United Liberty

Bought to you by the Tax Foundation.

Over at the Tax Foundation, Gerald Prante explains some of Frédéric Bastiat’s economic beliefs by using New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick’s decision to go for it on 4th and 2 against the Indianapolis Colts:

The type of response we see to Coach Belichick’s decision is too often what we also see in public policy debates: there is a bias for what is seen versus what is not seen. One can easily blame Belichick’s decision for the Patriots losing the game. But there was still a significant probability that the Patriots would have lost the game had he made the opposite decision and punted. And even though the probabilities of winning under either decision may have been the same (or Belichick may have even made the right decision from a probability perspective), Belichick would not have been blamed had he punted and the Patriots still lost. In summary, even though a given decision may be 50/50 from the perspective of maximizing the team’s chances to win, there is an asymmetry in terms of the payoffs from the coach’s perspective. In other words, as Steven Levitt pointed out, we have a principle-agent problem where the self-interests of the head coach are not aligned with the interest of the team (i.e. winning the game).

Congress is expected to run up a deficit of $1.5 trillion in FY 2010, which would pass the record deficit set in FY 2009.

The Tax Foundation have crunched the numbers and come up with what tax rates would need to be in order to balance the federal budget in FY 2010:

That is absolutely staggering. As Bruce McQuain notes over at QandO, “[T]his only ‘erases the deficit’ – it does not even make a small dent in the debt which stands somewhere in the 11 trillion dollar area.”

I am in no way advocating these tax rates, nor is the Tax Foundation. We have a spending problem. It’s time to get it under control.

New data released by the IRS shows that the tax burden on the top 1 percent of income earners now exceeds the tax burden of the bottom 95 percent.

Scott Hodge at the Tax Foundation says, “To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined.”