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Comment by clavalle | Hacker News Reader

I am a Sander's supporter so I say this more theoretically than as a criticism of his plan:

It scares me that in our political structure that we feel like we need to experiment with the whole country. I understand that if we don't the super high income earners, in this case, would flee to cheaper areas but I sure prefer the idea of trying out large shifts in policy in more gradually widening areas than completely wholesale as we've been doing.

On a related note, what are the good software platforms for running economic simulations? Are any of them decent?

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Every tax plan is an experiment. ("Trickle-down effects?") Every law is an experiment. ("Three-strikes?")

Remember, this NYT article was written by a conservative, who previously was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think-tank with the goal to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility". Before that he was a "commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo".

There's no need to believe that any of his statements are false, but I can't help wonder why there's a focus why "Bernie Sanders’s Tax Plan Would Test an Economic Hypothesis" when every one of the candidates has an economic hypothesis to test. Even if it's the most extreme (and I think continued tax cuts for the rich and funding multiple overseas wars are also rather extreme), I can't help wonder if there is a bias towards which sources to draw from when writing this article.

This is exactly the point of having states. They're not called laboratories of democracy just because we like flowery language.

Obviously you can't experiment on a statewide basis with federal taxes, but you can look at the economies of various states compared to their tax rates. Do states with low or no state income tax fare better than states with high state income tax? Do states with an additional capital gains tax have less investment or stock market participation per capita than states without an additional CG tax?

Robert Axtell has done a lot of interesting work on agent-based modeling of economic systems [1]. He has a new book coming out this year about simulating national firm growth patterns based on his recent research [2], which could provide an ideological platform for experimenting with policy decisions. Agent-based modeling is relatively new and untrusted among economic policy makers, but if the success of these models is any indication we will see a shift toward a complex systems approach over the next few decades.

1: http://www.css.gmu.edu/~axtell/Rob/Research/Research.html

2: http://www.css.gmu.edu/~axtell/Rob/Research/Pages/Firms.html...

> It scares me that in our political structure that we feel like we need to experiment with the whole country

How else do you expect to improve anything? You have to try something, and many, many other countries have tax structures close to this, so you know it's not going to fail.

I would imagine a simulation to be extremely complicated and fairly unreliable given that the Economy is and can be more volatile than weather (and of course is a chaotic system as well).

That being said I bet a simulation would probably be better than many educated guesses.

This depends what you mean by economic simulations -- if you are looking for general equilibrium models, Dynare is pretty popular, although many people would just code from scratch, and there are various codes here and there.

Someone else mentioned agent-based models; these are interesting, but there is a reason why there has been some (now decreasing, as models develop) skepticism towards them -- for example, quite often we see rather dumb simulated agents, who do not react to environment and do not learn from their repeated mistakes (for example, by not adjusting their behavior to tax rates...)

It's an experimental return to the tax rates we used to have back in the 40s and 50s, before the massive tax cuts that started being implemented a couple of decades later.

Federalism.

In practice, a marble cake federalism.

What about comparing to other countries and their tries? I am sure there are some slight variation and cultural differences, but it's a good start. On the same note, I am amazed how many mistakes Europe is doing when the answer sheet is just look at what LKY did.

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