Welfare Sun King

Solar-Powered Welfare shows what you get when you choose planning over Pigou. Tax credits for the wealthy.

Pigou means less planning and it saves the environment. What a deal!

Efficiently attacking inequality

Since discovering the Pigou Club, Kitchen Linker has gotten a little interested in tax policy. Here's a great article on this that has nothing to do with Pigou or energy. Sebastian Mallaby on Attacking Inequality in the Washington Post:

Fixing these egregiously regressive programs could yield really juicy benefits. On a back-of-the-envelope calculation, raising the minimum wage might transfer $10 billion a year to poor workers; call it $20 billion if you want to stretch the assumptions generously. But if you eliminated just a quarter of the subsidies in the tax code, you would liberate about $180 billion a year -- enough to finance a big expansion in the earned-income tax credit plus a cut in the regressive payroll tax. And this sort of redistribution would not risk higher unemployment or compromise economic growth at all. Democrats on the left and right ought to be embracing it.