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You may think so. I rather doubt it.

So what. Living in an advanced industrial society involves paying taxes. You can argue about the level all you like, but more taxes isn't automatically a bad thing - it all depends what you get for your taxes, and the mindless claim that government is always less "efficient" than private enterprise has been extensively tested in recent years, and has proved to be a less-than-reliable rule.

Not all that left wing - coming from Prohibition money and on depressingly good terms with the mafia.

And the Laffer Curve is one of those superficially plausible arguments that politicians love that turns out to be useless - to the point of being actively misleading - in detailed practice. Kennedy was a politician, and his speech writers had to give him plausible things to say that didn't make him look a complete idiot. The Laffer Curve hadn't been quite so comprehensively discredited back then, so the Economic Club of New York might not have laughed at him at the time.

That's engineers doing stuff they like to do, rather than economics in action.

What's that got to do with the Laffer Curve? Higher tax rates make tax evasion more profitable and more common, but the risks of detection vary so much from activity to activity that a broad brush rule like the Laffer Curve is spectacularly irrelevant.

So that's two people for three weeks rather than two people for three weeks. And you probably worked longer hours than they would have done.

The CD's don't go back thirty years - they show up in the local paper from time to time

But scarcely a majority. Your friends may all be honest - granting your church activities, they may be more likely to tell you that they are honest than the general population. Those of my wife's graduate students who ended up getting post-docs in Switzerland found it an expensive place to live.

The usual liberal/right-wing "favour business over labour" program. It doesn't deliver, but it sounds good to people who are owning and running small companies. The world is a little more complicated than they like to believe, and the horror stories that surface when regulation is lax or has been bribed into looking the other way should be more effective than they are in discouraging this approach - industrial disasters rarely get reported in terms of government inspectors not doing their jobs or not being allowed to do their jobs, but if you read the reports carefully that's suually exactly what's been going on.

In Germany, engineers get to run companies and they appreciate what automation can do. The UK most of the bosses are ex-accountants, and in the US ex-lawyers. That's a generalisation, but a useful one.

You are an engineer by training and avocation.

Right ventricular heart disease as a complication of cirrhosis of the liver? It's rare pretty much everywhere except Glasgow.

That kind of sum strikes you as expensive? And sufficient justification for pestering your more sophisticated relatives, if you've got any?

Sometimes? How often? But you are right, that kind of thing shouldn't happen. Have you ever wondered exactly why US medical care costs half as much as anybody else's? With all that wonderfully precise - if expensive - administration in place to protect themselves from malpractice suits, that kind of mistake ought not to happen at all.

Perhaps what you really need is a medical fraud squad in every police force.

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Of course not.

Then why don't you move to North Korea or Cuba for a while and see for yourself? There the government runs just about everything. Sort of ...

Hint: Laffer was just past his teenage years when Kennedy said that. So how could his non-existent curve be discredited back then?

Absolutely not. I certainly do not enjoy remodel jobs in the house. But if I can realize a net savings north of $5k in such a short time I am going to do it. Same for a lot of other folks.

Such completely legal activity costs people work, eventually their jobs and it reduces a little chunk of government "revenue" from several thousand to zero. All courtesy of the Laffer curve effect.

Sometimes unions and others succeed in convincing a leftist political group in pushing through very silly laws to curb such activity. Case in point: Li'l yellow "check engine" light came on a month ago. Called an auto parts store if they still did the free OBD-II reads. "Oh now, a new law in California prohibits us from offering that service now". So I went on the Internet and bought an OBD-II adapter for my netbook for $12. Read it out myself, was a mundane error (loose gas cap), reset the light, done. At the shop they'd have charged me north of $50 for the service and it would have cost me more time.

You really live in a fantasy world. When the "savings" are only 10% most people won't take the risk. It's not the risk of detection but that of not having an invoice and thus no recourse unless the remodeler is honest. When the difference is 30% or more, however, it's a totally different ballgame.

No, it was one guy for two weeks and four days, then a guy and his wife for one day. I did not work longer hours than they do and I did not work weekends.

