Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, vents about media treatment of the proposed ‘tax reform’.

In recent days I have – likely like you have – heard and read several media reports on Trump’s tax plan (or what we know of it so far).  Nearly all of these reports are juvenile: changes in tax rates are evaluated by the media according to changes in the legal tax liabilities of various groups of people.  For example, Trump’s proposal to cut the top federal personal income-tax rate from 39.6% to 35% is assessed only by its effect on high-income earners.  Specifically, of course, it’s portrayed as a ‘gift’ to high-income earners.  Eliminating the estate tax, as well as the alternative minimum tax, are likewise portrayed as benefits for the rich.

My purpose here isn’t to praise or to pillory Trump’s tax plan; I’ve yet to examine it in any detail.  My purpose, instead, is to lament this popular approach to evaluating taxation.  This approach, as Deirdre McCloskey might say, is that of a lawyer and not that of an economist.  The lawyer focuses on legal liabilities; the economist focuses on systemic consequences, both immediate and ‘seen’ as well as distant and ‘unseen.’

Actually, most of the j-school grads who are bloviating about it on TV aren’t even lawyers — but they have access to lawyers who (a) are mostly Democrats and (b) apparently slept through a lot of law school.

It’s true that if Smith’s last (say) $10,000 of annual income is currently taxed at a rate higher than a proposed new lower rate, Smith is made better off if this proposed lower marginal tax rate becomes reality.  (As an aside, I refuse to go along with the common-in-many-circles description of such a tax cut as a “gift” or a “giveaway” to Smith and other high-income earners.  Smith is the person who earned the income.  It is his property.  This income belongs to Smith.  The government takes it away from him.  For the government to reduce the amount of money that it takes away from Smith is not properly called a giveaway to Smith.  But let’s here say no more about this particular linguistic battering of reality.)

There’s a lot of that going around these days; the presumption that all your income belongs to the government except for whatever they graciously deign to let you keep infects a lot of people beyond the Usual Suspects who want your earnings confiscated because it’s more than they think you deserve.

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A new research letter published today in the journal Nature makes a startling claim that, if correct, will rewrite everything we know about how North America was populated.

But in the the words of its own author, Steven Holen, the evidence he and his colleagues discovered “went against everything I’ve ever taught in my career about early humans in North America.”

So clearly it’s reasonable to be skeptical. That’s why we’re breaking down the evidence in this special edition of CSI: Mastodon.

UPDATE: More here.

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A useful reference for those of us who often find ourselves throwing books against the wall.

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I want you to consider the possibility that your parents did not shape you as a person. Despite how it feels, your mother and father (or whoever raised you) likely imprinted almost nothing on your personality that has persisted into adulthood. Pause for a minute and let that heresy wash across your synapses. It flies in the face of common sense, does it not? In fact, it’s the type of claim that is unwise to make unless you have some compelling evidence to back it up. Even then it will elicit the ire of many. Psychologists especially get touchy about this subject. I do have evidence, though, and by the time we’ve strolled through the menagerie of reasons to doubt parenting effects, I think another point will also become evident: the problems with parenting research are just a symptom of a larger malady plaguing the social and health sciences. A malady that needs to be dealt with.

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The study found evidence of the comet engraved on a pillar in the world’s oldest temple at G?bekli Tepe in Southern Turkey. The engraving indicates the comet killed thousands, wiping out many large animal species, and triggering a miniature ice age lasting 1,000 years.

Oddly enough, all life on earth was not destroyed. So I wouldn’t sweat the ‘global warming’ scare.

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Another lefty myth debunked.

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Some people just can’t shake loose from playing with blocks.

Joe Bob Briggs investigates ancestry.

I’m loving all these Ancestry.com commercials where dim-witted actors say, “I thought I was a Tahitian Eskimo Mexican until I sent in my DNA test kit, and boy was I flummoxed when the results came back! I’m really Croatian with a mix of sub-Saharan! I guess I’ll be turning in my furry hat!”

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Given its iconic hold on the American imagination, the idea that more Americans are leaving California than coming breaches our own sense of uniqueness and promise. Yet, even as the economy has recovered, notably in the Bay Area and in pockets along the coast, the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates show that domestic migrants continue to leave the state more rapidly than they enter it.

The Middle East isn’t the only place that’s producing lots of refugees.

The movement away from expensive core regions reflects the basic preference among people for affordable, less dense housing. The new Census estimates have confirmed this national trend. Migration to both suburbs and smaller cities — and away from dense core counties — is now at the highest rate in a decade.

Population growth in big urban core cities, including New York, is now about half of what it was back in 2010. Last year, all 10 of the top gainers in domestic migration were sprawling, more affordable Sun Belt metropolitan areas in states like Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.

