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That indispensible newspaper, the Economist, includes an amazing and disturbing article this week on judicial decision-making. The article profiles exhaustive research on parole decisions made by Israeli judges. The good news is that neither the sex nor ethnicity of offenders influenced parole decisions. The less good news is that the rate of denying parole was [...]
Archive for April, 2011
April 15th, 2011
Category: Crime Control, Drug Policy
Hold their dealing revenues hostage to reduced violence, by first taking down the most violent organization and then telling the others that you’re choosing a second target on the same principle. Repeat as needed.
April 15th, 2011
Category: Watching Conservatives
House Republicans want to balance the budget … but not yet.
April 15th, 2011
By now it is a theological dogma among Republicans that cutting marginal tax rates for the wealthy will incrase revenue. But if that’s the case, why does the Republican budget make any budget cuts at all? Why not just keep cutting marginal rates and using the extra revenue to pay for Medicare and Medicaid? If [...]
April 15th, 2011
Kentucky Democratic Congressmember John Yarmuth is ridiculing the GOP’s budget, which will end Medicare in order to provide tax cuts to the wealthiest: After the budget vote, Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) labeled it the “Harry Potter Budget Plan.” “Don’t worry about actual economic measurements,” he said. “Just wave a magic wand and it all adds [...]
April 15th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
Congressmen Vern Johnson, Ed Markie and more than fifty other House members have introduced legislation (H.R. 1065, “The Pill Mill Crackdown Act of 2011) to reduce the number of “pills mills”, which dispense legal medications in a haphazard or blatantly criminal fashion. Florida Governor Scott, who very commendably has backed off from his prior opposition [...]
April 15th, 2011
Category: Higher education
One of the nation’s most important jobs in higher education will be ably filled by Dr. Alan Garber, who is leaving Stanford to become Provost of Harvard. Alan is a world-class physician, economist and health policy guru rolled into one and as much as it pains me to lose him as a colleague, there is [...]
April 15th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
I yield to no-one in my enthusiasm for a nice fat carbon charge (with a tariff), and I am far from a Pigovian tax grinch. But I’m afraid Harold is implicitly too enthusiastic about its climate potential in the vehicle fuel context. Gasoline consumption is quite inelastic to price changes (of course, if it’s revenue [...]
April 15th, 2011
Yeah that’s a gas tax. In 2010, America consumed 138,496,176,000 gallons of gas. If a $1/gallon failed utterly to reduce our gasoline use, it would at least raise something like $138.496176 billion every year.