Yglesias » Film Subsidies

Are film subsidies a good idea? Do they correct a market failure that is big enough to justify the taxes? I also wonder about subsidies to sports teams. 
Yglesias » Film Subsidies:

why would you think a target tax subsidy for the movie industry is a smart economic development strategy. Let’s say you start with a certain quantity of public services and a balanced budget. Your money’s coming in from property tax, sales tax, income tax, and a few licensing fees. Now it’s definitely true that a tax break for folks who film movies in your city might spur some additional business activity in your city. But you’ll have to pay for it with either higher taxes or else fewer services. Won’t the higher tax rates just offset the positive impact of the targeted tax break? And if you’re willing to live with fewer services in exchange for lower taxes, wouldn’t it be more beneficially to cut rates across the board?

Regulating Land Use

There are numerous land use regulations that encourage sprawl.  The reason that new development usually has lower density than older developments is largely government action to encourage sprawl by using regulations and providing millions of dollars worth of roads, sewers, and utility connections.  One common regulation mandates that each house must have a minimum amount of yard.  Yglesias:

As Atrios says, the problem with lot occupancy rules isn’t that there’s something terrible about backyards (or front yards or side yards or rows of bushes in front of buildings or what have you) it’s just that land is a valuable commodity. Think about something else. I like television. And most Americans like television. If we had a rule mandating that every new housing unit include a television, it’s not like people would be sobbing in the streets saying “oh noes, this television is ruining my life.” Most people would just watch TV and some minority of cranks would maybe smash TVs in back alleys or whatever.
But this would still be a stupid policy and inefficient allocation of televisions! In a world where TVs are not mandatory, most people buy TVs. Some buy expensive ones, some buy cheap ones, many households own several, and some households own none. Lawns should be just like that, available to those who want to pay the market price, but not cross-subsidized through arbitrary rules. There’s no collective action problem posed by contemplating a world in which most houses include some green space many do not. There’s no adverse selection issue. There’s nothing.

Notes On Government Employment - NYTimes.com

Notes On Government Employment - NYTimes.com:

...most government workers are at the local level, and most of the rest are state workers; the federal government is a small piece of the total. And if you look at what they do, a lot of them are teachers; many of the rest are firefighters, police, and other occupations we sort of like.

Third, why has government employment grown over time? Because, um, we have a growing population. Here’s government employment as a share of the population:

Yes, government got bigger under those socialists Dwight Eisenhower, LBJ, and Nixon. Since then, however, there has been no trend relative to population.

And bear in mind, again, that the representative government employee isn’t a bureaucrat trampling on your liberty; he or she is a schoolteacher.

Yglesias » Home Page

Yglesias » Home Page:

Paul Waldmann produces a very interesting chart which illustrates that not only have the
top marginal headline tax rates declined over time, the income cutoff for paying them has fallen:

This is a difficult to justify response to a world in which there’s more dispersion of incomes at the very high end than their used to be. More tax brackets would be a welcome development. Indeed, thanks to the widespread available of computers these days it should be possible to entirely dispense with the idea of “brackets” and express the rate as a continuous function of taxable income or consumption or whatever it is you want to use as the tax base.

How should higher education funding be distributed?

Yglesias » Higher Education From 50,000 Feet:

I can think of two broad principles that would be more defensible than funding by exclusivity. One would be funding by need. This would say that teenagers whose parents have modest incomes need resources more than do teenagers whose parents have high incomes. So institutions that attract a disproportionately high income client base should attract little support from the public. That means reduced direct appropriations, and at a minimum social pressure on civil society actors not to donate to highly privileged institutions. Another would be funding by quality. Here you would say that resources ought to flow to institutions with a proven track-record of producing unusually large student learning gains. In our current system, I think that funding quality is what we think we’re doing. Yale is “better” than the University of Connecticut so funds flow to it. But in our current setup, better simply means more exclusive. It’s a measure of the quality of the inputs, not the quality of the instruction. The result is that both the public sector and the civic sphere are essentially acting to redistribute wealth and opportunities upwards.