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2015_11 SSHA
- 7: I have a bit of a problem with this: it suggests in a roundabout way, that property would somehow precede taxation and the state; Tilly's account or "The Myth of Ownership" is maybe more adequate., also see page 17, the argument that each part of the colonies has the tax regime that fits its economic system (much the same could be said about the inverse). Maybe this is an ahistorical critique, maybe the author did not mean that (or maybe he did) – but to the modern reader, it's underspecified
- 5: is it maybe possible we're receding to a later stage, with all the talk of what a tax is supposed to be used for, or the social-democratic obsession with social insurance contributions
- 9: so the argument for/against direct/indirect seems to rest merely on democratic control; I am not sure. What about elasticity (DWL) and incidence? Lasalle: taxes on labor, well, maybe. Is the democratic control the argumenet for progressivity?
- 9: also consider today the findings by McCaffery and Baron that people DON't understand indirect taxes correctly.
- 15: PIT and other "revenue" (sic!) based taxes also have the problem of realization, which is not covered here!
what is strikingly missing:
- tax on consumption (which did predate this writing)
- tax on land value
The problem here might be if the ontological becomes normative!
Phases:
- Booty of war (2)
- Voluntary offerings
- Perogatives
Tax systems are a function of class antagonisms (such as direct taxes of the landed interests)
20: look again into Buchanan, and relate it to Nagel/murphy the myth of ownership: maybe both looking from the right AND the left, infinite regress ensues – (this is hard to say). TODO actually this is still pretty loose, I think probably think about this in a more careful way. The bottom line would be something like this: buchanan talks about the fiscal illusion, which requires a prior of private property, which is difficult to talk about without reference to the institutions that actually allow private property and commerce. On the other hand, talking about the advantage of public goods only makes sense once you talk about
- reads like today!
- cite SChumpeter: the confusion and non-scientific/ideological nature seems very interesting, p. 99
- 103: argues that once there is a state, anything could be a matter for the public; now I am not so sure, there are still economic considerations (economies of scale, etc.)
- 104: that's a good thought – it's ahistorical to think of previous times as hyper-private, without the state – because this functional differentiation simply had not happened yet.
- 105: that's a good point: that the crisis must be fundamental, related to the foundational logic – maybe we have that today with the dual crises of the welfare state
- 108: such a great notion how the democracies are saddled with the old baggage of feudalism! It was the princes state that was assimiliated (as far as possible by democracies)
- notice that this 108ff schumpeter makes the same argument as could be made about post-communist welfare states: they were no welfare states under socialism, because the economy and state were one undifferentiated realm
- 114: not sure how we can practically have a monopoly tax, but some things work out great – the land value tax! Schumpeter also recommends it!
- 116: fantastic keynes-esque quote on the end of history in tax
- 124: the whole war debt thing is a bit of magical thinking ...
- 131: more keynesian optimism on the future end of history
Comment: Schumpeter might really be thinking about the laffer curve: past regime does not work because costs of extraction are prehibivey, so you need a new system. In away, schumpeter really thinks AS WE MUSt of tax state as interfacing the mixed economy.
TODO Cite Buchanan on fiscal illusion in diss, and the italians he cites, seems quite similar.
- hereagain the myth of ownership strikes hard: it is VERY hard to price the "real" cost of public goods, almost circularly.
- either way, infinite regress ensues.
- i'd like to hear him argue against the LVT or PCT
- I agree with much of this: financial transaction tax really is a tax that's widely loved because no one knows who pays it.
- methodologically, this is dicey, how do you ask
- criticism from q might be helpful: can we look at these isolated survey items, and what do they "mean", can we take out the context?
- TODO still need to cite campbell in diss as the kind of tax survey research that we cannot do.
New Title btw for the workshop is "History of Politics of Public Finance".
- hehe, except regressive taxes are also distortionary, that is my problem here
- it's not what Duan Swank writes: everything is fine, because the revenues are ok
- here - as in so much of the political economy that is similar - we have the problem of the missing counterfactual: it argues in a way from end backwards. Say, this or that tax regime is beneficial for labor/cap, hence it was agreed on because of this/that. Compare this to McCaffery: if you compare it to the absent PCT, capital wins either way (denmark: b/c is regressive, us: becaise PIT is ineffective). Hyperbole: you couldn't invent a better tax to protect the rich.
