Beyond how communications about swine flu are handled, consider also the merits of this “public health emergency.” Hamilton Nolan at Gawker has a pithy retrospective.

In a post on Saturday at NRO’s the Corner blog, former Bush speech writer Marc Theissen exhibits ignorance of basic security concepts too galling to let pass without comment.

Attempting to refute the idea that hijacking planes and flying them into buildings was “off the table” as a terrorist tactic after 9/11, Theissen says:

Really? Planes were off the table after 9/11? That would come as a surprise to every passenger in the past three years who had their liquids confiscated in an airport security line. Those security measures were instituted because in 2006 we foiled an al-Qaeda plot to hijack airplanes leaving London’s Heathrow airport and blow them up over the Atlantic (a plot our intelligence community says was just weeks from execution).

(First, put aside some issues — “what the government says about its security measures must be true” and both the immediacy and viability of the liquid bomb plot in London.)

The difference between “hijacking” and “bombing” shouldn’t need explaining. The former is taking over the controls of a thing, enabling an attacker to direct it into other things. The latter is exploding something in it or on it so as to render it inoperable.

Americans ritually donate their toothpaste to sanitation departments in the cities they visit not because a liquid bomb could enable the commandeering of a plane, but because the alleged liquid bomb could take a plane out of the sky.

The bombing of a plane is a serious concern, but not as serious or potentially damaging as the commandeering of an aircraft. And commandeering is essentially off the table. The hardening of cockpit doors, new procedures at the fronts of planes, and newfound resolve of passengers and crews against commandeering have reduced the likelihood of future commandeerings to near zero. That was what the plane going down in Pennsylvania was all about.

If it weren’t made in debate about such serious issues, Theissen’s error would be quite comical. In his jumbled version of events, the liquid bomb plotters were going to go to the trouble of capturing the controls of an airplane, then fly it around for a while, and finally blow it up over the Atlantic. It’s reminiscent of the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine attacks the theory that an elderly couple running a nearby cobbler shop had shut it down just to abscond with Jerry’s shoes:

ELAINE (amused): So. Mom and Pop’s plan was to move into the neighborhood…establish trust…for 48 years. And then, run off with Jerry’s sneakers.

KRAMER: Apparently.

ELAINE: Alright, that’s enough of this.

Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here.

• Marian Tupy discusses African aid in his new Development Policy Analysis, “The False Promise of Gleneagles: Misguided Priorities at the Heart of the New Push for African Development,” and an op-ed in the Washington Times.

• Swaminathan Aiyar argues against a global currency in The Guardian.

• Daniel J. Mitchell calls for abolishing the death tax in USA Today.

• Will Wilkinson argues for more liberal immigration policies in The Week magazine.

• In the Christian Science Monitor, Benjamin Friedman says the United States should cut military spending in half.

• In Monday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Jim Harper explains why Obama’s record on following through with his campaign promise to post bills online for five days before signing is worse than the Washington Nationals’.

In the latest issue of Forbes, Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank is pushing “A Tax Even Libertarians Can Love.” I hope he wasn’t counting on this libertarian’s support.

What he advocates is “replacing the income tax with a progressive tax on spending. …A family’s income minus its savings is its consumption, and that amount minus a large standard deduction — say, $30,000 a year for a family of four — would be its taxable consumption. …Rates would start low, perhaps 20%, then rise gradually with total consumption. …With savings tax-exempt, top marginal tax rates on consumption would have to be significantly higher than current top rates on income.”

His concept of “significantly higher” includes tax rates of 100–200% on marginal income that isn’t saved. This is about minimizing affluence, not maximizing revenues. There is ample evidence from Emmanuel Saez and others that the amount of reported income drops sharply as marginal tax rates rise above 25–30% (and even less on capital gains).

In his 2007 book, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, Frank suggests marginal tax rates of 50% above $220,000 and rising to 200%. Since seniors (like me) commonly finance retirement from past savings, Frank’s tax scheme amounts to rapid confiscation of past savings.

For young people, Frank’s tax can’t possibly encourage savings because it discourages earning any income in the first place. Consumption is, after all, the motive for both earning and saving. The prospect of facing future consumption taxes of 50–200% would surely discourage saving much, because the rewards from invested savings (namely, future consumption) would be subjected to such prohibitive tax brackets. Under this steeply progressive tax on unsaved income, any income exempt from taxes today would be subject to brutal taxes whenever folks wanted to buy anything of value, like a car or house, or to retire on their accumulated savings.

