And just one more thing (still contraceptives)

The key question about whether Catholics are harmed by the contraceptive mandate is whether they are being asked to do something immoral.  I don't think they are.  The key questions about whether religious freedom is harmed by the contraceptive mandate are:
1. Is the mandate objectionable to some on the grounds of faith?
2. Is there a legitimate federal interest in overriding these objections (as in prohibitions on human sacrifice or (perhaps less legitimately) polygamy)?

It's clear that the answer to 1 is yes, but it's not clear that the answer to 2 is no.  The federal government heavily subsidizes employer provided healthcare, so one might reasonably think that if you take the subsidies you have to take the strings that come with them.  Furthermore, it seems possible that there's a legitimate federal interest in reducing healthcare costs, and perhaps even a right to reproductive freedom to be protected.  More below the fold.

Taxes again

I noticed this post advocating a cap on tax deductions.  I think it's a pretty interesting compromise between the current system and the system I've proposed previously.  If only they could manage to fit in the domestic purchase deduction.  Ideal tax code in a nutshell:

1. stepped income tax brackets as per usual, with no exceptions for capital gains or inheritance... Any money you recieve counts as income, period.
2. all domestic purchases tax deductible

HOLY CRAP I JUST HAD A COOL IDEA.  I just realized that we can combine 2 with a flat tax and make everyone go crazy.  Here's how it works:  Flat tax of X%. You're only taxed on money you make but don't spend on domestic goods and services.  Poor people would still pay basically no taxes as their incomes are almost entirely devoted to making ends meet, and rich people would have effective tax rates fairly close to X because they rarely manage to spend a significant proportion of their income in a given year.  We might want to include a tax deduction for savings up to a certain absolute dollar amount (say 10k a year) to add some stability to the system, but that's the only other deduction.  This is a great political compromise as it tricks conservatives into accepting a highly redistributive tax and tricks liberals into accepting a flat tax.  VICTORY!

P.S. Yes, tricking politicians into doing something is basically the only way to achieve victory in modern American politics.

Taxes - how they should be (Part 2 Simple)

Complexity is the friend of the wealthy.  This causes problems all over our country, but I'm going to focus only on tax law right now.

Complexity problem 1: Wealthy people can afford lawyers and accountants, who exist entirely so that money can be made off of the complexity of our laws.  Unsurprisingly, this means that the well off are more likely to receive tax deductions &c.  They report and record their income and expenditures more carefully and they have access to experts who can maneuver the many loopholes and edge cases in our current system.

This is compounded by problem number 2: As some of you may have noticed from this income and expenditure spreadsheet, education trends with income.  That means that if you're not making a whole lot of money, it's likely that you don't have a whole lot of education or training in order to deal with the complexities of tax law, which means you probably wont be able to do as good a job as a highly trained professional expert tax payer like an accountant.  Surprise!

I'm not the first person to have noticed this, as you can see from Obama's recent budget speech, but I hope this expresses the issues succinctly.  Basically, I think tax payments should be a simple function of your income.  We should be adjusting the level of taxation to what we expected to make on average at each income level once deductions were applied, and we should leave social policy implementation out of our revenue stream.  This would have a whole pile of interesting side benefits like:

1. Taxes would be hilariously easy to calculate for people with regular salaries, which means the government could just send you a bill rather than forcing you to wade through a pile of inconvenient forms.  I'd love that.

2. Human beings might understand the tax code.

3. Politicians wouldn't be able to sneak in weird policy ideas under the guise of tax breaks.

4. Our revenue stream would be highly predictable on account of no variance being introduced by lawyers

5. We would put huge numbers of accountants out of jobs (Hurray!)

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Rant For A Brilliant Idea

In conversation with lab-mates Mike, Reid, and Shawn, someone (we cannot reconstruct who) proposed a brilliant and counterintuitive solution to the problem of redistribution of wealth.  It requires no wellfare, and is implemented entirely through the application of a tax break.  I believe that, in the biz, this is considered a WIN.  Here's the idea:

Make all domestic purchases tax deductible.
Only tax wealth (as opposed to income).

Bam! Let's break down the consequences of this.
1. We have effectively incentivized spending, use it or lose it (though not more of it than you do already)
2. The wealthy are the most motivated to spend (but it's still good to be wealthy cause you can get more and cooler stuff!)
3. Making the purchases you need to improve your life or expand your business helps you save money on your tax return
4. In the worst case it degenerates to the current situation: say no one spends anything for a year (awful for the economy and insanely unlikely, but hey) then everyone pays taxes in the tax bracket they are in without any spending deductions and the government gets the same amount of tax income it does now
5. In the hilarious case, everyone wants to be minimally taxed so they distribute income equally among all people and everyone pays the tax bracket of the mean amount wealth in the government.  The government makes the least money when it's the needed the least - in the egalitarian utopia the people created in order to evade taxation.

The basic economic intuition behind why this would be good is that spending stimulates the economy.  This is relatively well understood, and the government is constantly doing things like tweaking interest rates in order to incentivize spending and keep businesses rolling.  A common problem in economic models is that while poor people spend just about all their money on account of needing to be alive and that costing money, rich people end up saving most of their money, which essentially removes it from the economy.  Money that sits around doesn't do anything to increase demand for products, provide jobs, or any such goodness.  So more money actually cycling in the economy is definitely good, and this suggestion does that without any (discernible to me thus far) negative consequences.  Please tell me why I am wrong, otherwise I am running for some major political office tomorrow, on the platform of "Everything is tax deductible and incidentally watch your economy become a perfect fountain of efficiency productivity and wealth redistribution".