Let's be frank, these corporate tax cuts are likely to prove a windfall for shareholders while producing merely marginal gains for wages and jobs.
Prices for Treasury securities, which showed marginal gains for much of the day in light dealer-dominated trading, picked up in late afternoon after Henry Kaufman, chief economist for Salomon Brothers, predicted lower interest rates and a weaker dollar.
This doesn't satisfy many of its critics, however: they point out that earlier studies have suggested that PFI, while delivering genuine value for money for prisons and roads, has delivered only marginal gains for new hospitals and schools.The suspicion remains that the Treasury has an ulterior motive in backing PFI for big projects—as a device to get borrowing off the books.
The MacBook range is expected to pick up a new chipset this year with more efficient management, battery life, faster processing, and more pixels on-screen, but those are marginal gains for many people, and don't create a burning desire for change in enough of the audience.
So despite the fact that some of the Republican debaters were up in arms about it, the USA Freedom Act actually has produced only very marginal gains for privacy.
The real sadness, in the meantime, is that we have yet to see a long think-piece in which someone quantifies the "marginal gains" of working for an obvious arsehole.
Many people in liberal democracies believe that they are entitled to rights and freedoms that cannot be sacrificed merely for the marginal gains of others.
And yet for all the marginal gains of precision hand-washing, rounder wheels, longer pubic hair and so on this has been a triumph of pure competitive spirit.
However, only a marginal gain is achieved for the right filter block.
