Unsurprisingly they found that large revenue increases seldom increased revenue, indicating that most governments and most taxes are near their Laffer maximum, and that spending increases were not very stimulatory. Indeed often spending cuts stimulated the economy, which suggests that at the margin government spending is of negative absolute value, not just negative net value – that people would be better off if the money was spent blowing stuff up in distant lands.

This shows that supply side effects of large changes in fiscal policy substantially outweigh demand side effects.

This explains and predicts the failure of “austerity” in Britain and France, since the “austerity” consisted of increasing expenditure relative to GDP, but increasing taxes – measures to increase the power of the parasitic ruling class, and diminish the power of the productive class. For austerity to work, has to be austere for the rulers. Similarly, it predicts the failure of “stimulus” in the US, since the stimulus consists of the government doing even more damage than before.

Alesina tells us that spending does not stimulate, and cutting spending does not depress. He provides a couple of politically correct explanations involving expectations for this observation, but fails to mention what seems to be to be the glaringly obvious explanation: That government transfer spending discourages people, especially women and protected minorities, from working, and that government direct spending consists, at the margin, not of roads, public safety, and garbage collection, but of evil people doing hurtful things.

Leftists intend, among other things, the deaths of several billion of supposedly excess population, in order to protect Gaia from the hand of man. For example the food to fuel mandates have created artificial famine in many parts of world.

Leftists intend, among other things, the destruction of technological civilization by cutting off its energy supply.

Leftists intend, among other things, to make most people slave laborers of the state dominated by leftists, thus maximizing the status and benefits of members of the state apparatus. This is considerably worse than private chattel slavery, since resources owned by a private owner are conserved, whereas resources owned by the state are wasted and destroyed.

Leftists intend and expect that they will use state superpowers for good, in pretty much the way that one expects one will follow a diet and exercise regime, but apart from the fact that it is difficult to use state power for good, it is also distasteful, like a very strict diet. Leftist want power itself, not the benefits that power brings, and one cannot really experience power except by making others suffer, so in practice, leftists delight in the use of power to make others suffer, and when their fellow leftists behaved in this manner, older leftists were unsurprised and undismayed – because any leftists that were surprised and dismayed changed sides.

Likely some leftists believe that with themselves as masters, all the slaves would be happy, but are not much interested in historical reality tests that suggest the contrary.

When the original anglosphere leftists, the puritans, punished people for holding hands, they could plausibly believe that they were doing good, protecting people from fornication, but when they burst into people’s houses to find them celebrating Christmas, and destroyed the Christmas feast, they were enjoying the exercise of power to make people suffer, for the New Testament clearly endorses spraying a thin spray of Christian whitewash over old pagan festivals. If someone performs a 100% pagan festival, but he performs it to the Lord, and giveth God thanks, this makes it, the New Testament tells us, a 100% Christian festival. The Puritans believed that being holier than thou, they were righteously entitled to make thou suffer, and their anti Christmas measures suggest that their anti fornication and anti cruelty to animals measures ultimately rested on delight in making people suffer.

Anti fornication, and anti cruelty to animals had scriptural justification. Anti Christmas did not.

And through all the transformations their movement has undergone, ultimately transforming into modern anti Christian anglosphere leftism, this thread has remained constant, that they will snatch any justification that they are holier than thou, and thus entitled to have power over thou, and thus entitled to take righteous delight in making thou suffer.

They are not holier than me. They are evil power hungry hateful hypocrites, for those few of them that are young and naive leave the movement whenever it shows its true face, which it frequently does.

Miraculously, your idea turns out to be hot stuff, and the corporation makes a hundred million dollars – which sounds like a lot, but in order to get there, you had to cut the angel investors in for a share, the next round investors in for a share, various highly talented people who joined the company in for a share … But before they get their share, the government wants its share.

Unfortunately the U.S. corporate tax rate is 39.2%. Now you have $60 800 000 in net income. If you are in the state of California, they want 8.84 percent corporate tax. So now you have 51 960 000. OK, this gets split between the various investors, the founding employees, and you, all whom are probably paying at the maximum marginal tax rate. So after it is paid out, the feds want 35%, and California wants 10%, so now that is down to 28 000 000 or so. And then you spend it, and there is sales tax, so now that is down to 26 000 000 or so.

Thus, three dollars for the taxman, one dollar for you.

