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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (68566)	8/21/2006 1:40:59 AM
From: CalculatedRisk	Respond to of 110194

Paul Krugman: Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys select.nytimes.com Excerpts here: economistsview.typepad.com Yesterday The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service would outsource collection of unpaid back taxes to private debt collectors, who would receive a share of the proceeds. It’s an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920’s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century. And privatized tax collection is only part of the great march backward. In the bad old days, ...[t]here was no bureaucracy to collect taxes, so the king subcontracted the job to private “tax farmers,” who often engaged in extortion. There was no regular army, so the king hired mercenaries, who tended to wander off and pillage the nearest village. There was no regular system of administration, so the king assigned the task to favored courtiers, who tended to be corrupt, incompetent or both. Modern governments solved these problems by creating a professional revenue department to collect taxes, a professional officer corps to enforce military discipline, and a professional civil service. But President Bush apparently doesn’t like these innovations, preferring to govern as if he were King Louis XII. So the tax farmers are coming back, and the mercenaries already have. There are about 20,000 armed “security contractors” in Iraq, and they have been assigned critical tasks, from guarding top officials to training the Iraqi Army. Like the mercenaries of old, today’s corporate mercenaries have discipline problems. “They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath,” declared a U.S. officer... And armed men operating outside the military chain of command have caused at least one catastrophe. ... <MORE>

To: mishedlo who wrote (68566)	8/21/2006 2:03:33 AM
From: CalculatedRisk	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 110194

I think you will find this interesting: Investment and Recessions calculatedrisk.blogspot.com

To: mishedlo who wrote (68566)	8/21/2006 8:42:47 AM
From: Tommaso	Respond to of 110194

>>>If one believes inflation is a monetary thing, there is nothing else to look at except money and credit growth and the velocity of money.<<< That is correct. I think that the availability of goods and services on which the money is to be spent is also important. The more productive of goods and services an economy is, the more of them can be purchased with the same amount of money. The inflationary effect of oil prices results from the constraints on productivity caused by the shortage of oil, not the price of oil. Economic activity is constrained and there is less of everything for everyone. You won't be able to identify what I am saying with any economist or school of economics. It's the result of my own experience. I don't believe in the use of higher mathematics in the analysis of economic problems; economics is not physics. I don't believe in trying to solve political problems by writing poems about them either.