Thorndike is interested in the arguments on fairness, not the answers (that's interesting, that's great for CiviCon!)
book: the pale king, book on taxation!
Consent, Compliance and Confession.
Question: how about the compliance on illiquid tax, especially within the PIT (on accrual or realisation)
Look back into Macomber, what the ruling says, maybe get back to Ajay (it seems that Macomber did not introduce realisation-based evaluation).
TODO Random note: why is Martin Nonhoff not here? He does fiscal soc, right?
Thursday, Nov 12, 13:00-15:00
Held, Maximilian: Sharing is Growing: The Evolution of the Portfolio Effect in Laboratory Experiments
Summary
- We should do relate this to social/epistemic/individual preferences explicitly (if we can)
- We should explicate the external validity (real world?), increase the complexity (effort, capital)
- We should try and relate this to Kahnemann/Tversky research program.
- Lucy Barnes was quite interested in this stuff
Below is some more feedback
would be interesting to talk more about social, epistemic and individual; this is a little half-hearted for now.
Yup.
relate to Kahnemann/Tversky work on bounded rationality: which behavioral biases work here?
It's not clear to me how these biases translate to more complex tax scenarios. McCaffery and Baron have tried this, but only on very, very simple models. Loss Aversion probably plays a role.
We all deal with this: people face threats/risks, and then they make demands on the state to do this or that, demand this or that. How well did the people in the lab really trust you? Did they buy this?
Don't remember my response, or the precise question.
- On the one hand, isn't it unsurprising? (evolutionary argument, clear explanations)
- On the other hand, Isn't it surprising?
- Dynamic element addition to Richard Meltzer model is quite interesting.
- Would be crucial to build capital into this
- Would be crucial to build effort into this
- What kind of respondents did we have?
- Was there communication between participants?
- Should explain more how does the lab setup corresponds to decisions in the real world.
- Maybe it is too individualistic.
Yup.
Flores, Luis: Social (Self) Regulation and the American ‘Asset-Based Welfare State’: Revisiting the Post-Fordism Debates
- absolutely! indebtedness is can be a relief-valve for lack of other opportunity; consider the Haig-Simons definition of income, national accounts
- nicely written, great visualizations
- MSR (mode of social regulation) approach need not be contrasted with economics, they go hand in hand
- from intermediation to real source of profit for financial sector – that is a fantastic hypothesis, would be great to learn more about that. (this is a little like ajay)
- not sure how increasing share of services proves much of anything
- careful with the regressive term? Maybe the y2c vs. ordinary capital norm plays a role?
- Laffer curve +
- EMAIL per (this is what I heard from spd person nahles): social democrats like social contributions not VATs or anything else, because it isolates these funds from the political competition (supposedly) (sara points out social cobtributions)
Thursday, November 12: 03:15 PM-05:15 PM
Clark, Bridget: Rising Tides or Sinking Ships? Evaluating the Utilization of Business Incentives on the Economic Development of US Counties, 1999-2013.
- PD competition? Subsidiarity? Systems competition? This relates to Lucys question on why there is growth for machine in the first place (that's also an endogeneity! b/c if one does it, then the others have to do it too.)
- "job creation" - make work bias
- point to the planet money podcast on the topic a a while back
- send the caplan source
write a piece on why political economy should consider counterfactuals; especially normatively attractive counterfactuals, and then explain their absence. More generally (or slightly less fictional) the political economy explanation should first consider the arguments (the normative ones) in the first place, and not jump right to the second-order explanations ("epistemic communities etc").
Feedback for the workshop overall: we should talk more about the economics, especially incidence and a more fundamental understanding if income/wealth/consumption. Read McCaffery! Also, if possible, maybe focus on one or more alternative tax proposals per year (say, bitcoin property rights, PCT, LVT, EITC, etc).
