The ticking bomb problem

John Quiggin26 Comments

In response to the exposure of widespread torture of Coalition prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, it’s inevitable that the “ticking bomb” problem should be raised. As Harry Clarke asks in the comments to this thread

‘You hold a terrorist who knows the location of a defusable bomb which, if exploded, will kill x million people. Do you have the right to torture him/her to find the bomb?’

Instead of offering an answer to this question, I’m going to look at a question that follows immediately, but doesn’t seem to have been asked. Suppose that you have used torture to extract information from a prisoner in the belief (correct or not) that doing so was justified by a “ticking bomb” situation. What should you do next?

My answer is that you should turn yourself in, and plead guilty to the relevant criminal charges. I think this answer can be defended from a wide variety of perspectives, but I’ll take an intuitive one first. If the situation is grave enough to warrant resort to torture, it’s certainly grave enough to justify losing your job and going to jail.

In consequentialist terms, it’s desirable in general that laws against torture should be obeyed. Since few people will want to follow your example (particularly if they can’t plead a ticking bomb in mitigation) your action in such a case will undermine the law less than if you committed torture and got away with it. Other theories will, I think, give the same answer.

Turning from individual ethics to law and public policy what this means is that laws against torture should be enforced in all cases. A plea in mitigation might be considered in cases like the one described above – an urgent and immediate danger, followed by a voluntary confession. In any case where a confession is not made, no claims about mitigating circumstances should be admitted.

Since, to my knowledge, no torturer has ever made an immediate and voluntary confession, the practical impact is that the ticking bomb scenario should be disregarded in any consideration of the legal and political response to torture.

The Budget Part II

John Quiggin5 Comments

I’ve now had a chance to look at Budget Paper 2, and I think it might be more accurate to replace the observation “Nothing much for education, and nothing at all for health” with “Nothing or less than nothing for most areas of education and health”.

The Budget Papers have literally dozens of descriptions of “measures” in which the expenditure item is either a row of dashes (the government has left the program alone) or a row of negatives (the program hasn’t been abolished, but expenditure has been cut).

Now, there may well be areas of spending which ought to be cut. But a search of the Budget speech reveals only seven occurrences of the word “cut”. Five refer to tax cuts, one to income cut-offs for eligibility for Family Tax Benefit and one to not “cutting and running” in Iraq. There’s no hint of any cuts on the expenditure side.

Tax fallacies from Peter Saunders

John Quiggin22 Comments

While I’m on the topic of tax and public expenditure, this is a good opportunity to refute some spurious claims made by Peter Saunders of the CIS in a piece in the Oz recently. This isn’t too hard, since the claims have been made quite a few times before, and I’ve refuted them quite a few times previously, a task that becomes a bit frustrating after a while.

First, Saunders says

The top tax bracket was worth 15 times average earnings in 1960; nine times average earnings in 1970; three times average earnings in 1980; but is just 1.3 times average earnings today.

As I pointed out in my 1998 book Taxing Times

The tax reforms of the 1980s abolished the old top tax bracket, for which a marginal tax rate of 60 per cent was applied. An inevitable effect was that the former second-highest rate now became the top rate, even though it was lowered from 49 per cent to 47 per cent. Hence, even though taxes on high and middle incomes have been cut, the top marginal rate is now reached at a lower income, expressed as a proportion of average weekly earnings.
Even sillier comparisons are made with the tax system applicable in the 1950s. For example the Treasurer, Mr. Costello argues for reform on the basis that, in the 1950s, only people with incomes equal to 19 times average earnings paid the top marginal rate of taxation, whereas today people with incomes equal to one and half times average earnings pay the top rate. The ratio of tax revenue to GDP has, of course, risen since the 1950s, in Australia as in every other developed country. But the dominant effect arises from reductions in the progressivity of the income tax system. The current income tax system contrasts dramatically with that of the 1950s which had 29 brackets and a top rate of 67 per cent. Obviously in a system with so many brackets, very few people will have in incomes in the highest bracket.

The Parliamentary Library has a useful article on this topic, which shows how the increase in proportions paying the top rate was mainly driven by the reduction in the number of brackets. More detailed info is available from NATSEM (PDF file). Combining this with AWE data, I estimate that the 47 per cent rate applied at around 1.2 times Average Weekly Earnings in 1974 and about 1.4 times average weekly earnings in 1984, scarcely any different from today.

The main difference was in the very high rates applying to high incomes (the real target of Saunders’ concern, I suspect). The top rate in 1974 was 67 per cent, and it did not apply until income reached 40 000 per year, 5 times the threshold for the 48 per cent rate. Upper-income earners were taxed much more heavily in the past than they are today (though of course it’s necessary to take account of avoidance and evasion when considering actual rates of tax).

Second Saunders compares rates between countries saying

Not only does our top rate cut in too low – the rate itself (48.5 per cent including the Medicare levy) is much too high. In Britain it is only 40 per cent; in Germany it is 45 per cent (and coming down).

But this ignores the impact of payroll taxes and social security contributions. Australia has low payroll taxes and no separate contribution to social security[1]. By contrast, in most of the other countries mentioned by Saunders, these taxes are large. In Germany, for example The employer and employee each make a contribution of 21% (2004)This point has been made so often it’s hard to believe that Saunders is unaware of it.

fn1. It’s also necessary to take account of compulsory superannuation contributions in Australia. But unlike social security schemes in other countries, this is pure forced saving – there is no pooling of contributions in the accumulation schemes that are now standard (except for politicians). So although there’s compulsion used here, it should not be regarded as taxation.

