Pun Salad

• Decades ago, when socialist ideas were still popular, the notion came about that the "airwaves" (i.e., some parts of the electomagnetic spectrum) should be a "national resource." This eventually resulted in Dan Rather, at which point nearly everyone should have recognized it to be a Really Bad Idea.

  But bluenoses and power junkies of left and right continue to hold on. Jacob Sullum examines the latest outrage, Senator Brownback's proposal to increase the FCC's "indecent" programming fines by an order of magnitude. Jacob asks: how about we junk the whole kit and kaboodle, take the First Amendment seriously, let people decide what to watch on their own, and we parents take some responsibility for what our kids see? Good question.

• Greg Mankiw quotes a Cato brief on estate taxes around the globe, so I will too:

  Of 50 countries surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2005, 24 do not have an estate or inheritance tax, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Sweden. Of the 26 countries in the table that do have estate or inheritance taxes, the United States has the third highest rate at 46 percent.

  There is no way that the Federal Goverment should feel entitled to 46% of anything, even with exemptions. The only motivation to setting a number that high is envy. (Sorry, seem to be on a Death Tax kick these days.)

• Lileks' Bleat is an everyday stop for me, but he's really good when he riffs on old movies. Today, he starts on 42nd Street:

  … the star of course is Ruby Keeler, who dances like sacks of wet cement falling from a second-story window. It's like watching an interpretative dance based on the Whack-A-Mole game.

  And there's more after that, so check it out.

Prof Bainbridge is pretty much always on the side of the angels in my book, but I have to dissent in part from his recent post on repealing the estate tax.

First, the good: he recognizes "the liberal arguments against repeal strike me as wholly without merit." He also quotes Bruce Bartlett's too-rarely-seen argument that the super-rich actually benefit from current estate tax rules in many ways, despite the ostensible class-warfarism rhetoric behind arguments against repeal.

But then …

… I get to thinking about Paris Hilton and her ilk and the case for taxing trust fund babies into having to work for a living takes on tremendous gut level/populist appeal.

So maybe the right answer is an estate tax that has substantial deficit neutral exemptions for small business and family farms, but no loopholes for the Hiltons of the world.

But it's a wild misfire. Paris makes more than enough money on her own to fuel her, um, active lifestyle. Check, for example, the Forbes Celebrity 100 where she's reported bringing in $6.5 million per year. OK, she's not exactly mining coal, but neither is Prof Bainbridge. (Or me. Or, probably, you.)

In addition, it's not as if Paris has ever experienced an estate tax hit, nor is she likely to see one in the near future. Her grampa, Barron Hilton, is still alive and kicking at 78; Forbes reports that he's worth about $1 billion, barely enough to get him on the 400 Richest Americans list (he's number 346). Interestingly enough, Wikipedia reports that his father, Conrad Hilton, left him and his siblings "almost nothing"; Barron sued successfully to win a bigger share. Besides running the hotel chain, he founded the San Diego Chargers, and had a bunch of other businesses.

Paris's father, Rick, is also still alive (he's 50). His Wikipedia entry says that (in addition to being an heir someday, with his seven siblings), he's a real estate broker.

So what does this all have to do with the estate tax? Nada, really. This WSJ editorial (found with the Googling above) points out that, if anything, the presence of an estate tax encourages the high-consumption lifestyle that Paris putatively represents: spend it now, or the state will grab a huge chunk of it when you croak.

But what's really disappointing is the Prof's apparent inclination to punish people he doesn't approve of through the tax code. OK, so Paris is an airheaded slut. That's hardly a good basis for one's stance on tax policy. Should we really try to tax people based on their character?