In another April 25 piece in The New York Times, Mr. Frank shifts from promoting confiscatory taxes on consumption to defending small tweaks to the current tax regime. “The current [tax] system is much fairer than many people believe, and the president’s proposal will make it both fairer and more efficient.” That comment was aimed at the tea parties. Yet tax party protesters clearly understood, as Frank does not, that the president’s first wave of proposed tax increases come nowhere near paying for his grandiose spending plans. My estimate of last October, that Obama’s plans would add $4.3 trillion to the deficits over ten years is now looking much too generous, if not wildly optimistic.

In the New York Times piece, Frank argues that income differences are mainly a matter of luck. As he often does, Frank pretends to possess evidence about this topic that other economists have missed. He says, “economists have only begun to realize [that] pay differences often vastly overstate differences in performance.”

In his book, whenever Frank alludes to what “the evidence suggests,” his sources are usually suspect, obsolete or invisible. He claims “regulations, like cartoons are data.” He cites an unpublished master’s thesis, unidentified surveys and “casual impressions.”

Frank claims “happiness can be measured reliably” by brain waves. Explaining this better in the Economic Journal in 1997, he noted that people who say they are happy show “greater electrical activity in the left prefrontal region of the brain” which “is rich in receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, higher concentrations of which been shown independently to be correlated with positive affect.” If we accept the amount of dopamine in the brain as the gauge of happiness, however, then the happiest people are those who routinely abuse crack and meth.

In the second chapter of Falling Behind, his first graph lists a Census Bureau URL as the source for household income data from 1949 to 1979. Click on that link and you will find the data only go back to 1967. In reality, all of Frank’s income and wealth graphs actually came from Chris Hartman at inequal​i​ty​.org. Hartman is not an economist or statistician, but a “researcher, writer, editor, and graphic designer with experience in politics, higher education, and publishing.” Hartman’s non-facts used in Robert Frank’s first graph actually came from a 1994 book from the Economic Policy Institute, reflecting the “authors’ analysis… of unpublished census data.” Frank’s comparison of CEO pay with “average wages” came from Hartman’s flawed calculations for United for a Fair Economy, which were critiqued on page 131 of my textbook Income and Wealth. And Frank’s demonstrably false claim that “asset ownership has become even more heavily concentrated during recent years” is likewise from inequal​i​ty​.org.

In short, Professor Frank often bases his remarkably strong opinions on fragile facts.

New Jerseyans may get a chance to vote their Fourth Amendment preferences in the upcoming gubernatorial elections. Among the candidates is Chris Christie, who as U.S. Attorney for New Jersey authorized the tracking of suspects’ cell phones without getting a warrant.

In Tax Notes International today, two Ernst and Young experts describe how corporate tax reforms in Japan have made America an even bigger outlier in its punitive treatment of multinational corporations:

Japan’s recent adoption of a territorial tax system as part of a broader tax reform reduces the tax burden on the foreign-source income of Japanese multinational corporations.

Before the Japanese reform, the two largest economies had both high corporate income tax rates and worldwide tax systems. Now the United States not only has the second-highest corporate income tax rate of the OECD countries, it is also one of the few that still have a general worldwide tax system.

The Japanese corporate tax reform is part of a global trend toward reduced taxation of corporate income, which often takes the form of a significantly reduced corporate tax rate but also is reflected through reduced taxation of foreign-source income.

The details of the president’s budget proposal to reform deferral are expected in the coming weeks. As we await the specifics, it is clear that the direction of the proposal runs counter to this strong current of global corporate tax reform with lower overall corporate tax rates and reductions in domestic taxation of foreign-source income.

In simple terms, Japan’s reforms may give firms such as Toyota or Hitachi an advantage over firms such as Ford or General Electric in international markets.

Alas, U.S. policymakers don’t seem to understand that in a globalized world of free-flowing capital we need to change our uncompetitive tax policies. At Cato, we will keep trying to educate them, but it is sad that our economy loses jobs and investment because our elected leaders are such slow learners compared to leaders in Japan, Jordan, Canada, and elsewhere.

Despite the recession, globalization continues to exert pressure for beneficial tax reforms. From Tax Notes International today:

Jordanian Finance Minister Bassem al-Salem on April 20 confirmed that the government is working on draft legislation that would cut corporate tax rates drastically, reducing them in some cases by more than half.

Al-Salem said the government will seek to introduce a single 12 percent tax rate for most corporate entities, although companies in the banking, insurance, and mining sectors would pay tax at a rate of 25 percent. The current corporate tax rates range from 15 percent to 35 percent for different profit levels and also differ by business sector.

The draft legislation would also rationalize individual income tax, custom duties, and other taxes to increase efficiency, al-Salem said. Jordan has about 100 different taxes.

Al-Salem said the tax cuts are needed because many countries in the region either don’t have taxes at all or have much lower tax rates than Jordan’s, making them more attractive jurisdictions for investment.

The full story on taxation and globalization is here.