I’m participating in a discussion of Matt Miller’s new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, which I’ve gushed about here already, over at the TPMCafe Book Club this week. Here’s my first post:
When I was reading through the seven Dead Ideas in Matt’s book, I got most excited about “Your Company Should Take Care of You” and “Taxes Hurt the Economy (and They’re Always Too High).” That’s partly because they’re the chapters are full of wonderful historical detail–about the rise of the corporate welfare state in the U.S. and past debates over tax policy–that I wasn’t very familiar with. It’s also because the ideas are so flawed and the fixes so straightforward: Get employers out of pension and health care provision, and raise our taxes enough to pay for what we want government to accomplish.
But Robert Litan’s second thoughts about the inevitability of higher taxes got me second-thinking too. My reactions to a book like this aren’t very good proxies for what the likely political realities are. So I’m curious, Matt (and all you TPMCafe commenters): Which of your Dead Ideas do you think are likely to keel over first?