by Beverly Mann I Wonder What John Yoo Thinks of All This Most of you, I’m sure, know of the controversy concerning Freedom of Information requests by Wisconsin Republican officials to University of Wisconsin professor history and environmental studies professor William Cronon, in retaliation for certain postings on his new blog and for a New […]

Guest post by Steve Roth Want a Flat Tax? I Got a Flat Tax for You crossposted with Asymptosis One percent of financial assets. Personal and corporate. Annually. With somewhere north of $55 trillion in U.S. financial assets out there (2009, down from $63 trillion in 2007), a Financial Assets Tax would generate more than […]

by Daniel Becker This is an interview of Joseph Stiglitz on Democracy Now regarding his article in the current Vanity Fair.  He discuss the issue of income inequality, taxes, etc and how it has set us up to be less of a land of oportunity than what old Europe was. A few quotes: The question […]

This is new. This post by Matthew Ygelsias isn’t about monetary policy, and I don’t find it convincing at all. He wrote if you raise high-end marginal rates while leaving deductions alone, what you do is massively increase the value of the deductions. The home mortgage interest tax deduction, for example, is both distributively regressive […]

“The practice of medicine was accepted to be a chancy way to make a living, and nobody expected a doctor to get rich, least of all the doctors themselves.”  – Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science, p. 4 (Penguin, 1995 edition, quote via Google Books) Lost in the discussion of Paul Ryan’s “plan” is the group […]

More on the health-care later, but let me be clear: Congressman Paul Ryan’s “plan” is NOT a budget. Budgets show Sources and Uses. As the CBO analysis makes clear, this “budget” is no more a budget than Ryan’s last round of fakery. To wit: The path for revenues as a percentage of GDP was specified […]

Much is being made of the reported gains in same store sales by major retailers. But it may be best to take these reports with a grain of salt. Until late last year price increases in the retail sector were minimaland the reported retail sales increases reflected real gains. Through year end the Y/Y deflator […]

Economists’s claims that taxes should not be paid by corporations is based on the premise that government should be relatively  inefficient and/or run a deficit in perpetuity. Discuss.