Of course, should your plan fail, and everyone lose their money, that is your problem, not the government’s.

It is often said that the Bush tax cuts disproved the Laffer curve, since they arguably reduced, rather than increased federal receipts, but that is because they were mostly tax cuts on the poor. They substantially reduced the number of people paying any income tax at all. To the extent that they cut taxes on the rich, they greatly increased receipts from the rich, almost enough to offset the reduced receipts from the poor.

Taxes on the rich in the US are far, far east of the Laffer Maximum.

There is plenty of room for the US government to raise more money by taxing the poor – taxing beer, cigarettes, and petrol. A Pigovian tax on single moms and broken homes would also, like the Pigovian tax on booze, improve behavior, while raising money without harming the economy too much – except of course that any money spent by the government, is, at the margin, spent on damaging and hurtful things, so that while a Pigovian tax on broken homes and fatherless children would improve private behavior, it would worsen government behavior. Giving money to the government is like giving money to a drunken mugger.

But if they want to raise revenue to get money to hand out to crony capitalists, taxing the rich is a dry well. They have to tax the poor. Taxing beer and cigs has reached their Laffer curve limits also.. The last untapped Pigovian sin tax is fatherless children and broken homes. If our rulers don’t want to piss off the feminists by extending sin taxes to new sins, they have to do what Europe does: Tax fuel, food, clothes, and such.

In Europe, all the wells are dry. Europeans are far, far east of the Laffer curve maximum even for taxes on the poor, except that for reasons of feminism, they have not touched the last Pigovian sin tax.

Every time England, Spain, or Greece raise taxes, tax receipts immediately fall, and fall a lot. This rationalized away as Keynesian recession. Supposedly taxes are reducing demand. But for taxes to reduce demand, they would have to raise money, at least at first. Since the tax rises immediately lose money, they are not reducing demand, but reducing supply.

Nonetheless, if we look at the European “austerity” budgets, they are all tax rises today, spending “cuts” tomorrow, the “cuts” being that at some time in the future, expenditures will rise by less than planned, and people who expected to have government jobs and handouts someday in the future will, someday, not have them.

Predictably, the “austerity” tax rises raise tax rates today reducing revenue today, while the “austerity” spending cuts may reduce spending some time, some time, some day, so the European austerity budgets “unexpectedly” fail to reduce the deficits. Seems that most economic headlines these days have the word “unexpected” in them.

If you are going to cut the US deficit, the place to start is massive tax cuts on the rich, and end to handouts to crony capitalists and the poor. All government involvement in the finance sector, green energy, and the rest, is crony capitalist handouts. Social security supplemental is ninety nine percent handouts to the undeserving poor, for example people who say their sexual deviations and alcohol habit prevents them from working, or that they are victims of discrimination on the basis of mental handicap, race, criminal past, and gender, for example people suffering from a mental syndrome that forces them to scream obscenities at bosses, fellow employees, and customers, not to mention all those people with bad backs – but I digress. Back to the Laffer curve.

How far east of the Laffer Maximum is Greece? The proportion of Singaporean residents aged 25 to 64 in employment is 77.1% In Greece, about half that.

With that rate of labor participation, obviously the way for the Greek government to raise more money is to cut handouts and taxes, which is the opposite of what the Greek government is doing.

I notice that whenever these “unexpected” falls in revenue are discussed, people piously proclaim them as evidence for the truth of Keynesianism, which suggests that in Academia blaming revenue falls on the Laffer curve is as dangerous as blaming black dysfunction on a genetic propensity to stupidity and violence. When curiously few people are working, it is obviously the Laffer curve. (At least if we include regulatory burdens such as that employees are fireproof once hired as part of the Laffer curve burden.) But try getting an academic, or anyone whose job is government dependent, to say that.

Now with taxes like that, one might wonder how America functions at all. The answer is quite simple. If your business starts making any money, then you apply the same energy, effort, and ingenuity you spent creating the business to moving all income generating activities outside of the US. If it was not for tax dodging and the export of wealth generating activities, the US would be a third world hell hole.

The apple does not fall far from the tree. Lutherans hated Jews, Puritans hated Christmas and men having sex with women.

Mencius argued that Nazism was genuinely right wing because it was not progressivism. This fits the definition of the “right”, that whosoever disagrees with progressivism on any one point of ten thousand points of doctrine, is a rightist (and doubtless a racist also). If however, Nazism is, like progressivism, a child of the seventeenth century holy wars, this accurately describes its extensive commonalities with leftism.