These dispersive trends are clear in Southern California, where net migration out of Los Angeles County runs about four times the rate of neighboring, more suburban Orange County, as migration to places like Riverside County mounts. Despite all the national hype surrounding L.A.’s drive for densification, it’s not a model that most people, and particularly families, seem to be embracing.

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Comedian Bill Nye accused CNN of doing a “disservice” to its viewers for inviting a well-respected physicist on Earth Day to argue about the legitimacy of man-made global warming.

Nye, who is well known for hosting a children’s TV show in the 1990s, scolded CNN’s “New Day Saturday” panel Saturday for pitting his environmentalist pedigree against the climate skepticism of physicist William Happer.

He also suggested the 24-news channel should instead drown out people like Happer with 98 scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

For the left, one needn’t be a Real Scientist; merely playing on on TV is sufficient.

Come to think of it, that explains AlGore pretty much.

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I am personally amazed by the number of recruiters who have sent us “vetted” professional coders who can’t actually code. This is such a serious problem that if a recruiter sends us three candidates who cannot pass our coding test, we fire the recruiter. We can’t afford to waste the time.

Tech recruiters charge 18 to 25 percent of the first year’s salary, but even the best recruiters we’ve worked with cannot truly vet the types of engineers we need. As far as I can tell, recruiters are not under pressure to learn, because high-end tech talent is so rare, hiring managers will take practically anyone who can fog a mirror. We won’t. And you shouldn’t.

In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training, and by the time we help them become A-team players, their GitHub accounts and contributions will reflect their learning. At that point, they will be firmly on the radar of top-tier tech. And we would have played the role of pre-school for Facebook, Google, or Apple. Great for Zuck, Larry, or Tim, but not so great for us.

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In short, I don’t think even Reagan could have defeated Obama-Hillary and the transgendered, victim-mongering, sexual-schizophrenic Democrat loonies. Little did anyone, least of all me, know that there was a strange orange-haired being in the universe that had the odd characteristic of killing the fungus that was growing all over Washington DC. His very presence seemed to damage the up until then unstoppable fungal growth. Jonah, rather than continue to wildly rip the strange orange creature that neither you nor I fully understand, we should give thanks to a beneficent G-d who has heard our prayers and delivered us from the scourge of Obama-Hillary. Some things as just beyond our ability to predict or control.

Let Trump be Trump and let the fungus among us continue to die.

This ongoing discussion between James Gawron and Jonah Goldberg has an interesting take on the comparison and contrast between Reagan and Trump. I found it very thought-provoking.

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Because the Cloud People and the Dirt People are clean different things.

It turns out that many members of the Senate, while opposing private school choice policies that would benefit others, practice school choice themselves.

Since 2000, The Heritage Foundation has surveyed members of Congress to determine whether they had exercised private school choice by ever sending a child to private school.

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Hey, she was biodegradable; friends of the earth and all that.

Apparently the only species that isn’t endangered is humanity.

Popular Mechanics pursues its modern Leftist political agenda.

But of course it matters. Because if we can’t decide when a species becomes a species, it means we don’t have a very useful definition of “species.” And if we don’t have a good definition of “species,” then we can’t address issues like preserving biodiversity or saving endangered creatures. Much of the legislation that protects certain plants and animals depends on defining which species are endangered in the first place. And some creatures are already in danger.

In August 2016, a group called the Pacific Legal Association petitioned to take the coastal California Gnatcatcher bird off the protected list under the Endangered Species Act. They said that the coastal variety wasn’t a distinct species, so it shouldn’t be specifically protected. They did the same thing for the Southwest Willow Flycatcher, another Pacific coast bird with rapidly disappearing habitat. The coastal California Gnatcatcher retained its protections because a panel of experts determined that the coastal variety was different enough that it qualified as its own group, but the Flycatchers are still up for debate. It all hinges on how we define a species.

By that reasoning, black people aren’t a different species so #BlackLivesMatter is nonsense.

Funny how the same people who think that ‘race’ is a ‘social construct’ spend most of their time worrying about (wait for it) race.

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When not pushing their left-wing agenda, Popular Science sometimes talks about science.

The largest diamonds ever mined on earth aren’t just set apart by their large size and luster, but by a unique origin story as well. They were born of metal, growing from patches of liquid iron and gas deep inside the Earth.

…

“Diamonds like [the Cullinan] have characteristics that aren’t quite the same as other kinds of diamonds. For years, geologists have wondered if maybe they formed in a slightly different way or if they came from a different part of the mantle. It’s been a lingering question that’s been really hard to tackle,” Smith says.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

In years past, hunters would begin their sporting careers in pursuit of small game. The tricks and tactics they learned were then put to use on bigger game such as deer and turkeys.