Sure, but it has absolutely nothing to do with why people move to Switcherland. Only the super-rich have bank accounts there and I am not talking about the super rich but people like you and me.

It is expensive but higher net income more than makes up for that. Not for a production worker but for a good engineer it does.

Right now they vote with their feet, by leaving. Simple as that.

Nearly all companies I consult for in the US are run by engineers.

Oh, there are a lot more areas, whole countries :-)

For people who have to earn their pay that is expensive, yes. Pestering takes very few minutes, a smart person glances over a bill and points out the thinks to question. I sometimes do that for others.

No more bureaucrats with big pensions. We've got enough as it is. As I said before, what we need is tort reform. That would fix this. Of course, there is nothing about that done in Obamacare. And everybody knows why ...

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Back when I lived in Irvine, I lived across the street (about two blocks) from a grocery and hardware store, and about three quarters of a mile from work. Then, I decided I could just work at home, and then moved out here in the boonies where it is a half mile to the 7-11 and about two miles to all the grocery stores.

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That's not the boonies. It is about two miles to the stores here as well and there is no 7-11 in between.

Working from home is great. Plus it is very eco-friendly. My yearly mileage on the car has dropped to less than 2000mi. Meaning I need to buy gas about six times each year.

The Laffer curve hasn't been discredited at all, except in the small minds of the Slowmans of the world. In fact, it's obvious. At zero tax rate the government brings in zero money (0 * something = 0). At 100% the government brings in no money (100% * 0 = 0). Inbetween there might be some money for the politicians. Laffer didn't describe the shape of the curve at all, except at the endpoints. The point is that there is a point where further increasing taxes reduces income; taxing (the economy, in general) is dynamic not static, as moron politicians and Slowmans insist. The logic of the Laffer curve is uncontestable, no matter how hard lefties try to rewrite history.

Obama has gone even further and believes that it doesn't matter that increasing tax reduces income; it's about "fairness". That is, punish the achievers because "they didn't do that" (ignoring the fact that the "poor" didn't do anything).

Forget it. Slowman is impervious to reason.

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We are still averaging about 8000 miles per year, mainly because the dance classes we go to (twice a week) are about 20 miles away in Palm Desert. That is almost two gallons each trip, so with a 14 gallon tank, we have to get gas about every two and a half weeks. Throw in a trip to Orange County every couple of months, and the miles add up...

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Neither qualifies as an advanced industrial country, and those governments controls stuff that works much better when left to private enterprise. Not like the Republican approach leaves me free to be happy with regimes that keep some services under government control, and unhappy with the pathological loonies who reject the free market as enthusiastically as the Republicans embrace it.

"Laffer himself does not claim to have invented the concept, attributing it to 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun[22][23] and, more recently, to John Maynard Keynes.[1]"

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But you didn't dislike it anything like as much as painting walls, which you left to your wife.

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Scarcely. Getting stuff done for cash was always part of most people's lives in the UK and it's certainly a common thing here.

Honest, or fearful of reputation damage. Legal recourse isn't always effective - crooked and incompetent contractors go bankrupt at regular intervals. Bad-mouthing them in a close-knit community can be more effective.

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Then you really are a competent do-it-yourselfer. I'm better than average, but I certainly can't do stuff faster than the people who do it every week for a living.

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It's not just the super-rich. The Dutch state thinks is it missing out on at least 32 billion euro of off-shore money

which suggests that the trick is also popular amongst the merely well- off.

I dislike it almost as much. My back is not in that great a shape. Schlepping buckets or mortar and laying tile is real hard on your back.

Sometimes I also take more time than they do but that can pay off: Neighbors had their kitchen tiled right about the time I tiled ours. My job took more than 2x as long. But I put down a membrane, fastened and leveled all loose stuff, and all that. First their grout came out in chunks, then their tile floor began to crack about a month later and had to be ripped out again ...

And as usual no word about what triggered it. AFAIK the Dutch government started taxing the assets in bank accounts, regardless of interest. So if you didn't get any or very little interest, like right now, they are confiscating the savings of people piece by piece. People do not like this. Because it is unfair.