Thus Nazis are rightists, in that they are not descended from puritanism, but leftists, in that they are descended from protestantism.

Thus World War II and denazification may be understood as an atheocratic continuation of the theocratic holy wars of the seventeenth century. Once the Roman Catholics were defeated and the Holy Roman Empire vanished, the protestants turned on each other, since each sect of protestantism disagreed with a different aspect of Roman Catholicism, having little in common except that they deviated from Roman Catholicism on a few issues of a thousand issues.

Theocracy is inherently warlike. The warlike character of theocracy/atheocracy is obfuscated at present by the strategy of progressivism/puritanism to ally with the far enemy, such as communists and Muslims, against the near enemy, ordinary white taxpaying Americans.

Hence the doctrine of democratic peace: Democracies never go to war with each other – provided we define all democracies where progressives lacked the upper hand as undemocratic. If, however, we ignorantly look at things like voting and elections, it looks very much as if democracies frequently do go to war with each other.

From time to time, people dig up tests that were given to high school kids in the eighteen seventies, and point out that today’s Harvard postgraduates would be unable to pass them.

To which those defending our current elite reply that the curriculum is different. Supposedly it is not that our current elite does not know $#!% from beans, it is that they know different $#!%, and beans were not covered in their curriculum, beans being a menial old fashioned obsolete topic unworthy of their immense brains. While today’s Harvard PhDs would flunk high school in the 1870s, 1870 schoolkids would, we are told, flunk Harvard. Well of course they would flunk Harvard. Back in the bad old days they did not know that whites are bad and blacks are good and that men are bad and women are good.  Learn to chant “Four legs good, two legs bad”, and you too can be a Harvard PhD in sociology or in interdisciplinary studies.

Perhaps I know the difference between a positive feedback loop and a negative feedback loop because of my background in computers, but why do I know the difference between the Falkland islands and the Maldives, while Obama’s gigantic entourage of speechwriters and fact checkers does not?

What people know is not necessarily a good indicator of intelligence. There is a lot of stuff to know, and plausibly people know different things – but smart people know the stuff in their own field, like the difference between the Maldives and the Malvinas. And if you are going to use the concept of feedback loop to analyze the financial system, you should know the difference between a negative feedback loop and a positive feedback loop.  And if you don’t trust your audience to know, use the phrase “vicious cycle”, or “run”, which are usually more precise, accurate, and appropriate to any situation where one might be tempted to use “negative feedback loop” inappropriately.

You will notice I have not bothered to explain the difference between a positive feedback loop and a negative feedback loop, nor explain which are the Malvinas and which are the Maldives – because I figure that most people who read my blog are considerably smarter and more knowledgeable than Obama’s staff or the IMF staff and would not appreciate being patronized.

Below the fold, you will find an outlandishly disgusting video, which reveals that leftists frequently lack the gag reflex, are disinclined to turn away in horror and revulsion from that which is horrible and revolting.  A bunch of leftists, smiling, giggling, and joking, simulate cannibalism on a living person, and don’t realize how it is going to look when normals view the video.

Roissy, now calling himself Heartiste, has an interesting explanation.:

A lot of the leftist program, for example feminism and gay liberation, is just inherently revolting and disgusting, due to our adaption to the ancestral environment, so to get along in progressive circles, you had better not have a gag reflex – but the same gag reflex that makes us turn away from women pretending to be men, and men pretending to be women, also makes us turn away from evil.

Consider, for example, Germaine Greer. When young and pretty, she had lots and lots of sex with lots and lots of high status males, mainly musicians of mildly successful bands. However, though she had lots of sex, she never had a sexual relationship. She probably believed she had sexual relationships with lots and lots of high status men, but they did not believe they had a sexual relationship with her. She wanted to have children, and always expected that some suitably high status man would choose to have children with her, but who wants to hang out with a raging slut? Any guy that she considered good enough to have sex with was good enough that he had better options. It appears that she was uniformly treated as a filthy hole in which to relieve oneself, for we hear about her sexual acts from her and her feminist friends, not from the numerous men that banged her. I conjecture that men did not want to announce they were dropping their loads in Germain Greer, any more than they wanted to admit to wanking off in a filthy public toilet. Eventually, approaching menopause, she woke up to the horrifying reality that she was no longer sexually attractive except as a hole to drop a quick load in, and spent a fortune on IVF, attempting to have fatherless children – unsuccessfully.