These days, however, the trend has been reversed. Most new hunters head straight for the deer stand or turkey blind and never learn the basic skills and strategies gained by long hours spent cruising the hardwoods in search of sharp-eyed bushytails.

The slackers.

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Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I mean, what isn’t these days? That idea is from the New Republic. Yes, the cops “seemed” to be African-American, as the author concedes, so the white-versus-minority paradigm is a little off. Yes, this has happened before to many people with no discernible racial or gender pattern. Yes, there is an obvious alternative explanation: The seats from which passengers were forcibly removed were randomly assigned. New York published a similar piece, which argued that the incident was just another example of Trump’s border-and-immigration-enforcement policies toward suspected illegal immigrants of color. That no federal cops were involved and there is no actual evidence at all of police harassment of Asian-Americans is irrelevant — it’s all racism, all the time, everywhere in everything.

It’s easy to mock this reductionism, I know, but it reflects something a little deeper. Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years. In the late 19th century, as most worked in hard labor, they were subject to lynchings and violence across the American West and laws that prohibited their employment. They were banned from immigrating to the U.S. in 1924. Japanese-American citizens were forced into internment camps during the Second World War, and subjected to hideous, racist propaganda after Pearl Harbor. Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

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Too many.

Sadly, a lot of companies need to require a college degree because that’s the only way they can be confident that the applicant has what used to be a standard high school education.

Also, requiring a college degree is one of the few ways around the Politically Correct discrimination laws.

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Fly over a major city and what do you see? Not well defined centers and sub-centers. More likely, an amazing complexity. We argue that what is actually down there, but hard to actually see, is a large number of superimposed and spatially realized supply chains.

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Rather than inch upward from $10 per hour to $10.25 per hour in January 2016, as the rest of the state was doing, San Diego jumped its minimum wage to $11.50 per hour. In the year and three months since then, the number of food service jobs in San Diego has dropped sharply, with perhaps as many as 4,000 jobs lost, or never created in the first place.

Isn’t that amazing? If you raise the price of something, people buy less of it. Somebody ought to teach a course on that or something.

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When it comes to countries, there really isn’t any dispute. No country has ever gotten rich through high taxes, big government and onerous regulation. And yet, these are the very prescriptions that often are promoted by international organizations and left-wing politicians.

Adam Gopnik is not afraid to ask the hard questions. (Well, actually, it’s not that hard.)

Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. Thomas Friedman is concerned.

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California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.

Over the past decade or two, interior California has lost virtually all influence, as Silicon Valley and Bay Area progressives have come to dominate both state politics and state policy. “We don’t have seats at the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”

…

Fresno, Bakersfield, Ontario and San Bernardino are rapidly becoming the Bantustans — the impoverished areas designed for Africans under the racist South African regime — in California’s geographic apartheid. Poverty rates in the Central Valley and Inland Empire reach over a third of the population, well above the share in the Bay Area. By some estimates, rural California counties suffer the highest unemployment rate in the country; six of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country with the highest percentage of jobless are located in the central and eastern parts of the state. The interior counties — from San Bernardino to Merced — also suffer the worst health conditions in the state.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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One of the disadvantages (among many) of the statist myth ‘intellectual property’.

Lileks.

For years, the key to weight loss has been obvious and simple: Eat less and move around more. Run 12 miles each day while licking a carrot and the pounds just melt away.

Kidding! Everyone on the internet knows that you can lose weight fast with This One Simple Trick, or This One Weird Trick. It’s either a diet so rich in fiber you might as well eat a plank of particleboard, or it’s a magic pill that makes the pounds fall off. Yes, a team of Actual Doctors (OK, podiatrists, but still doctors) have discovered a special substance called gullibilium. It increases your metabolism so high the food actually disappears on your fork before you eat it.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Welcome to the MBA Program.

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Those looks might strike you dead, but in the Victorian period, wallpaper could–and did–kill. In one sense, it wasn’t that unusual, writes Haniya Rae for The Atlantic. Arsenic was everywhere in the Victorian period, from food coloring to baby carriages. But the vivid floral wallpapers were at the center of a consumer controversy about what made something safe to have in your home.

The root of the problem was the color green, writes art historian and Victorianist Lucinda Hawksley for The Telegraph. After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, “Scheele’s Green” became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic.

But I’ll bet it was gluten-free.

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Imagine the reaction if a white coach had said that about black players.

UPDATE: Big Media Won’t Go Near ‘R’ Word on Ball’s Racist Remarks

Go here to check it out.

We need to encourage Steve to insult and make fun of unpopular people so he can get rich like all the other liberal comedians.

Steve Sailer (who may or may not be a liberal comedian) reports.

It would appear that the one thing white people and black people agree on is that the way to get a good education is to send your kid to a school with a lot of white kids in it. I’m glad that’s settled.

Of course, that raises a number of questions that we’re not allowed to raise because that would be Noticing.

