August 1, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

Americans appear to support universal health care at zero marginal cost; their support dwindles, however, when the potential costs are revealed.

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August 1, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

Raising the capital gains tax, as some desire to do, will only destroy credit, which will result lower productivity and economic growth.

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August 1, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

Josh Stossel offers some insights he learned from the new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Excerpt:

Caplan stresses that most voters see no reason to do otherwise because they don’t bear the consequences of their choices. This irrationality does not carry over into their personal lives because there they bear the brunt of their own decisions. But when irrationality is free, notes Caplan, people will indulge their biases.

Caplan divides them into three categories: antimarket bias, antiforeign bias, make-work bias and pessimistic bias. Antimarket bias describes people feeling that trade and profit are zero-sum games, that one person’s gain is another person’s loss. They haven’t learned that free exchange is win-win and that in a free market, profit comes from cost-cutting innovation. Antiforeign bias, perhaps a vestige of primitive man, consists of distrusting “them” even though our prosperity increases according to how global the division of labor is. Foreigners don’t want to invade us; they want to sell us useful things. Make-work bias is the belief that what makes us rich is jobs, rather than goods, and so anything that eliminates jobs is bad. If that were really true, we could prosper by outlawing all inventions created after 1920. Think of all the jobs that would create! Finally, pessimistic bias is the view that any economic problem is proof of general decline. Lots of people actually think we’re poorer than our grandparents were!

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August 1, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

The Arizona Republic has something to say about Schip reauthorization.

Notable:

The question SCHIP reauthorization poses is whether the federal government should be subsidizing the health insurance of middle-class families. There doesn’t seem to be any justification for it, particularly funded the way congressional Democrats are proposing.

To pay for the SCHIP expansion, Democrats are proposing to raise tobacco taxes by up to 61 cents a pack.

Tobacco taxes are highly regressive. So, basically, Democrats are proposing to tax the poor to pay for the health care of the middle class.

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August 1, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

Economists signed petition in order to retain low trade barriers.

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