Edward Leamer’s quarterly forecast was released today. It was quite pessimistic regarding the housing market: LOS ANGELES – A sustained decline will hit the U.S. housing market next year, costing the nation as many as 800,000 jobs, according to a new economic report released Wednesday. The slowdown is likely to last several years, with as […]

I’d like to follow up on PGL’s post from yesterday about tax cuts and GDP growth. The argument from some supply-side tax-cut advocates (see, for example this WSJ op-ed: “The deficit is shrinking, thanks to the Bush tax cuts“) is that the Bush tax cuts have increased economic growth dramatically. So dramatically, in fact, that […]

I’ve been looking for an excuse to post this diagram of real Federal tax revenues (excluding payroll contributions) and Kash’s post “The Budget Deficit in Context” and a few other posts on this topic provide that excuse. I guess the standard supply-side reply to Kash’s noting that revenues as a percent of GDP have fallen […]

The New America Foundation has just proposed a few ideas for fundamental tax reform. Their tax reform plan suggests five specific major changes to how taxes are collected in the US: Replace the payroll tax with a progressive consumption tax, i.e. a tax only on the income that an individual does not save; Eliminate corporate […]

Reader RN alerted me to a recent press release by the Bush administration touting the fantastic job growth following the 2003 Bush tax cuts: “The American economy has created 4.4 million new jobs and the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.0% — well below the historical average — since the President signed the Jobs and […]

Dean Baker writes: One popular explanation for the weak employment growth of the last five years is that mothers are increasingly opting out of the labor force. The argument is that in a post-9-11 world, people have come to recognize that family is what really matters. Therefore, women now want to be at home with […]

Bruce Bartlett, noted tax-cut advocate and columnist for (among others) the Washington Times and National Review, sent me an email this morning offering this explanation for why he is in favor of at least talking about increasing taxes: I could do nothing but write about why spending should be cut for the rest of my […]

Last week, White House economic advisor Allan Hubbard and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan both made incomplete or inaccurate comments regarding the fiscal challenges facing the United States. See pgl on Hubbard and Dr. Thoma on Greenspan. Both Hubbard’s and Greenspan’s comments are deserving of criticism, but instead of focusing on their respective errors and omissions, […]

While I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the following short piece from the AEI, its title is just too funny to pass up: Congressional Republicans Make French Socialists Look Like Ronald Reagan As was the case during the Reagan years, the culture of spending has prevailed over the Republican promises to control spending and […]

Daniel Gross, Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong hammer Mr. Hubbard for apparently not knowing that Federal debt stands at $8.1 trillion. His overall performance was much worse than that: Actually, again, I don’t know what numbers you’re using, but the current budget debt is not a problem, but we do not want it to grow as […]