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I don’t think I believe that.

Steve Sailer goes where nobody else dares.

Just as the 21st century has witnessed the paradox of the rhetoric of white privilege and the reality of white death, we’ve also seen increasing black privilege, but with the benefits flowing mostly to the whitest of blacks. The ongoing flight from white helps those blacks who are almost but not quite white, such as former national security adviser Susan Rice and her affirmative-action-eligible children.

White elites are happy to promote black privilege because they don’t see many American blacks as being anything other than token competition for their children at getting the really good jobs. For example, in 2016, more than a half century after the political triumph of civil rights and in a year in which the legal profession donated 28 times more money to Hillary than to Trump, only 1.81 percent of law-firm partners were black.

ZMan waxes philosophical.

Ethical theories like utilitarianism, say that an action is right or wrong, depending on the consequences it produces. A deed is judged as good if it has a good result. The intentions of the actor are of little or no consequence, because what matters is the final result. Similarly, the deed has no intrinsic morality because the morality is entirely dependent on the results. The most common expression for this is that the ends justify the means. Most of what we think of as the Left falls into this ethical category.

The obvious alternative to this is what Jeremy Bentham called deontological ethics or deontology. This loosely means the knowledge of what is right and proper. A Catholic, for example, acts in accordance with the teachings of the Church. A lawyer conducts himself in accordance with the demands of Lucifer. The act is good or evil intrinsically, regardless of downstream outcomes. What matters is the fidelity to principle or a moral code. The means justifies the ends is the most common formulation of this.

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Funny thing about that. The Berlin Wall was there for a reason; it worked.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

The DemLegHump Media will do their best to ignore it and cover it up, of course. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

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The Danish reputation got a boost among the American left in last year’s presidential election, when none other than Bernie Sanders himself plugged the country as a model for the United States to emulate. But admirers of the popular democratic socialist politician may be surprised to learn exactly how Denmark was able to become an international leader in ICT delivery. It wasn’t super-charged regulation, top-down “net neutrality” rules, or major government subsidies that did the trick.

So how did Denmark do it? Deregulation. By virtually eliminating their equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Danes now enjoy some of the best ICT service on the planet.

ZMan looks how history has changed.

One difference between the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution is the trail of breadcrumbs each left behind, as it worked its way through society. Today, Americans still drive over roads and bridges built during the peak of the industrial age. Even though our consumer goods are made by foreigners, they still use the same practices the West developed for industry. Even in blighted cities, you can still find old factory buildings that remind us of the past.

The technological age is a different animal. It tends to erase its own footsteps. Lotus Development Corp is a good example. It was not just that it lost the competition for desktop productivity software. Everything about it was consumed and recycled. Walk around Cambridge today and you cannot tell that Lotus even existed. The tech economy is a soylent green economy. Once the utility of its creations are exhausted, everything about it is consumed, erased from existence, as if people are ashamed of it.

…

Whether you call it the technological age or the global age, these are just polite terms for cosmopolitanism, scaled to the supranational. In the city, you don’t build, you hustle. You don’t own, you rent. Nothing is permanent because a stationary target is an easy target. Instead you make what you can and you move onto the next thing. If you can shift the burden onto someone else, all the better. That’s how the game is played because in the city, everyone is a stranger.

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Last week New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joined Robert Redford, Mike Huckabee, and Norman Ornstein in conflating the humanities with federal subsidies for the humanities. Kristof assumes that those of us who think we could muddle through without the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) must not understand the importance of books. He therefore sets out to educate us.

The major defect of people who want the government to do everything for us is the overwhelming delusion that if the government doesn’t do something it therefore won’t get done.

Lest you think that Kristof “sounds elitist” when he talks about the importance of Big Bird, he wants you to know that “I’ve seen people die for ideas,” including the Tiananmen Square protesters who in 1989 “sacrifice[d] their lives for democracy.” What that has to do with the merits of federal funding for the CPB is anyone’s guess. Kristof seems to be invoking dead dissidents in the name of keeping Sesame Street available on all of the local channels where it currently can be seen.

Another major defect of people who want the government to do everything for us is rampant infection with the Aggregation Fallacy. Those whose lives consist of roaming the land seeking for some discrimination to smash appear incapable of making elementary intellectual distinctions where such distinctions are important.

Walter Olson rips the mask off of some Fake News.

It made for great copy – irresistibly clickable and compulsively shareable. “Trump’s Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens,” blared Time Magazine’s headline. “Trump Proposed Budget Eliminates Funds for Meals on Wheels,” claimed The Hill, in a piece that got 26,000 shares.

But it was false. And it wouldn’t have taken long for reporters to find and provide some needed context to the relationship between federal block grant programs, specifically Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), and the popular Meals on Wheels program.