Late-night TV has never been this dark or angry.

We saw it with the just-canceled “Late Show,” where host Stephen Colbert raged against President Donald Trump with a mix of Fake News and DNC talking points.

“Saturday Night Live” peddles assassination gags to its cheering throng.

“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” saw its host holding up a T-shirt that read, “Donald Trump Is Going to Kill You.” That same show yukked it up over violent attacks on Tesla dealerships and staffers crushing on alleged murderers.

Dark. Angry. Ugly.

Irresponsible.

Now, a regular host on “The Daily Show” is joining the melee. 

Host Josh Johnson weighed in on both threats against President Trump and the nation’s healthcare system on the “Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso” podcast.

The two don’t seem to go together, but Johnson forced the issue during the ghoulish chat.

How?

The far-Left comic attempted to rationalize why anyone would pick up arms to eliminate Trump. We’ve already seen three attempts to do just that.

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Even worse?

The interview debuted after yet another gunman stalked the White House. This time, the man in question sprayed the property with bullets before Secret Service agents took him down.

For Johnson, the ends may justify the means.

“I think that there has been a co-opting of non-violence to the point of almost being a psyop,” Johnson said. “You can only take away so much from a person before they have no options left, other than to scream in the street — sort of riot or something like that … Or before they pinpoint certain individuals that they see as the perpetrators of all these crimes against making a way of life.”

How else can one read those words than a justification of violence or, at the very least, violent protests?

Johnson wasn’t done.

“You shouldn’t have to earn the right to live … When people, of no fault of their own, get sick and they can’t afford whatever this astronomical bill is, and then they get on the hook for this bill for their care…”

“But then the insurance company is over here side-stepping them left and right, putting them on hold for three days or putting them in a circle of reasoning around paperwork until they die anyway, it’s like, that’s not considered violence by us.”

Those comments ignore a massive elephant in the room. The current health care mess we’re in is based, in large part, on ObamaCare, President Barack Obama’s “signature” achievement.

Prices have soared since the Democrats pushed that legislation over the finish line without a single GOP vote but plenty of gaslighting. Remember, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it?” 

AKA the PolitiFact Lie of the Year.

Now, Johnson didn’t share these views from “The Daily Show” pulpit. It’s still a chilling perspective for any mainstream media comedian to share.

Will he expound upon those views from his Comedy Central perch? Or will the cable channel realize those kinds of comments are deeply irresponsible, at best?

The post ‘Daily Show’ Host Justifies Violence Against Trump? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Mainstream economists believe that if government increases spending and injects new money into the economy, then productive wealth will follow. Austrian economists would like to differ.

Jeff Bezos tweeted:

Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.

Strangely, a chorus of liberal economists rushed to attack Bezos. Gabriel Zucman replied:

Contrary to what you claim, working-class people contribute significantly to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income.

Justin Wolfers piled on:

If you only count the progressive taxes the U.S. levies, then the U.S. system is quite progressive. But if you also count regressive taxes (payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc), it’s not very progressive.

Bezos called for cutting taxes on the bottom half to make the tax system more progressive and the redistributionists came out swinging–to argue he was wrong about how progressive the current system already is. Own goal. Heretics are worse than unbelievers.

But there’s a second, more interesting thing going on. To make the regressivity case, Zucman and Wolfers have to count payroll payments as taxes. That cuts directly against eighty years of liberal doctrine. Beginning with FDR, the argument on the liberal side has always been that payroll taxes are not taxes but contributions or premiums entitling the payer to benefits as an “earned right.” Here’s FDR to Luther Gulick in 1941:

We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.

That framing isn’t a historical curiosity. It runs straight through liberal social security stalwarts like Arthur Altmeyer, Wilbur Cohen, and Robert Ball, and it’s alive today in Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson’s Social Security Works!, which attacks billionaires and insists Social Security benefits are “earned compensation.” The whole political durability of the program–the third rail–rests on this framing.

So the modern left wants it both ways. When the question is whether to cut Social Security, FICA is a premium and benefits are earned compensation. When the question is whether the tax system is progressive, FICA is suddenly a regressive tax. Pick a lane.