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It's not discredited as such - it's just that it doesn't mean what Regan wanted it to mean.

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Sure. But in practice that point is a lot higher than you pay at the moment in advanced industrial countries. In so far as the Laffer Curve is real, it happens to be irrelevant to the economies where people claim to be applying it.

The morons are the politicians who argue  that reducing taxes increases revenue. Nobody now works anywhere near that far up the Laffer curve - Swedish and UK income tax did go that high a few decades ago, but that was based on a silly political principle, and the relevant leftists realised that it was a total waste of time many years ago.

The broad brush logic is fine. The practical application has always been totally stupid, and krw is too dim to realise this.

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"Laffer himself does not claim to have invented the concept, attributing it to 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun[20][21] and, more recently, to John Maynard Keynes.[1]"

But how would krw know this? He obviously wants it to be true, which - for him - is enough justification for him to proclaim it to be true. But finding an example where I had been exposed to a reasonable argument and had unreasonably rejected it would be quite beyond krw's exceedingly feeble intellectual powers. He doesn't recognise a reasoned argument when it cuts his feet from under him - as happens regularly.

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I've been commuting once a week between AL and Atlanta, so using about a tank-and-a-half a week. Gas is about $.25/gal cheaper in AL, so I fill there and get $20 or so to make it back. That's coming to an end soon, so my use should drop by 60%, or so. I put a lot of the 110K miles on my truck in the last year.

Wrong. It means exactly what he said it meant. He was right about many things.

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You're wrong, of course. Lower taxes have always *increased* revenue. JFK did it, Reagan did it. Bush did it.

It's a simple fact, moron.

Stupid lies.

NO, the reality is that you don't believe in dynamics either. Dumb lefties never do.

I only speak the obvious, Slowman. You're an idiot.

Absolutely. I didn't take good care of my teeth until it became ~20K USD out of pocket to get proper restorative work.

?-/

It may get into Lost Angeles, but it will never get into San Francisco itself. Closes point of approach is maybe Livermore.

I bet it will be over a trillion before it is done and will end in Reno, Nevada. And will take over 20 years more.

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He was far-right about most things, but rarely correct. Contragate sums up his administration.

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A claim that you haven't tried to support - wisely, since it isn't true.

No, it's merely an item that right-wing nitwits believe because it suits their world view. They aren't into evidence=based politics.

And your evidence to support this claim is?

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Define this "dynamics" I'm not supposed to believe in.

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You post what you think is obvious. Right-wing idiots don't understand evidence-based argument, and think that simple assertions are as persuasive for other people as they are for them.

You're the idiot, and your mode of argument makes this abundantly clear.

Inflation does exactly the same thing, just invisibly. Taxing the assets seems a bit more honest because you can see it happening (like not hiding the tax on a receipt).

Both are very ungood.

On a sunny day (Wed, 03 Oct 2012 09:21:45 -0400) it happened Spehro Pefhany wrote in :

As of the first of this month value added tax on most things has been increased to 21 % in the Netherlands. It used to be 19 %. So that is 2 % decrease in buying power for most people. It is to keep the deficit low you know.

This tax increase is also for things like electricity.

That would lead it to the status "as absurdum", as the Romans would have said. Because people don't want to go to Livermore, they need to go to where all the electronics design happens and that's on the other side of the hills.

Way it'll go is already very clear: I know people who regularly travel to places north of L.A. Rought 5-6h drive from here. After those lengthy TSA waiting lines started they figured that flying won't save them much time anymore, if any. So now they drive. I recently did the same thing.

Yup. It's like a union boondoggle :-(

Except the Dutch get hit with both, inflation plus confiscation. Bill is wondering why they don't loudly complain in his neighborhood. Well, many of them will simply and quietly react by moving the assets under the mattress or something. Naturally then they'll keep their mouths shut because else the goons might come after them. The Laffer curve also works in that arena.

increased to 21 % in the Netherlands.

No, that is to pay the tab for Greece and some other countries :-)

It'll cause an economic slowdown. Same here if they let the fiscal cliff happen Jan-1. No joke.