Harvey S. Rosen Quotes

Public decision making is complicated and not well understood. Contrary to simple methods of democracy, there appear to be forces pulling government expenditures away from levels that would be preferred by the median voter.

Government grows because low-income individuals use the political system to redistribute income toward themselves.

Why should the central government be in the business of giving unconditional grants to states and localities? The usual response is that such grants can equalize the income distribution. It is not clear that this argument stands up under scrutiny. Even if a goal of public policy is to help poor people, it does not follow that the best way to do so is to help poor communities. After all, the chances that a community with a low average income will probably have some relatively rich members and vice versa. If the goal is to help the poor, why not give them the money directly?

It may be worthwhile to spend a few million dollars to determine the efficacy of program that would involve spending billions of dollars.

Some argue that an income tax is unfair because it taxes capital income twice: once when the original income is earned, and again when the investment produces a return.

If it makes sense to transfer income from rich to poor people within a generation, why shouldn't we transfer income from rich to poor generations?

A second justification for corporate taxation is that the corporation receives a number of special privileges from society, the most important of which is limited liability of the stockholders. The corporation tax can be viewed as a user fee for this benefit.

From a theoretical point of view, lifetime income would be ideal, but the practical problems in estimating it are enormous.

"Welfare" in the United States is a patchwork of more than 80 programs that provide benefits primarily to low-income individuals. These programs are means tested - only individuals whose financial resources fall below a certain level can receive benefits.

It must be emphasized that free ridership is not a fact; it is an implication of the hypothesis that people maximize a utility function that depends only on their own consumption of goods.

Government is essentially a big computer that elicits from citizens their preferences and uses this information to produce social decisions.

In an experiment in Illinois, members of a randomly selected group of unemployed individuals were offered a bonus of $500 if they found a job within 11 weeks and kept that job for four months. On average, people who were offered the bonus received UI for one week less than the control group, and the program saved more on UI benefits than it spent on bonuses.

Plato argued that in a good society the ratio of the richest to the poorest person's income should be at the most four to one.

A social welfare function is simply a statement of how society's well-being relates to the well- being of its members.

Only empirical work - analysis based on observation and experience as opposed to theory - can answer the question of how labor force behavior is affected by changes in the tax system. Even intense armchair speculation on this matter must be regarded with considerable skepticism.