AEI – Short Publications
So I’m back from the holidays: Happy New Year to you all.
For starters here is a piece at the American Enterprise Institute [a right wing think tank] by Greg Mankiw, Bush’s former economic advisor: AEI – Short Publications. My reaction is mixed, although he touches on a few things I have advocated myself, such as the introduction of free markets into agriculture. Where I I have a bone to pick is on the taxes/benefits argument he makes, and on his gratuitous comments about there being some ‘good taxes’.
For instance I don’t recall him arguing, publicly, for a gasoline tax which would be far and away the best way to wean the country off gas usage. Saying something like that when you’re off the team strikes me as a bit lame!
As for the ‘vastly higher taxes’ comment: he completely ignores his own role in abetting the recklesss fiscal policy of this administration. The choice is not just between taxes and cutting benefits. It is between revenues and expenses in total including things like defense. We have not had a clear debate about all the options because people like Mankiw try hard to keep the focus on the simple tax/benefit balance, while ignoring other sources of funding such as cutting the rampant waste at the Pentagon [which should surely anger anyone like Mankiw who seems to stress efficiency].
Finally Mankiw, like all right wingers, refuses to take a full view of the provision of health care. He only frames it in the context of the piece currently paid for by the government [which he keeps arguing needs to be reduced in oreder to avoid those draconian taxes]. He completely ignores that part of the economy which is now privatized and which is horrendously inefficient: the value being provided by the mish mash of bureacracies like the insurance companies could most likely be more cheaply provided by the government thus releasing money into private hands for other things. We, on the left, need to keep pressing the Mankiws of the world to include their precious private sector in the wider social benefits/cost discussion so we can reach a complete rather than partial solution.
