The New York Times has the article Lines Blur as Texas Gives Industries a Bonanza.

Mr. Ryan’s specialty is helping clients like ExxonMobil and Neiman Marcus secure state and local tax breaks and other business incentives. It is a good line of work in Texas.

Under Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more of the incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year, an examination by The New York Times has found. Texas justifies its largess by pointing out that it is home to half of all the private sector jobs created over the last decade nationwide. As the invitation to the fund-raiser boasted: “Texas leads the nation in job creation.”

The rest of the article talks about the pros and cons of these tax breaks. I don’t doubt that each reader of the article will see the moral of the story to be whatever fits best with their political outlook.

It is kind of ironic to pit the facts presented here with the Republican mantra that the government should not pick business winners and losers. I suppose the answer is that the Texas government does not care if the companies they pick are winners or losers as long as they provide the promised jobs. You’ll have to read the whole article to decide for yourself what you think about the situation.

From personal experience of having lived in Texas for 4½ years, I have my own opinion of low wages and high living standards for engineers.  My wages were enough to have a decent living standard in Texas, but they were falling behind national wage levels.  I felt that if I stayed in Texas much longer, I would be financially trapped by my inability to afford to live anyplace else.  Sharon and I are both glad we got out when we could.

I actually faced a similar situation in Oregon, also a low cost-of-living, low-wage state.  Had it not been for the real-estate boom in Oregon which doubled the value of our house while we were there, we might have been trapped in Oregon after retirement.  Unlike Texas, Oregon is actually a very nice place to live, but it was not near family, so it is not where we wanted to retire.

The bursting of the real-estate bubble before we moved back to Massachusetts is what made it possible to return to the high-cost of living state even in retirement where my income is not affected by where I live.

NBC has the article Facing the fiscal cliff: American taxpayers have had it easy for decades.

Still, with the deadline for a deal to head off the so-called “fiscal cliff” now less than a month away, the debate has shifted from whether taxes should go up to just who should pay more. Both sides seem to acknowledge what some economists have been saying for some time.

The problem with the budget is that Americans don’t pay enough taxes.

The case isn’t hard to make. The U.S. federal tax burden, relative to gross domestic product, is lower than it’s been in half a century. Americans pay lower taxes in relation to the size of their economy than all but a handful of developed countries, including Chile and Mexico.

The relatively low tax burden on Americans is, in part, an illusion that results from heavy reliance on hundreds of billions of dollars of so-called “tax expenditures.” To make government spending appear lower than it really is, the U.S. tax code is larded with givebacks, deductions and exemptions.

I particularly like this article because it provides so much food for thought.  As a well balanced article, it was hard to find a concentrated excerpt that also showed its balance.  As I looked for as good an excerpt as I could find, I chose the above.  At first, I was going to leave out the last excerpted paragraph above, but as I stepped away from the posting the article to go have breakfast, the ability to digest some of that food for thought led me to see the importance of the paragraph.

There is a tradeoff between tax expenditures and collecting the taxes and then spending the money on targeted programs to accomplish some specific purpose.  The tax expenditures may be meant to encourage some social good, but they tend to be less focused and targeted on the specific social good they are trying to promote.  For instance, lowering the tax on capital gains may encourage investing more in businesses, but not all businesses are the types in which  we want to encourage investment.

On the other hand, we could stop favoring capital gains in the tax code, but use the extra money collected to spend on particular industries or particular business practices that we want to encourage.  That would focus the tax money where it might do the most good, but such a plan would require more bureaucracy to manage it.  The burden of bureaucracy would fall on both the government to administer such a program and the beneficiaries who might have to apply for the benefit.

Like any good idea for change, it needs to be applied judiciously.  There are some aspects of the old way that are worth preserving.  One management course that I took as a Digital Equipment Company employee argued for a certain methodology when contemplating making changes.  Write down what it is about the current system that you want to change and also write down those parts you want to preserve.  Neither the old system nor the new system is likely to be all good or all bad.

McClatchy  has the article Al Qaida-linked group Syria rebels once denied now key to anti-Assad victories.

Nearly a year later, however, Jabhat al Nusra, which U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaida, has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad.

I have no idea about the truth of or falsity of anything in the article.  The only conclusion I can feel certain of is that dealing with the Syria problem is complicated.

In the comments on the article are links to two other articles, America’s New Proxy, The Syrian National Coalition: The Many Faces of its Leader, Sheikh Ahmad Moaz Al-Khatib and
Al-Qaeda affiliate playing larger role in Syria rebellion.  I have no more ability to vouch for these two articles than I have for the McClatchy article.  However, taken all together they just reinforce how fraught with danger it is to meddle (or decide not to meddle) in the internal affairs of other countries.

I guess the only lesson to take away from this is to avoid getting too wedded to one side of the argument or the other and keep your mind open to new information.