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James Medlock Profile picture
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10 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Seems clear at this point that prop 15 will not find enough support in the remaining uncounted votes to pass. My guess is that without covid it would have narrowly passed, but people got nervous about the impact on small businesses during the crisis. What are y’all’s takeaways?
Prop 13 is such a third rail in California politics, it’s incredible we even got this close to overturning half of it. Ads targeting homeowners saying this would be a slippery slope to taking away their protections probably had a big impact too
Property taxes are the least popular form of tax, in part because they violate people incorrect but intuitive sense of fairness (having to pay on something you “own,” and detached from your current flows of income). Should keep pushing, but also be pragmatic on using other taxes
One map I want to see: how much did Biden out perform prop 15 in each county?

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More from @jdcmedlock

James Medlock Profile picture
28 Oct
I was watching this video from @GazeWithin () and I have to be pedantic about something - the claim that Medicare admin costs look artificially low because it piggybacks on other government agencies to collect revenue and determine eligibility is incorrect
In their Trustees reports, they mention they fully reimburse other agencies like SSA, HHS, and the IRS for their respective administrative roles, listed in table III.B1 (and other tables for the other parts of Medicare)
cms.gov/Research-Stati…
The other claim - that admin costs look low because per capita spending for old people is much high since they tend to be sicker - has some truth to it, but it doesn't account for the big gap. Per capita spending is about 2x for old people, and admin spending is 12.8% vs 1.8%
Read 5 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
9 Oct
Interesting paper on Norway's wealth tax, suggesting that it hasn't had a negative impact on jobs, and in fact suggests "a positive causal relationship between the level of a household's wealth tax and subsequent employment growth in the firm it controls."
iza.org/publications/d…
The mechanism here seems to be that investing in firm employment can be a way of reducing wealth tax liability
Norway's wealth tax is worth studying, because it's been one of the more successful implementations in Europe.
Read 4 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
16 Sep
When I talk about unions people often ask “aren’t you afraid workers will get too powerful?” and in the current context of the US it feels sort of like saying “aren’t you afraid you’ll trip and fall if you run away from this bear that’s trying to eat your face?”
It is possible to have poorly designed institutions that lead to perverse incentives, but the problem isn’t worker power itself
The nordics manage to have near universal public sector unionization without major issues because the government acts as an institutionalized voice for the public, rather than just rolling over to demands (as we’ve done in the US with police unions)
Read 4 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
5 Sep
This is an interesting paper on the implications of means-testing Norway's Universal Child Allowance
cesifo.org/sites/default/…
They push back on the idea that universal transfers are "wasted" on higher income recipients, by noting that progressive tax brackets share a similar structure (), and noting that the real costs are not nominal expenditures but distortions to incentives
They note that the effect of means-testing the benefit would be to shift marginal tax rates towards the middle of the income distribution (where it phases-out), while increasing the universal payment with taxes would maintain a progressive structure
Read 8 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
3 Sep
The extent to which we face equity-efficiency tradeoffs is really overstated. A lot of the time we're sacrificing efficiency to maintain inequality
Income inequality has a significant negative effect on the long-run level of GDP per capita in developed countries papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Making wage structures more egalitarian can boost productivity at the same time
(see also: cepii.fr/PDF_PUB/wp/201…)

Read 8 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
16 Aug
Unions mostly get talked about as a way of helping workers, but I think their ability to solve collective action problems and improve economic output when properly structured is vastly underrated
For example, in a fluid labor market there's a disincentive to train workers, because a company's investment in training may be poached by another firm. Unions can, in collaboration with employer groups, solve this problem by coordinating training
Sectoral bargaining can also address the prisoners dilemma of wage-price inflation. Under individual bargaining, every worker has incentive to maximize wage growth, even if this leaves everyone worse off due to resulting inflation peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/05/03/cou…
Read 4 tweets

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