If you notice this sort of thing, that Germaine Greer was disgusting, it will blight your career as much as saying “nigger” (or saying “niggardly” – leftists do not know etymology). And so, as an unintended side effect, the left is, as in the video above, disturbingly comfortable with evil and horror. A old fashioned Christian would say that women’s liberation leads to demonic possession. I prefer the naturalistic explanation based on adaption to the ancestral environment, but Germaine Greer does look demonically possessed.

Germaine Greer not long after unsuccessfully attempting to spawn fatherless children

Rule by consensus has a similar effect. If you notice that the evil and the insane are having disproportionate influence over the consensus, you will not get far. If you want a career in progressive circles, you had best be incapable of noticing evil and madness.

Use of the word racism

Racism, sexism, and so forth, is the act of using the same kind of reasoning to make inferences about people, as one would use to make inferences about anything else.

Thus in all of history there was never such a word, until the twentieth century, for in the twentieth century, various thoughts about this world have been prohibited, in much the same manner, and for much the same reasons, as various thoughts about the next were prohibited in earlier centuries.

Now some people will say that racism is irrationally making inferences from someone’s appearance and origins, but in practice, no application of Bayes theorem to particular individual cases that includes this kind of information will ever be accepted as rational, thus no application of this information in any real life situation will ever be accepted as rational – though of course those crying “racist” will make an unprincipled exception for themselves.  Knowing that visiting certain parts of the city will surely get them assaulted, they don’t go there, and they spend stupendous amounts of money to ensure that their kids do not go to school with blacks.

Similarly, if you twit a leftist with “trick to … hide the decline”, they will patronizingly explain to you that “decline” does not mean what it sounds like it means, but resist explaining “trick” or “hide” no matter how vigorously you twit them on it, implicitly admitting that they know full well that “trick” and “hide” mean exactly what they sound like they mean – which in turn implies that they don’t care whether global warming is true or false, only that it is a way of getting the power to create a totalitarian world terror state and get rid of a few billions of excess population.

Over time, leftism has been getting more and more evil.

Leftists like to trace leftism to the left side of the french Estates General. Like every version of history that leftists like, this does not seem to be true. French leftism repeatedly dead ended disastrously, swiftly winding up in Bonapartism, and had to be repeatedly re-created by the English left, in much the same way the anti colonialist movement was manufactured by the imperial powers and forcibly imposed on the third world, much as Soros and the CIA are trying to restart leftism in the countries of the former Soviet empire after it dead ended in Stalinism.

The English left, not the Jews nor the French, is the source and origin of the world’s left. What we now call progressive or reform Jews merely got in on a good thing during the twentieth century, but the greatest glories of the left predate the twentieth century, and thus predate significant Jewish participation in the left.

Before and shortly after World War II, English leftism was progressive protestantism, was nominally Christian, although for a century or so Jesus Christ had been demoted from the incarnation of God to chief community organizer, so that progressive protestantism was well on the way to becoming Universalist Unitarianism, and Universalist Unitarianism was already scarcely distinguishable from militant atheism.

Reform Judaism was a conversion to leftism, and thus a conversion from Judaism to progressive protestantism, with the result that reform Jews, like progressive protestants, are not reproducing, while Orthodox Jews continue reproduce industriously as they always have.

The greatest glories of the left, and their most plausibly righteous accomplishments, were the emancipation of women, the emancipation of blacks, and the abolition of slavery. Every leftist project since then has been ever more dubious. Leftism requires ever more reforms, and thus, with the passage of time, pursues reforms that are ever less credible. I have already argued that the emancipation of women was an intolerable mistake, and a disaster that must and will be reversed, possibly through the collapse of our civilization, certainly through the collapse of our government. Haiti and South Africa suggest that black emancipation also was a disaster, that blacks are better off ruled by whites than ruling themselves. What about slavery?

Of all the left wing projects, abolishing slavery was the most plausibly good, and the least plausibly evil. Debt based slavery is reasonably defensible, since the incompetent and improvident wind up with someone else making decisions for them, as they should. In practice, however, slavery tends to be war based, with members of incompetent and improvident groups being enslaved, regardless of individual competence and providence.

