Links for 2011-03-28 [del.icio.us]

• A Punching Bag No More — The American Magazine
  Debating which grocery bag is best: looks like its the plastic bag.
• Ezra Klein – Is it cheaper to just let the planet heat?
  But they both ignore a point that’s central to Manzi’s argument: What happens after 100 years? Letting greenhouse gases build in the atmosphere is a bit like letting a tree grow roots beneath the foundation of your house. It may not be that bad this year, or next year….But with each year that goes by, the problem becomes incrementally more severe, and harder to reverse. So even if Manzi is right that the costs are manageable into 2100 — a century, after all, is a long time for a human, but not for the atmosphere — what does that do to our descendants who have to deal with a scorching planet between 2100 and 2200? And then into 2300, and then 2400? I think Manzi’s answer is that technology will save us by then. And maybe he’s right. But maybe he’s not. And if he’s not, then we’ve let the problem become unimaginably bad for our descendants. If you bet on technology and you’re wrong, it’s not like we’ve got another of these planets waiting in the back somewhere.
• TheMoneyIllusion » Progressive wishful thinking
  All this may be true, but progressives can’t point to any European models (except perhaps special cases like Norway and Luxembourg) that raise the sort of revenue they claim the US would raise if we boosted taxes as a share of GDP to European levels. For instance, in Mankiw’s data the Germans raise $13,893/person with taxes of 40.6% of GDP. The US raises $13,097/person, with taxes of just 28.2% of GDP. The progressive denial of the Laffer Curve is an implied claim that if we raised our tax rate to German levels, our GDP would not decline, instead we’d raise an astounding $18,856/person in tax revenue, despite the fact that no other major country with Euro-style tax rates comes close to raising that kind of revenue. Quite a leap of faith.
• Gates v. Jobs on liberal arts — Joanne Jacobs
  The most profitable majors are: engineering, economics, physics, computer science, statistics, biochemistry, math, construction management, information systems and geology, says WalletPop.

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