The New Poll Tax?

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) has an intriguing idea: move tax day from April 15 to November 1, so that the memory of filing tax returns is still fresh in voters’ minds when they go to the polls. Sounds good at first, but I’m skeptical. If we actually had to *pay* our taxes on tax day, the plan might work. The problem is that we actually pay our taxes throughout the year through mandatory withholding. For about 70% of tax filers, tax season is when they get a *refund* on their taxes because the government kept too much during the year. Now, they still might be annoyed at tax time if they actually think about the net amount they actually paid over the whole year – or if they think about the interest they could have earned if withholding had not been excessive – but I suspect that most Americans don’t think about it that way. They’re just happy to have the sudden windfall, and timing that windfall to coincide with election day is not the way to mobilize anti-tax sentiments.

If you want to set up tax collection in a way that translates into angry voters, you need to eliminate withholding so that people have to pay their taxes all at once, and *then* make that day November 1. Even then, I suspect it wouldn’t make much difference, because a minority of tax payers pay the vast majority of income taxes.

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The Rational Romantic

When I started this blog, I decided to keep it sharply focused on economics, politics, law, language, philosophy… well, pretty much anything, really. But I ruled out anything highly personal. This is a public journal, not a private diary. Here is my pledge to you, dear reader: no specific accounts of my loves and loves lost, sexual exploits, family disputes, etc. If you want to hear that stuff, you’ll have to go drinking with me.

But my embargo on gory details needn’t prevent me from *theorizing* about the economics and philosophy of everyday life. We academic types are quite happy to discuss our personal lives in the abstract, you see. And today, this L.A. Times article got me thinking about the economic theory of romance. Mark Miller, the article’s author, must be an economist at heart, because he thinks about this just the way I do:

So when it comes to the qualities we want in a soul mate, how many of them are enough? If she has 75% of my desired attributes, should that be sufficient? Or would I feel that I'm settling and wonder if someone with 89% would have been just around the corner and much more satisfying? And if she was, would I truly be happy with her, when someone with 97% might have come along a month or two down the line? … Clearly, no one person is going to have all the traits I'd ideally like my soul mate to possess. So, what am I willing to do without?

Dedicated readers – meaning the ones who actually read my longest and most esoteric posts – may recall that I said something similar in my discussion of the rationality of satisficing behavior:

For instance, a satisficing dater might stick with a girlfriend who is not ideal but who meets certain minimum requirements for looks, personality, and so on. However, satisficing turns out to be an instance of maximizing behavior in the context of a dynamic search. When it is costly to search for something – say, a new mate, or a lower price on a product, or a job with a higher wage – you have to weigh the cost of searching further against the expected gains from finding something better than the status quo (as well as the distinct possibility of ending up with something worse than the status quo). It’s a standard result from search theory that a rational person facing these conditions will adopt a reservation level of satisfaction (quality of mate, price of product, wage of job) and stick with any outcome at least that good. In other words, he will engage in satisficing behavior.

So Miller and I seem to be pretty much on the same page. In the last couple of paragraphs, he conjures a starry-eyed moral to the story: “And one of the things I've learned is that when you're in a truly loving relationship, your partner's flaws are minimized and positive qualities maximized. Which is a really nice thing to happen, because it sends you deeper into love with them.” True, but don’t forget: that should only happen when you’ve found someone who exceeds your reservation level of romantic satisfaction.

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Let’s Go Down to the Sunset Grill

So it seems that the GOP wants to make the government’s anti-terrorism powers, granted by the Patriot Act, permanent. That, of course, is exactly why it was wise to include sunset provisions in the original law in the first place: if it weren’t for those provisions, the government wouldn’t even have to ask nicely to keep its exciting new powers, and this debate wouldn’t even be happening. The whole point of a sunset provision is to put the brakes on Robert Higgs’s “ratchet effect”: the size and power of government expand in times of crisis, but they never shrink back to their previous levels when the crisis is over.

I suppose some might argue that the terrorism crisis is not yet over, and perhaps they are right. But the powers granted by the Patriot Act don’t expire until the end of 2005 anyway. If there is still a terrorism crisis when 2005 rolls around, then Congress should simply vote to keep the relevant provisions in place for another two or three years, at which point the debate will – and should – happen again. There is no justification for making the powers granted by the Patriot Act permanent unless the government intends to be in a perpetual state of war. Of course, that’s exactly what’s needed in order to give job security to the bureaucrats at the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Hmm… I wonder which executive agency is lobbying most vigorously for the repeal of the sunset provisions?

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Still Bored

Try as I might, I still can’t muster any excitement over all the war coverage. Don’t get me wrong -- I do care about the outcome. I just don’t get a charge out of the play-by-play news coverage. I blame the war for my utter lack of blogistic inspiration over the last couple of weeks. I promise the posting frequency will pick up again as soon as my muse emerges from her bunker.

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