Occupying Chicago

My only excuse for not posting since last month is that I’ve been diverted with other projects, including the new hgchicago site. The bad news is that it’s still not all there.  The good news is that it’s WordPress-based and that the new version of Firefox, 7.0.1, no longer freezes my OS.  Never did solve the Opera vs. WordPress problem, but now I’m back to Firefox for most things.

Chicago is no longer a media center, but still important enough to have Occupy action. I stopped by Jackson/LaSalle this afternoon, there were a few hundred people with signs and a good attitude.

Some occupiers

 

More occupiers
Occupiers

 

I saw no "media" of the type that has satellite trucks and excessively attractive newsreaders, but Distract Chicago was there.
Well-put

The scheduled teach-instarted nearly on time, with St. Xavier Professor Aisha

Teach-In

Karim speaking about Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  Unfortunately, the acoustic conditions and the speaker’s accent prevented me from a full understanding of her case.

It looks from the previews like WordPress might be doing some things to my images, but I’ll wait to see the actual post.

Some cool manipulations of tax data

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to pay personal income tax, so nobody could compile any data about our individual income (Land value tax is linked to the land, not the owner, so owner identification isn’t needed for tax purposes.) This world being less than ideal right now, it is nice that the Tax Foundation has mined IRS data for these cool tables linking interstate migration of taxpayers and the amount of income reported. We see that, net in 2008, more taxpayers moved to Illinois from  Michigan than from any other state, while the greatest number of net departures was to Texas.  Altho net emigrants to Florida were less than 1/3 those to Texas, their total “adjusted gross income” was greater, presumably affluent retirees.

The Census Bureau is another source of  interstate migration data.  Those reports are simple population numbers with no income data attached, altho I believe the original source data includes income. The Tax Foundation’s data of course can’t recognize people who do not file federal income tax returns.

Avoiding the drag of safety nets

Perry Willis’ recent post  distinguishes two alternative ways in which the state might transfer wealth to ordinary citizens:

  • Dragnets, in which everyone receives the wealth, regardless of need
  • Safety nets, in which only those who are in difficulty receive the wealth.

He characterizes Social Security and Medicare as dragnets, since virtually everyone is covered regardless of need.  Costing 15% of wage and salary for typical workers, these are very expensive programs which might be cheaper if the affluent were excluded from receiving benefits.  He also claims that  “Dragnet programs usually have one other feature — fraud.”

He does not cite any example of a government-funded safety net, tho it seems that Medicaid, which is offered only to those who can meet some need-related criteria, would be a good example. Like any “need-based” government program, it presupposes an apparatus for monitoring everyone’s income from all sources. And does it have fraud?  Take a look.

Perhaps the safety net isn’t much superior than the drag net.  Is there a better approach? Of course. The citizens dividend does not take anything from wages and salaries, does not require an income-monitoring apparatus (altho it might require some kind of citizenship certification), and gives each of us a fair share of what belongs to all of us.

 

 

Sun Yat-sen “deeply inspired” by George

Georgists claim Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese republic, as one of us.  But I could never find anything in English-language books to support this assertion. So it’s good to see this article from Focus Taiwan News Channel, about an exhibition on “Sun Yat-sen and the United States.”

[Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou] noted that Sun, when he drafted his political philosophy, was deeply inspired by Henry George, a renowned American political writer of the 19th Century, as well as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address of 1863.

 

Hong Kong’s “citizens dividend”

I have previously discussed Hong Kong’s land tenure system, under which the land is publicly owned, but improvement owners have security of tenure in exchange for paying significant land rent.  One result is that most working people don’t have to pay any sales or income taxes.  Another is that land is efficiently used.

But there are a couple of concerns:

  • Since Hong Kong doesn’t collect all the economic rent, speculation can still drive up the cost of housing as well as any activity which uses land (and they all do).
  • Wealthy mainland residents are moving to Hong Kong to take advantage of the increased liberties which HK residents get, further driving up costs for local people.

Now we read that every HK has declared a sort of citizens’ dividend, every permanent resident will get HK$6,000 (US$773, currently).  Bloomberg calls it a “handout,” but I think “share of economic rent” might be more appropriate.  Opponents of the move say it will be inflationary, and certainly it could lead to higher economic rent, with speculation driving land costs even higher. Of course, if people expected the government to collect all the economic rent, speculation would not occur. While the cost of living might still increase, giving an equal dividend to every resident would tend to flatten the income distribution, helping the poor much more than the wealthy.

