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Why do arguments against progressive taxation always involve hypotheticals? "Suppose that blah blah blah..." Why can't they use real people and real numbers?

• Vivtek 16y ago
  That would be economics. Nobody in American politics listens to experts like economists - they only listen to "real people", who are above all that elite liberal claptrap they teach in schools.
  • napierzaza 16y ago
    "guys drinking beer" is highest amount of complexity that american politicians are willing to use. It's so simple, they're all the same people with the same opportunities, some are just poorer than others... right? There's not barrier to entry, plumbers just don't apply for the CEO positions.
    • hnal943 16y ago
      There are also barriers to entry to becoming a plumber. And there's no reason a plumber couldn't easily become the CEO of his own plumbing company. People are largely in charge of their own destiny in America (as well as many other countries). No one is made a CEO by birthright.
  • m_myers 16y ago
    If you'd stopped at the last comma, I'd be right there with you.
• yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Most political arguments involve hypotheticals - arguments against progressive taxation are nothing special. See, for example, Krugman's continual use of the baby sitting coop example. The real data is usually not as convincing as toy examples, analogies, or assertions that your political opponents are pure evil.
  • jcl 16y ago
    Actually, the babysitting co-op is a bad example of a hypothetical situation, since it uses real people and real numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op
    • yummyfajitas 16y ago
      But using it as Krugman does, namely as a predictive model of the real economy, is little but analogy. So technically that's an analogy, rather than a hypothetical. My bad. It's still a far cry from using real people and real numbers to argue for inflationary monetary policy. (Incidentally, one very common liberal hypothetical is that "tax cuts for the poor have a higher velocity than those for the rich, since the poor live hand to mouth and must spend everything they get." It turns out this is false - the poor pay down their debts with tax cuts, while the upper middle class spend it. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/TaxRebates.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/TaxRebates.pdf http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16246 http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16246 )
      • borism 16y ago
        inflationary monetary policy which other monetary policies you know of? inflation is the underpinning of monetarism - very little to do with Krugman or liberals.
        • hnal943 16y ago
          I suppose the alternative would be a stable monetary policy. The difference would be that under a stable policy you would only print money to keep the currency stable as inflation occurs, rather than printing money to fund government initiatives.
          • borism 16y ago
            And how exactly would you differentiate between printing money "to fund government initiatives" and printing money to fuel the economy? The fact is, even if all the money printed would be given away to non-governmental entities (that is, central bank would not be engaging in Quantitative Easing), it will still be funding the government (e.g. some of it will be collected back as taxes).
• Semiapies 16y ago
  Simplest reason? Hypotheticals can be simple enough to talk about without spinning off a dozen side discussions about the details of a real situation.
• lkrubner 16y ago
  You write: "Why can't they use real people and real numbers?" I would suggest that simple models can help clarify things, in a way real situations do not. People use simple models in math, physics, medicine, sociology, statistics, economics, finance, chemistry, ecology, climatology, astronomy, etc. In almost every field of inquiry, people attempt to build simple models to try to get at the underlying truth of some situation. Real events are full of complex interactions, which often involve more variables than can be easily understood. The human brain is not set up to understand real events in which 200 variables all have some influence. Issac Newton was offering a simple model when he said all matter attracts matter, proportional to its mass and inversely proportional the square of the distance - his model does not explain everything in the Solar system, it especially failed to describe the orbit of Mercury, but it did offer wonderful insight all the same. Lister and Pasteur were both offering a simplified model when they advanced the germ theory of illness, and yet their model offers wonderful insights into disease. Gauss offered simple models for more things than I could possibly list here - some have argued that he was the most important mathematician of all time. He contributed something to group theory, geometry, analysis and he largely invented statistics. And what is statistics, but a set of methods for quantifying simple models or sorting relevant data from the irrelevant? With only slight exaggeration, I could make the argument that the progress of science is the progress of simplifying models. That is the argument for not using "real people and real numbers".