I didn’t take intro economics in college, but thanks to the distributed intelligence of the internet I can gain pearls of insight into what I missed by reading Greg Mankiw’s blog on which we see the advice he would give to a politician interested in curbing inequality:

The tax system is probably the best vehicle to accomplish the Dems’ goal. One possibility would be to reduce the payroll tax rate and to make up the lost revenue by increasing, or perhaps even eliminating, the cap on taxable payroll. That would benefit, approximately, the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution.

Fair enough. He also remarks that “This policy change would, of course, have an efficiency cost.” How so? “By raising taxes on taxpayers who already face the highest tax rates, the deadweight losses of the tax system would surely rise.” In other words, to maximize equality, we should make taxes on the wealthiest people as high as possible. By contrast, to maximize efficiency, we should make the highest tax rate as low as possible. He doesn’t spell out the reasoning behind that view, but presumably that’s why I should have taken the class. He also says earlier in the post that free-market economists like him typically don’t care about inequality. He doesn’t spell out the reasoning behind that view either, but my guess is it’s because he thinks maximizing efficiency is the most important thing.

I think the implication of the combination of these views is that we should just divide federal spending (about $2.8 trillion) by the population (about 300 million) and then charge every person a $9,333 (or thereabouts) head tax. Is that right?

So let’s say you’re a retail store. You’re planning some kind of post-holiday sale. You don’t, however, want the details of the sale to become public knowledge too soon. But your ad copy and other elements of planning need to be worked out in advance. Because your store is imperfectly managed, information about the sale leaks onto a website. You’re pissed off. What do you do? Wield copyright law as a fearsome bludgeon:

Deal site BlackFriday.info yesterday removed the Best Buy “Black Friday” sales price list after the big box retailer threatened to deliver a DMCA takedown notice to Black Friday’s ISP. In a brief posting, Black Friday said, “While we believe that sale prices are facts and not copyrightable, we do not want to risk having this website shut down due to a DMCA take down notice.”

In recent years, information on the post-Thanksgiving sales has become a highly prized commodity, with a number of sites featuring copies of major retailers’ ads. Consumers looking for the best prices and wanting to streamline their shopping are responsible for the sites’ popularity.

This is absurd. We’re inching toward companies being able to prevent newspapers from publishing any sort of adverse information just all on vague copyright grounds. Facts are facts and people are entitled to circulate them.

Out-of-the-closet David Kurtz has some choice words on hopes for a big Iraq turnaround:

That Bob Gates is going to make a dramatic difference over the next two years. First, I remember the last time we were promised wisdom, experience, and a steady hand from a member of Bush 41′s old team. That was Dick Cheney.

Right. The purported dichotomy between 41 people (good!) and 43 people (bad!) is dramatically overstated. And it’s not just Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz was on the Bush 41 team. So was Condoleezza Rice. And, of course, so was Colin Powell. Don Rumsfeld, meanwhile, wasn’t. The reality is that presidents almost always — especially in the first terms of their administrations — appoint reasonably diverse groups of people to national security positions. They proceed to disagree with each other. The President of the United States then decides what he wants to do. Bush 41 had some real nutters working for him who pushed some nutty ideas inside his administration. Bush 43 had some reasonably sensible people working for him who pushed some reasonably sensible ideas inside his administration. The difference wasn’t in the advisors, it was in the presidents. More often than not, Bush 41 made reasonable choices while Bush 43 made bad ones.

There’s no mystical Team Kennebunkport that can save the country from the fact that our president has some very wrongheaded ideas about the world and a habit of making very bad decisions.