 

Another way the poor and their land are separated

Andrew Kahrl‘s talk this afternoon at APA was “The Plight of Black Coastal Landowners in the Sunbelt South and Its Lessons for Post–Housing Bubble America.”

He used examples from New Hanover County (NC) and Virginia Beach (VA).  A hundred years ago, coastal land wasn’t really good for farming, and folks were aware of the danger of storms, so it tended to be cheap. Poor black farmers wanted to own their own land, and this was what they could get.  Continue reading Another way the poor and their land are separated

How to prevent economic Ebola?

Economic Ebola is “the virus that infects scientists and engineers and causes them to go to Wall Street rather than create something of societal value,” says Paul Kedrosky.  Graduates with quantitative skills are offered salaries up to five times what they could make in productive work, so of course many of them spend their time finding ways to scrape a few million from high-velocity financial markets, rather than designing products or processes that would actually increase society’s satisfaction.

“Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance,” says Vivek Wadhwa. [Well, they’re not really our engineers, they belong to themselves, but we’ll skip that for now.]  A fine idea, but how to do it?  One answer might be a financial transaction tax, a tiny levy on each financial trade which could remove the profit from “financial engineering.” It would have no real effect on “long-term” investors who hold a position for more than a day. Seems like a good idea, but of course there will need to be a definition of what is a “financial transaction” for tax purposes, and clever people will find a way to design a transaction which doesn’t meet the criteria.

Maybe a better approach is to eliminate or scale back some of the things that make financial engineering lucrative.  For instance, if a land value tax prevented private collection of land rent, the mortage/financial crisis we’re still in would have been much smaller, or perhaps not possible at all.  We might want to go back to the classical concept of usury, forbidding all transactions where interest is charged for the use of money.  (People can still get compensation for lending money, but it would be as some agreed share of the profits which the investment generates, keeping the lender conceptually closer to the borrower.)

Of course we could start with something simple, like having the government take over insolvent banks, prosecuting and imprisoning criminal executives, letting stockholders, bondholders, and others who have unwisely trusted the bank to absorb the financial loss.  That alone would make financial engineering a lot less appealing.

National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project

[November 2012 update: Earlier this year, the project got something like the resources it deserves, having been adopted by the Cato Institute.  The new link is http://www.policemisconduct.net/, with browsers apparently being forwarded from the old link. The text below is unedited since it was originally posted.]

A very impressive volunteer statistical effort, injustice everywhere simply summarizes and tallies reports of one kind of injustice in one country, specifically police misconduct in the United States.  Certainly a big enough category, it turns out.  For the first three quarters of 2010, a total of 3814 reports, involving 4966 police officers and sheriff’s deputies.   Sounds like a lot of misconduct, tho actually less than 1% of the country’s government-employed law enforcement people.

All information is from published reports, and a link to each (a dozen or more most days) is provided.  “National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project” seems to be the overall project name, but a bit ponderous for a URL.

This is one of those things that somebody ought to do, and fortunately somebody does.   It’s really something the government should be doing, or, if you don’t trust the government, perhaps a university.  Or, if you don’t trust entrenched university staff, it falls to independent scholars, and that’s what we’ve got.

It really deserves more resources, so that systematic data-gathering, analysis and followup could be done.  Those of us with a few extra dollars can help, especially if we do not itemize our tax deductions. Injustice Everywhere hasn’t yet managed to jump thru the hoops to charitable status certification. There’s a donation link near the top of their web site.

Collecting the Rent in Hong Kong

Georgists often like to point to Hong Kong as a successful example of funding a community’s needs from economic rent.  The result is a prosperous and (relatively) free city, a magnet for immigrants.  But our information is old, and numerous changes have happened since the transfer of power, from UK to PRC in 1997.

So I was pleased to spend a bit of time this afternoon with a Hong Kong native, who now lives and works in Chicago.  Not familiar at all with Henry George, not even interested in political philosophy as far as I could tell, but able to speak with me about current economic conditions.  If I have any errors below, I trust that someone will correct me. Continue reading Collecting the Rent in Hong Kong