If some people are naturally slaves, and others naturally masters, which I rather think is the case, it seems unlikely that recently existent slavery was very precise in putting people in the right categories. So I would say that abolishing slavery was not too bad, but everything else was bad, and has been getting steadily worse.

If conservatives are losing faith in official science, maybe that is an indicator that conservatives are in contact with reality.

Conservatives distrust official science, because official scientist do not practice actual science, instead  manufacturing official truth.

If you start arguing the scientific method, rather than “the scientific community”, to a leftist, for example that warmists should make available the data that supposedly shows we are doomed if we don’t obey them, they will react like a vampire exposed to sunlight.  Leftists have not merely lost faith in the scientific method, they would like to burn anyone who advocates it at the stake.  If you start arguing with a leftist that evolution is natural selection, and natural selection did not stop above the neck, they will call you a racist.

Now whenever I have argued with a leftist that official science is not applying the scientific method to X, they argue that applying the scientific method to X is impractical or immoral, therefore we should believe that whatever official government scientists do is science.

So, here is a test example, where applying the scientific method is easy, almost trivial:  The Urban Hotspot effect.

The obvious way to measure the Urban Hotspot effect is to drive a thermometer from the countryside through the center of town then out into the countryside on the other side of town. Repeat at various times of day and various towns.

Now obviously no officially endorsed government funded scientist has ever done such a thing, presumably because if he did, his career would come to an abrupt end, for anyone who has ever gone looking for a picnic spot while driving through a rural highway on a hot day has noticed that the Urban Hotspot effect, if measured in such a fashion, would be quite high, and reporting a high Urban Hotspot Effect would have the same effect as saying “niggardly” in a room full of affirmative action English graduates.

So instead, he measures the urban hotspot effect in some highly indirect fashion involving obscure alleged Chinese historical records, that,  strange to report, no one else is able to find.

What would happen if a scientist was to actually measure the Urban Hotspot Effect?

Well the article I linked to above gives us a hint:

scientific authority is too easily had or invented — from temporary statuses with slow-moving associations that take time to detect and reject rogue members, to fake statuses with make-believe organizations of their own invention. Maddow recounts a situation in which a person masquerading as an authority was later kicked out of one association, relocated to another, was kicked out of that — but in the meantime, he was able to get cited literature into the scientific record and into books that had large cultural consequences, including justifying at least one despot to terrorize a class of citizens based on this false science.

Notice that in the example given, there was no argument that the scientists results were incorrect, merely that they could legitimize the incorrect political position, So, doing actual science, will swiftly get you ejected from all professional associations, since politics is now so all embracing that any scientific result could have political consequences.

If you cannot do actual science on the Urban Hotpot Effect, you cannot do actual science on anything political, and these days, just about everything is political, so, to a good approximation,  if anyone is an official scientist, chances are he is not doing science, and unlikely to be interested in doing science.

This may well explain our technological stagnation.  Science relevant to engines became political, so engines stopped advancing.  Similarly with one field after another, photo lithography being one of the last to fall.

What is the scientific method?

Well it cannot be entirely expressed in words, except cryptically and briefly.  It can, however, be expressed by examples, as I have just done.  Another good example illustrating the scientific method is the Sokal Hoax and Wood’s exposure of the N Ray delusion.  WHO research into the effects of pesticides, and all research into the effects of low dose radiation, are conducted in much the same way that research into N Rays was conducted, but back then it was safe to doubt N Rays, whereas today it is seriously dangerous for one’s career to doubt WHO.

Two famous and historically important summaries of the scientific method are:

1. the Royal Society’s “nullius in verba”, which means that when expert authority claims to know X, you are supposed to ask how they know X, and if they don’t have a good answer, you are not supposed to believe them.
2. Richard Feynman “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”

Around the time that the Royal Society started weaseling on “nullius in verba” and the journals stopped insisting that those supplying politically correct science conclusions needed to provide their data and their methods of analyzing their data that supposedly led to their conclusions, official science and the scientific method parted company.

The rot set in earlier than that. The scientific method was in a bad way once they introduced peer review after World War II. If one reviewer of n can block unwanted truths, unwanted truths are never going to get through. For science to work, you need a system where you only have to impress one editor of n editors, not a system where you have to refrain from offending any one reviewer of n reviewers.  Peer review is entirely deadly in its effects on science.  Everything becomes political.