ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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If you cut the payroll tax (roughly) in half, where does the Social Security System get the money to pay benefits?
"The bottom line is the bottom line."
Good stuff.
Help me out here. You write:
The economy is in trouble today because of, pardon the pun, false profits.
So, why on Earth would we try to "take these lies and make them true"? If we were reporting fanciful or unsustainable profits, how would we go about re-inflating that bubble, and why?
I agree with your basic analysis about profitability needing to drive the bus, but profit expectations and current contracts have a lot to do with how we reach that point. If profit expectations were unreasonable and they were embodied in contracts (of all kinds, including mortgages) then the remedy is either inflation (preferably through redistribution) or economic collapse, not tax cuts to employers. Or am I missing something?