- Corporate tax vs personal tax: the argument against only works for corporate tax, not for personal taxes
- and for indirect
- can you invest in state-owned enterprises, and if so, what is the incidence?
- what industries are the SOEs in? rent-seeking or actual growth?
- in how far the the SOEs provide welfare and/or other "public" goods?
Ribeiro F. da Silva, Germano: On the Political and Social Determinants of Tax Systems: The case of Paraguay
- very close to my work! should stay in touch: why did we get this tax regime, and not antoher one
- about the regressive preferences: maybe one asked absolute, one percentage?
Comment on Isaac's comment: our tax predictions are not parametric (but they can't be because of inequality, which we need to look at first.) recommend for reading the dingsda principle that there should be only one instrument for one policy goal. Read mixed economy, Musgrave (especially now that we're doing politics and histpry of PUBLIC FINANCE, not just tax) feedback: finally found my tribe!
Friday, Nov 13 14:15-16:15
Chaired by Ho-Fung Hung
so what is wrong with this? what is the role of technology? information, IT and black-scholes is it really "new capital" or just fluctuating a little faster? maybe take up Eugene Fama and neoclassical econs on their own terms first.
Thompson, Daniel: Financialization, Power Resources, and Welfare State Retrechment in 14 Rich Democracies
same heretical question regulation also differs between countries, as does the risk structure and appetite of investors
Why is small better? who cares? Is it really job-creating? how did we end up with this ideology in the first place
Baltz, Matthew: Institutionalizing Neoliberalism: American Governance of inward Foreign Direct investment since 1975
Friday, Nov 13, 4:30
- deliberation IS used more often on taxation, says Caroline lee: post 2008, there IS stuff on retrenchment
- public engagement profs: raising people's tax morale
- 2 issues: it's better to be remote from the state // it's better to open up questions
- problem: don't feel prepared yet, this might translate (problematically) to empathy
- new orleans was means
- citizen assembly failed; so what does that mean? What's my
- AmericaSpeaks national conversation on the national debt there is more research on this
- feminist critique: mullifying critique
- more structured / less structured:
- malgorzata: is it habermas or weber? (Habermas: its convergence in values)
- degrees of logical consistency / are there
- isn't this bad news for habermas? very slightly more structured (MAGNITUDES MATTER DON'T THEY?)
- methods not that much better than other survey / GARBAGE_IN_GARBAGE_OUT / underlying? really? is this latent variable model? Operant metaphor is the school: SHAWH ROSENBERG
- ambitious interpretative method in: abductive / it is quite limited
- where in the process? did they understand all the items? did they do the Q-sort: of course it should become more organized
- local police is NOT depoliticized (!) at least in the US.
TODO: read Caroline Lee's work.
- especially "Hard Times, Hard Choices", just the article
- Do-It-Yourself Democracy (monograph)
Saturday, Nov 14, 10:45
really be hard about this: this is a charge that civicon (thin leftiest supporter) also faces: does it just mullify dissent?
- On the non-zero sumness: do we really not have that?
- Re-read nina eliasoph: conflict out
- Why is conflict more genuine than consent?
- Nina Eliasoph,
- Chantal Mouffe
- intellectually coward, self-congratulatory
really add this as a completely new reason for my diss: the concern that deliberation might be watered down, professionalized to the degree where it becomes just marketing.
My answer out of that is actually - counterintuitively -- longer, deeper, learning.
actually this is a somewhat fundamental addition: it's not just "facilitating dialogue" (whoch is what deliberation seems to degenerate into) – we need "didactiv reduction"; again the schools for democracy goes quite deep here.
I have a reference to abortion somewhere, that it CANNOT be resolved and there seems to be a case from Caroline Lee where pro-life and pro-choice people got together and talked with one another to prevent violence, and they ended up liking one another, but not agreeing at all this is interesting both because of of the moral issue of abortion, but also as an example of the talk
Sunday, Nov 15 8am
Sunday, November 15, 10:15am – 12:15pm
This included Carl-Henry Geschwind's talk.
Schumpermas are Max Helds drafts on taxation and democracy, including his dissertation at BIGSSS.