Is there a principled way to resolve this? Yes, and it follows Jim Buchanan (see my earlier post here) and Larry Summers who laid out the economics in his classic paper Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits. The principled test is whether a payment reduces labor supply. The wedge between marginal product and the worker’s reservation wage isn’t the statutory rate–it’s the gap between the mandated payment and the worker’s marginal benefit. Sylvain Catherine made exactly this point in reply to Wolfers:

Payroll taxes are not regressive! They are mandatory contributions to a retirement system that offers higher rates of returns at the bottom than at the top.

Consider a forced savings program: everyone must pay 12.4% of income into a 401(k). Is this a tax? For someone who was going to save 15% anyway, not at all. For someone who was going to save 10%, only the extra 2.4% bites. Mandatory does not mean tax. The marginal valuation of the mandated benefit is the key.

Now apply this to the two payroll taxes.

Medicare (HI): Every marginal dollar buys zero marginal benefit. Thus, it’s a tax. Part A eligibility is binary–40 quarters gets you in–and once in, your benefit is whatever Medicare spends on your care. No relationship on the margin. (Moreover, the raw HI schedule is unambiguously progressive: 2.9% flat, rising to 3.8% above $200K/$250K thresholds, plus the NIIT.)

Social Security (OASDI): The 90/32/15 Primary Insurance Amount bend points mean a low earner gets a much better return than a high earner. So the gross statutory rate is flat-then-regressive; but the net rate is progressive. In short, OASDI isn’t a tax for low earners but it is a tax for higher earners, thus the tax is progressive.

So: HI is a progressive tax. OASDI is a contribution at the bottom and a tax at the top. Either way, the Zucman-Wolfers framing—payroll payments as straightforward regressive taxes—is wrong and rhetorically it abandons the framing the left has spent eighty years building to protect these programs.

Personally, I’d prefer a system truer to the old rhetoric–a forced savings program with a closer connection between marginal payments and benefits. But if the left wants to reframe Social Security contributions as taxes, and thus make Social Security all about redistribution to the poor, rather than a wise savings program, roll the dice. Just remember that Altmeyer, Cohen, and Ball spent decades building the “earned right” framing precisely because they understood it was the program’s structural defense against means-testing and privatization. Drop the framing and you drop the defense. I suspect the privatizers at AEI and Cato will happily take that trade but the left may come to regret making it for them.

The post Liberal Economists Score an Own Goal Against Bezos appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Greg Ip’s argument that cryptocurrencies, being privately issued, will fail as money relies heavily on his historical claim that privately issued bank notes in the 19^th-century United States failed as money (“Stablecoins Are Private Money. That’s Why They’re a Risk to the Economy.” May 25). Mr. Ip’s history is incomplete.

It’s true that problems plagued privately issued bank notes in 19^th-century America. But research by Hugh Rockoff, George Selgin, Lawrence H. White and others reveals that these troubles were caused not by the bank-notes’ privateness but, instead, by government restrictions. Most notably, but not only, legislation restricted branch banking and required privately issued bank notes to be collateralized by state-government and railroad securities that sometimes proved to be junk.*

In contrast, where banking was less encumbered by government restrictions – places such as Scotland in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and Canada in the 19^th century – privately issued bank notes served very well as money.

Nor is history kind to Mr. Ip’s suggestion that government money serves well as a store of value. In the 124 years from 1790 through 1913 (the year the Federal Reserve was created), the dollar lost approximately eight percent of its value, yet in the 114 years since the Fed’s creation (1913-2026), the dollar lost a whopping 97 percent of its value.**

If cryptocurrencies fail to serve as good money, the reason won’t be that private issuers of money are destined to perform more poorly than government issuers.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* George A. Selgin and Lawrence H. White, “How Would the Invisible Hand Handle Money?” Journal of Economic Literature, December 1994, Vol. 32, pages 1718-1749.

** George Selgin, William D. Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White, “Has the Fed Been a Failure?” Cato Policy Report, November/December 2012, and “Consumer Price Index, 1800- ” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

The post On Private Money appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

The first Star Wars feature film in seven years should have been a grand event. But from the moment the opening text rolled, it was clear something was amiss. Yes, the story is classic pulp adventure, in the beloved style of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but it was glaringly obvious that something was missing right away: not a single mention of the genocide in Palestine.