Mark Perry Has Never Heard of William Baumol Otherwise why would Mark Perry write this nonsense: The chart above (thanks to Olivier Ballou) is an update of a chart we produced last year about this time, and shows the percent changes since January 1997 in the prices of selected consumer goods and services, along with the […]
Why Tax Cuts for Rich Dude Will Lead to Little Stimulus Over at Brad DeLong’s blog jonny bakho adds an interesting comment: How much stimulus did the GWBush tax cuts provide? They came during a recession followed by “jobless recovery” made somewhat better by the housing bubble, then burst big time in 2008. How different would the […]
Lawrence Summers on Those Employee Bonuses – a Redux of the 1990’s? Lawrence Summers made an interesting comments during a CNBC interview: Former Treasury Secretary and Obama administration economic advisor Larry Summers said Friday that recent employee bonuses are stunts and not reflective of long-term hopes for prosperity that tax cuts are supposed to bring. “I […]
The Black Unemployment Rate Josh Marshall listens to Donald Trump so we do not have to: President Trump has been out bragging that “because of my policies” the African-American unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest level ever. This appears to be technically true. But I thought it made sense to give some context for the […]
Negative Interest Rates and a Term Structure Puzzle James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending […]
Has Dean Baker Joined Team Republican? The dishonesty ab out the Trump tax cut for the rich from certain Republican leading conservatives are been extensively noted so let’s not go there. But why is Dean Baker writing this? There are two ways in which we can say that a deficit/debt is will hurt our children. The first […]
Corporate Profit Tax Cuts and Wages: the UK Experience Kimberly Clausing and Edward Kleinbard have each written some interesting papers on transfer pricing. Here they team up on a different topic: The President’s Council of Economic Advisers claims that slashing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent would boost the average American’s wages by $4,000 […]
The Incidence of the Obamacare Subsidies Justin Fishel and Mary Bruce covers Trump’s dismantling of Obamacare: The White House announced Thursday night that the administration will slash Obamacare subsidy payments to insurers. The “cost-sharing reduction payments,” worth an estimated $7 billion this year, are intended to reduce out-of-pocket costs for low-income Americans on Obamacare … […]
IMF Fiscal Monitor: Progressive Taxation Need Not Deter Growth The latest from the IMF is a must read for progressives even if it runs contrary to the nonsense coming out of the White House: At the global level, inequality has declined substantially over the past three decades, but within national boundaries, the picture is mixed: […]
Hassett’s Evidence on Transfer Pricing and the U.S. Trade Deficit In my last post, I questioned Kevin Hassett’s claim that transfer pricing manipulation was responsible for half of our trade deficit and asked what was the paper he referenced. We have the text of his speech: There is another important factor to consider when thinking […]