Lifted from Robert’s site: Ezra Klein defends an increased capital gains tax as necessary for distributionally neutral base broadening rate lowering tax reform..  I support a higher capital gains tax rate (did not have space for that in my comment).  My comment: But why do you want base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform  ?  The inside the […]

While the issues involved are complex and also involve the use of government force to make it stick, and drug patents have a long and debated history, New asset class and much more at Dealbook points to a growing phenomenon for the global economy as well. Patents and innovation deserve a separate post, but the […]

Paul Krugman writes on debt and austerity some more, and a link to Steve Roth’s post It’s private debt from December 2011 is mentioned in comments near the start of that thread. Steve’s post had 101 comments of a serious nature and is a really good thread I believe.

Well, it’s that time of year again—when the Supreme Court justices interrupt their primary careers of flitting around the world (some of them), or at least around the country (the remainder of them), to teach a law school course or two, to instruct high court justices in other countries on how to feign working full-time, […]

Lifted from Linda Beale’s: Romney’s “revenue neutral” 20% rate cut may not be achievable, Hassett admits…For months, many tax experts have been saying that even what is known about Romney’s plan–skimpy as it is on any real information–shows that it is unworkable.  One of Romney’s sometimes advisers finally sort of acknowledged that.  Kevin Hassett (an […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Book Review There has been a lot of buzz about a book published on September 18th. (Dan here..See here for one buzz) UNACCOUNTABLE: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care by Marty Makary, MD This is an important book because in plain English […]

by Linda Beale NY AG defends tax-exempt organization probe After complaints from some academics about the rationale for a New York investigation of tax exempt organizations and a letter from Congressional Republicans Dave Camp (MI) and Orrin Hatch (Utah)suggesting that the New York Attorney General should not be seeking copies of federal returns from taxpayers […]

In comments to my previous post, Robert requested the unsmoothed data from Graph 3.  Here it is.   GPDI is plotted against the Capital Gains Tax Rate. Since the Capital Gains Tax Rate (X-axis) is quantized, the result is columns of data.  Compared to the smoothed version, there is little change in either the slope or […]

I have an embarrassing confession to make.  I forgot the date QE III was announced. I decided to graph the 3 year Tresury constant maturity interest rate.  The logic is that I don’t believe the current FOMC can plausibly precommit to policy more than around three years from now.  Most members’ terms end in January […]

It appears that in the conservasphere Rasmussen polling is called “Rasmussen the most accurate pollster.”  In fact Rasmussen had the best performance in 2008.  This was widely noted. However Rasmussen performed terribly in 2010.  If one focused solely on the final poll issued by Rasmussen Reports or Pulse Opinion Research in each state — rather […]