Will (here, here, here, and here) wants to know why anyone would want pre/post-death differentials in taxation. One thoroughly pragmatic reason might be incentives: we may care about what happens after we die, but we probably care less than we do about what happens during our lives. In other words, one has reason to think that the incentive effects of post-death taxation are less severe than for pre-death taxation.

It's perhaps worth noting that Jeremy Bentham, hardly Mr. Redistribution (defender enough of stable expectations in property to argue here against upsetting the land distribution of serfdom-era Russia), thought that it was precisely through (more or less) estate taxation that "security and equality" could be reconciled. Indeed, he was willing to allow average (not just marginal) rates of 50% on the estates of those who died without closely-related heirs.

At any rate, welfarists--indeed, consequentialists of any stripe--should at least give some thought to the incentive differentials.

(Via Julie Saltman, Max Sawicky has some heated remarks on various arguments of those who support the repeal.)

Braised Lamb with Couscous is not what someone normally imagines when they think of school lunches. If Jamie Oliver has his way, however, that dish and things like it might well be heading towards your local high school in England.

I'm not one to be beguiled by celebrities, normally. Especially when they try to take on political issues. So when I initially heard that the young, bizarrely accented, British chef was engaging in some activism about school lunches, I was pretty skeptical. It's not that I don't like Mr. Oliver - in fact, though he has a lot of detractors, I've been a fan since he was much less famous and only on British TV. But really - what good is a celebrity chef skilled in over-exposure really going to do?

I'm still not sure that Oliver's approach is the right one, even though he has managed to squeeze 280 million pounds out of the government to improve school lunches. I've written before about how I think teaching people how to cook is probably a great way to break the obesity chain. Is feeding them good things helpful as well? Maybe so. And on that second score, Oliver's program is actually pretty encouraging. His program to challenge your local school is well laid out, judging from the sample: the principles are good ("understanding food, and knowing how it should taste"), the idea of using food diaries to track current consumption is one I've played with (and it kind of formed the basis of my "what I'm eating this week" posts), and his recipes, given that they're designed to be prepared for 70 pence a student, are actually pretty appetizing - slow cooked Balsamic beef? Fish in creamy curried coconut sauce? Sweet Potato and Lentil Korma? These are not standard cafeteria fare. But the question is whether the government's answer to Oliver's petition was just an election time stunt, or whether Oliver's actually got the ear of some people who care? I kind of suspect that it's the former.

Paul Goyette has a few thoughts on the estate tax (in response to my posts here and here and here). Paul suggests that we are (or should be) worried about the concentration of sums of money in the hands of a few, regardless of whether this follows family lines or something else. Well, maybe.

This seems like the place to invoke Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain notion-- if everybody in the world had the same amount of money, but all of them were willing to give some of it to see Chamberlain play, presumably the fact that Chamberlain would therefore become rich would be pretty reasonably within the American tradition. And if Chamberlain then decided to spend his money, presumably the transaction wouldn't be suspect, even if he wanted to give all of it to watch somebody else play a bunch of basketball.

The trouble, I take it, is that at some point people's decisions to give vast sums of money to their offspring, friends, loved ones, alma maters, &c. stops looking like a Wilt-Chamberlain-style reward of merit and more like the thoughtless passage of wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not. Unfortunately, I think this discussion is necessarily riddled with our own prejudices about what constitutes merit, about who deserves to have whose affection, and so on. Unsurprisingly, the public policy that these conflicting prejudices generate does not have a lot going for it so far as philosophical coherence is concerned.

In the end Paul agrees with me that our tax policy should be death-neutral. That still leaves the question of whether gifts should be considered taxable just like other income or not. I think this is actually somewhat complicated; just as income turns out to be basically impossible to fully define, the same is true of gifts. If a lawyer provides pro bono legal services to an indigent client, should those services be taxed as income? I would think not. Similarly if a friend of mine agrees to let me spend the night with her in New York. The purpose behind the current exclusion of gifts under $11,000 could be reasonably related to avoiding those valuation problems, which would otherwise be a nightmare (in addition to increasing the dubious invasiveness of the income tax reporting requirements).

The tax deduction for charitable contributions will also occupy this debate rather strangely; Paul implies that he'd favor letting people deduct their contributions to charitable organizations (and presumably not forcing those organizations to pay taxes on the gift income) which would be pretty odd.

In the spirit of providing Jeeves's sartorial advince in lieu of my own commentary:

"Pardon me, sir, but are you proposing to enter the Ritz Hotel with that hat?"...
In the matter of head-joy Jeeves is not in tune with modern progressive thought, his attitude being best described, perhaps, as hidebound, and right from the start I [Bertie] had been asking myself what his reaction would be to the blue Alpine hat with the pink feather in it which I had purchased in his absence. Now I knew. I could see at a g. [glance] that he wanted no piece of it and that the picture rising before his eyes of the young master parading London's West End with it perched on his bean was plainly one that he viewed with concern and looked askance at.
I, in sharp contradistinction, was all for this Alpine lid. With me, when I saw it in the shop, it had been a case of love at first sight. I was prepared to concede that it would have been more suitable for rural wear, but against this had to be set the fact that it unquestionably lent a diablerie to me appearance, and mine is an appearance that needs all the diablerie it can get. In my voice, therefore, as I replied, there was a touch of steel.
"Yes Jeeves, I am."
"Very good, sir."
"You don't like this hat?"
"No, sir."
"Well, I do," I said very cleverly, and went out with it tilted just the merest shade over the left eyebrow which makes all the difference.

(Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, p 17.)

On Mondays it can be particularly difficult to get oneself up and dressed properly. I'm reminded, though, of Jeeves's admonition to a distressed Bertie Wooster:

Jeeves: Pardon me, your tie.
Wooster: What's wrong with it?
Jeeves: Everything, sir. If you will allow me.
Wooster: All right, go ahead. But I can't help asking myself if ties really matter at a time like this.
Jeeves: There is no time when ties do not matter, sir.

Let that be a lesson to us all. (From Much Obliged, Jeeves, p 74.)

Previously I wondered about the similarity between the cover of Freakonomics and the cover of Logic and Its Limits. As I suspected, nothing particularly troubling seems to be afoot.

When my friend loaned me her copy of Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires yesterday she warned me I would have it finished before the night was through. I didn't start it until about midnight, but sure enough, that just meant it was a long time before I finally went to sleep.

I'm the one who pushed co-blogger Amy toward Comfort Me With Apples, Reichl's second book. This one is Reichl's third, and it's the story of her tenure as head restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. Because all of the restaurants had her picture posted, she spent nearly all of her visits in disguise, especially after she went to some fabulous places the first few times and discovered the vast gaps in the treatment of V.I.P. and hoi polloi.

Anyway, the book is great, although much to my surprise Comfort Me With Apples is a smidgen better; Sapphires is a little shorter on personal drama and a little longer on food stories. Still, it did keep me up until 3 in the morning. . . . Most fascinatingly, Reichl didn't really seem to enjoy her job very much.

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