideology “voodoo economics.””

Trust in Science

How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/kennedy-trump-vaccines-covid-skeptics-cfdef1bd
Voters still angry over Covid-19 measures backed Trump’s embrace of RFK; officials worry they won’t have ample clout for the next crisis 

Robots in the Workplace

How AI is powering a robotics revolution
https://ig.ft.com/ai-robots/

Robots Struggle to Match Warehouse Workers on ‘Really Hard’ Jobs
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/business/robots-warehouses-amazon.html
The machines can load and unload trucks, move goods and do other repetitive tasks but are stymied by some, like picking items from a pile. 

Trump and Legal Immigration

What will Donald Trump do about legal immigration?
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/11/18/what-will-donald-trump-do-about-legal-immigration
Highly skilled workers are already preparing for the worst 

The Japanese Approach to Education

What a School Performance Shows Us About Japanese Education
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/opinion/japan-education-childhood.html
A look into the delicate balance between teamwork, discipline and personal growth. 

Meanwhile, in America:
Texas Education Board Backs Curriculum with Lessons Drawn from Bible
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/us/texas-bible-curriculum-public-schools.html
School districts serving more than two million elementary-school children would be able to adopt a curriculum that draws on the Bible.

Trust and Institutional Quality

Trump’s demolition of the US state
https://www.ft.com/content/379dadff-92f7-4901-9432-403fd3c56f5d
One irony of the president-elect’s campaign of destruction is that the government is in dire need of reform
 
Trump’s attack on the enemy within will delight America’s real foes
https://www.ft.com/content/eb305c43-03c6-4cc9-9053-f0670fac8c73
The president-elect is threatening to gut the institutions that make America great
 
Trump’s victory represents a historic protest vote, no more and no less
https://www.ft.com/content/738cced3-35ee-45ef-b751-03d52bbaf35a
Antipathy to big government and big business has helped spur the rise of a third force in US politics 

The Artificial State
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-artificial-state
As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back? 

Institutional Crypto Capture?

Bitcoin’s shift towards respectability should concern us all by STEPHEN DIEHL
https://www.ft.com/content/8ab293b4-ee98-4d2a-8aa9-140a6a597f42
STEPHEN DIEHL notes:
The financial industry’s embrace of crypto is less a validation of its alleged revolutionary potential and more an attempt to extract fees from what is, essentially, gambling. It has effectively neutered crypto’s radical promise of disintermediation.
Regulators have not put in the necessary controls needed to address underlying disclosure, manipulation and systemic risks. Now we are in a precarious situation where oversight is fragmented, inconsistent and incoherent — with different agencies working at cross purposes and no clear principles guiding policy. 

Wise Words from a Truly Great Economist

Avinash Dixit:

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2010/12/people.htm

The lesson that really should be learned, and I’m afraid will never be learned, is that the time for fiscal prudence is when times are good. That’s when governments should be running substantial surpluses, so that when crises or a recession hit, they can spend freely without worrying about debt.

Unfortunately, the reason the lesson will never be learned is that good economic times are especially conducive to the illusion that bad times will never return.

Rising Demand for Drone Pilots

Low-altitude economy’s ambitions collide with lack of drone pilots
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3286763/low-altitude-economys-ambitions-collide-lack-drone-pilots
Training programmes becoming increasingly popular as more job opportunities open up for UAV operators 

Should Europeans Buy Their Own Domestic Fighter Jets?

The sad death of the Eurofighter Typhoon
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sad-death-of-the-eurofighter-typhoon/ 

Size of the Federal Workforce

2.3 Million Jobs: The Federal Workforce, in Charts

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/2-3-million-jobs-the-federal-workforce-in-charts-6b490ad3

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to slash the ranks of government employees; 70% of civilian workers are in military-related agencies

The Role of Language

Thought Experiment 5: Wittgenstein’s Beetle

Language can function only because there are public criteria for acceptable usage.

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/11/thought-experiment-5-wittgensteins-beetle

“Suppose everyone has a box with something in it: we call it ‘a beetle’. No one can look in anybody else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box.”

However, and this is Wittgenstein’s point, even if your box contained something different from my box (perhaps your beetle has an extra antenna, perhaps in your box is a coin, or perhaps it is empty), that wouldn’t necessarily stop us using the term “beetle” in the same way. What’s in the box could be irrelevant. In a similar vein we might ask how you know that when you think of the colour red, others have the same colour in mind. What matters is not how we experience colour but that we use colour terms with reference to the same things, such as tomatoes and post boxes.