What he Said Former president Bill Clinton, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Library, said he “can’t find anybody with a straight face” to defend the tax package, whose advocates “compromise the future of our country.” Of the Republicans, Clinton said: “When ideological people find themselves in a hole, they ask for a bigger shovel.” […]

Moderately Positive Outlook? CNN has a story, “Mañana economics: Economists keep saying the sun will come out tomorrow … and tomorrow … and tomorrow.” Here’s the outlook: GDP actually grew just 2.4 percent in 2002. When surveyed at the start of 2002, forecasters predicted 3.5 percent growth in 2003. Lately, they’ve cut their forecast for […]

Another Red vs. Blue Post: Does Blueness Cause High Income? Earlier I showed that, on balance, the Blue states (Gore) subsidize the Red states (Bush). For every dollar that a Red state pays in taxes, they get back an average of $1.12; on the other had, for every dollar a Blue state pays in taxes, […]

Ingenious Republicans My last post made me think about how clever the Republicans are. That 5% tax rate on dividend and capital gains income for lower income families is tactically brilliant. First, it makes a great sound byte: Intrepid Reporter: Senator X, isn’t the new tax bill you just voted for a big give away […]

Clarification In reference to my posts here and then here, a few people emailed to make the point that seniors with income of $41,000 could very plausibly have dividend and capital gains income totaling $1,000 per year. I comletely agree. However, the numbers in the right panel of the NYT’s figure, titled “Married, two children […]

I’m a Little Worried… …about Kevin Drum, aka CalPundit, who seems uncharacteristically out of sorts today. What’s bringing him down? A laundry list of things gone bad, and he doesn’t even mention “massive deficits as far as the eye can see” or inane new abortion restrictions. Things would probably not seem so grim to him […]

How Silly is the Times? In my last post, I mentioned that the NYT story has a graphic showing the savings for various income leves, incuding for a family making $41,000 in household income per year. The tax savings in that graphic assumed that the $41,000 in income family had $500/year each in dividend and […]

More Wall Street Journal (and the NYT) As it turns out if you want actual information, non-distorted even, about the likely-to-pass tax cut proposal, you have to go to the Wall Street Journal. All of the following are on Page 1, above the fold: Bush’s Tax Cut: Victory–at a Cost Bill marked by gimmicks marches […]

Thanks to MB (of Wampum) For coming up with the It’s Still the Economy Team Blog idea. Thursday, in Salon, Joe Conason had this to say: An excellent blog aptly named “It’s Still the Economy, Stupid” provides graphic illustrations of how the GOP “jobs” tax cut will be maldistributed — and the record number of […]

Dammit Blogger is really doing a number on my hit count. Even on my T1 line at work, over the last three days, my odds of successfully opening my blog are around 33%. Same goes for trying to open Atrios. Maybe it’s the Amazon links? That last part was a joke, but I commented them […]