The Budget: The good, the bad and the ugly

John Quiggin3 Comments

I’ve just watched the Budget speech, and seen the immediate wrapups, but haven’t yet had time to read the Budget Papers (late night ahead, as I have to go on Life Matters tomorrow to discuss it). Here’s my instant reaction in three categories

h5. The Good

* Howard’s attempt to reinstate the cultural dominance of the single-income family has been dumped, with lots of assistance for families following the model preferred by most Australian households with dependent children, that if one full-time and one part-time job.

* The baby bonus has been dumped, and Labor’s idea for a replacement stolen.

h5. The Bad

* Nothing much for education, and nothing at all for health. Costello spent the entire health section of the speech on two initiatives that would barely get coverage if they were issued as a press release by the Minister for Health, one on equipment costs for people managing diabetes and the other on a cochlear implant for which there are currently 130 people on the waiting list. Of course, if you’re one of the people affected, this will be welcome use, but for the other 19.9 million of us, there’s nothing here. In particular, the obviously unsatisfactory measures taken so far to arrest the decline of Medicare were touted as if they were the answer to the problem

* Regressive changes to the tax scales, with significant benefits for those on high incomes and nothing for anyone below $50 000. The large segment of the population on below-average incomes, but without dependent children or ineligible for family tax benefit gets nothing at all from the Budget except another round of bracket creep.

h5. The Ugly

* Resort to vote-buying lump-sum handouts on a scale I can’t previously recall. Obviously this is a reaction to last year’s “sandwich and milkshake”, but it’s very dangerous stuff. The Fistful of Dollars rides again.

* The announcement in the 2004-05 Budget of a raid on the 2003-04 Budget, to finance the first instalment of the handouts mentioned above. As far as I know, this is absolutely unprecedented. Since the amount raided is almost exactly equal to the projected surplus for 2004-05, it would be more accurate to describe the Budget as being in balance rather than in surplus.

Interesting?

John Quiggin2 Comments

I’ve been meaning for a long time to collect my thoughts about US interest rates, and where they are and should be going. As is often the case, I’m largely in agreement with Paul Krugman, at least as far as long-term rates are concerned. On the other hand, I’m a bit more hawkish in relation to short-term rates than Brad DeLong, with whom I agree on a lot of things.

I’m planning on reworking this piece as I have new thoughts, and in response to comments. so please treat it as a work in progress.

Warning: long and boring (but maybe scary) post over the fold.
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Time to repeal Godwin’s Law ?

John Quiggin6 Comments

What kind of America-hating lefty would seize on an isolated incident like this

Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.

then follow up with this

We handcuff her… because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities.

What kind of slippery-slope argument do you think is going to follow?
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Time to repeal Godwin's Law ?

John Quiggin6 Comments

What kind of America-hating lefty would seize on an isolated incident like this

Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.

then follow up with this

We handcuff her… because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities.

What kind of slippery-slope argument do you think is going to follow?
Read More »

The inevitability of corruption

John Quiggin17 Comments

Over the course of the Iraq war, a lot of opponents of the war have made a big noise about corruption among US contractors, the most common target being Halliburton. More recently, the pro-war blogosphere has been in an uproar over the ‘discovery’ that Saddam bribed a range of officials, including some in the UN, so that he could get kickbacks from the sale of oil, which was supposed to be used solely for the purchase of food and other essential imports. There has been a sense of baffled rage that no-one is much interested in pursuing these ‘discoveries’.

The scare quotes around ‘discovery’ reflect the fact that everyone who was paying any attention knew about this all along, and, indeed could deduce it from first principles. For example, in a piece on financing the reconstruction of Iraq written in May 2003, I observed

A return to normal output would yield gross income of around $US 20 billion per year at current prices, but most of this money was already being spent under the Food-for-oil program and most of it be needed for the same purpose in future. About 25 per cent of the money was taken to pay interest on debts associated with reparations for the 1991 War. If these were forgiven, some additional money would become available. In addition, it appears that Saddam managed to cream off $1 billion to $2 billion per year. If this were returned to the Iraqi people in general, it would make a small but positive contribution.

I didn’t bother to point it out, but it was obvious that Saddam could only get his cut by bribing those on the other side of the deal, that is, employees of the UN, the oil companies and the governments involved.

In the same piece, I made the point that the US contractors doing the work in Iraq were bound to charge a lot and deliver little, so that the cost of reconstruction would be far beyond the minuscule amounts that had then been budgeted. The appropriate response was not to complain about corruption but to accept reality and the need to spend a lot more money.

Iin both cases, it was, or ought to have been, obvious that the policy in question would produce corruption. That was why the US and UK initially tried to keep sanctions much tighter, with the result that thousands of Iraqi children died of starvation or inadequate medical treatment. Those who supported the Oil-for-Food program, knew, or ought to have known, that Saddam would take a large cut, and supported it anyway. Those who supported large-scale expenditure on reconstruction after the war knew, or ought to have known, that unscrupulous contractors would make a fortune, and supported it anywar. I’m happy to admit to supporting both policies, and to accepting corruption as one of the inevitable costs.

Having said all that, corruption is a crime and those guilty of it should be punished. But, unless you favor starving Iraqi children or doing nothing about reconstruction, trying to use either Halliburton or ‘UNSCAM’ to score points regarding the desirability or otherwise of the war is just silly.
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Abhorrence

John Quiggin9 Comments

This NYT story gives a pretty clear indication of how the Bush Administration’s abhorrence of abuse and torture will be manifested:

* A short spell in jail for those silly enough to be caught on camera or caught holding one
* A reprimand and no future promotion[1] for their immediate superiors
* No consequences for those who set up the system
* A new coat of paint for Abu Ghraib

I hope the Muslim world is more favourably impressed than I am.

fn1. As far as I can tell, this is what is meant by the NYT description of the reprimands as ‘career-ending’.