Author: theMarketSoul ©1999 - 2021

What’s the Laffer Curve?

It’s the simple, common-sense observation that there’s not a linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue.

Folks in the private sector understand this principle. No restaurant owner, for instance, would double meal prices and assume that revenues would climb by 100 percent.

Yet that’s basically the methodology used by the Joint Committee on Taxation when estimating the revenue impact of changes in tax rates.

Which helps to explain why Washington is so often wrong about revenue implications of personal tax rates and corporate tax rates.

The Laffer Curve also applies to tobacco taxation.

Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform points out in the Wall Street Journal that greedy politicians in New York have pushed cigarette taxes so high that the main beneficiaries are smugglers.

Rampant cigarette smuggling isn’t the problem in New York. It’s a symptom of the problem: sky high tobacco…

It is true.  This is not a playground, kinder-garden experience…

As we don’t live a purely Command and Control or 100% Free Market environment we have to constantly adjust our actions and interactions with the market around us based on factors such as:

Geography

Jurisdiction and cultural norms

Experiences

Sophistication levels

Access points

Openness

There are many other factors to add to the list above, but we are referring to the behavioural aspects inherent in any market interaction.

One of the greatest challenges facing the political class in the UK at the moment is the Truth or Dare conundrum.

We are specifically referring to the urgent need to cut public sector spending, yet the painful reality that it is:

a)      Very difficult and not politically expedient to admit the ‘Truth as seen by any politician’ (see the ‘Forces of Hell’reference uttered by Alistair Darling on trying to speak…

The focus on sustainability and sustainable practices is a self defeating objective.  Sustainability means that business leaders take their eye off the equity holder’s value creation ideal, as it flies in the face of self-interest as promoted by Adam Smith some 234 years ago (The Wealth of Nations , 1776).

Self-interest and the pursuit therefore is being clouded by a multitude of other non value adding factors that is diluting the message and contributing to more uncertainty and risk and therefore capital flight and volatility in the financial and capital markets as we have experienced over the last 2 years.

This process and Zeitgeist will not disappear or be properly understood, unless we develop a deeper understanding and familiarity with uncertainty as a driver of the innovative spirit of human endeavour.

Risk management per se is not the answer and panacea it is held out to be, and if…

The market is capricious.  We are paraphrasing a line from one of Bernard Cornwell’s series of historic novels on 9^th century England, where he referred to the ‘old gods’ (pagan gods) of the Danes and Vikings as capricious.

So if the impulsive nature of markets is to be appreciated for what they are, then why are we trying so hard to manage risk completely out of existence?

We will focus on two specific factors today in what we refer to as the ‘dumbing down of risk’.

A strict or narrow definition (old financial language) of risk is possibly that it is a quantifiable number with a probability ranking and we can therefore attach a statistical inference to the occurrence of the risk event.

Yet in The Health & Safety Executives language a risk and “Risk management involves you, the employer, looking at the risks that arise in the…

The problem of getting too distracted by constantly fire-fighting in business settings

We might have heard it referred to as phrases such as “blinkered vision, short-term thinking”, possibly even “tunnel vision” or something similar; however the challenges of Immediacy is (1) the hidden cost and (2) damage it does to our organisations and culture within those organisations.

This is a behavioural consequence of a much more deep rooted problem.  It could possibly be insecurity or ‘over’ control, mistrust or some other behavioural issue.

However, we would like to make a bold statement that the problem is one of an over commented emotional connection to what we do. Too much passion and care in other words. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it must be tempered and balanced by its opposite twin, namely logic and deliberation.

Too often we let the Emotional Intelligence (EI) side of our…

Illustrates the intersection of supply and demand curves as the free market equilibrium (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s post is actually only a short sound bite for further conversations to be developed in the future:

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• Long live the Free Market Theory….more a Free Zombie Market (investorpolitico.com)
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• Pope Francis Said What?!…

A government think thank, Policy Exchange, have urged the government to make it compulsory that people save for their retirement. Their proposal the ‘Help to Save’ Scheme is aimed at avoiding 11 million people ending up in ‘Pension Poverty’. In a BBC article….

James Barty, author of the report, said the lack of people saving for their retirement was putting an “intolerable burden on the state” which “needs to be addressed sooner rather than later”.

He said: “With an ageing population, putting money aside for later life should be seen in the same context as National Insurance contributions, taxes and even education – an obligation that falls on everyone in society.

“‘Help to Save’ will prevent the state from having to pick up the tab for people who haven’t put aside enough money for later life.”

Under the plans, the opt-out in the Government’s auto-enrolment scheme would be removed…

If you ask an economist about the difference between capitalism and socialism, you’ll probably get a boring answer about the size of government, the impact on incentives, and the power of the state.

Or maybe you’ll get a nit-picking answer, sort of like when I explained that Obama technically isn’t a socialist.

That’s why it’s sometimes best to use simple, common-sense analogies.

Two years ago, I used two cows to explain the differences between various economic systems.

But this image may be an ever more succinct way to showing the difference between capitalism and socialism.

Or, if you prefer stories, this updated version of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper makes the same point.

And here’s the PC version of the Little Red Hen.