Some highlights from reading blog posts, articles, and tweets this week.
- Interesting Vincent Geloso thread on tax cheating according to income groups. Bottom line: As a percent of income lower-income people cheat more. I’ve always suspected this. If someone makes $30k a year and makes another $10k off the books, that’s easier to do than someone making $200k a year and making another $67k off the books. In the latter case, we get 1099s.
He gives some indirect evidence but his reasoning is similar to mine.
- Happy Yeltsin Supermarket Day. A powerful story by Scott Lincicome about how Yeltsin dropped his view that Communism creates plenty. I remember hearing in a speech by the late Barry Asmus about 30 years ago that Harry Truman had said that if every Soviet citizen got a Sears catalogue in his mail on Friday, by Monday Communism would be dead. To use that line myself, of course, I wanted to see if it was accurate. I couldn’t track it down and so I called the Truman library. The person I talked to had no evidence that Truman had said that. But he should have.
- The problems with relying on regulated electric utilities to build the huge amount of infrastructure required to bring about a less-carbon-intensive electrical future. This is by the Conversable Economist. He consistently delivers quality.
- As I’ve seen saying for years in talks, the middle class has been disappearing: upward. By Daniel Griswold.
- An economist who became an important bureaucrat in the Philippines vents, with one graph, shown above, about the destruction caused by price controls.