Stuart Buck cites a townhall.com editorial by Bruce Bartlett arguing that consumption taxes are not regressive. Bartlett essentially parrots the logic of chapter 5 of the Economic Report of the President: Liberals also make the mistake of assuming that a consumption-based tax system is regressive — taking more out of the pockets of the poor […]
Press Release: Angry Bear Views Growing Exponentially Cumulative views of angrybear.blogspot.com: 7 (Friday), 23 (Sat.), 76(Sun.), 128 (monday, and today is only half-way over). This is growth, 1990s Enron-Style! So far, the cumulative number of views roughly equals 7 * 2^x, where x is the number of days, inclusive, since 2/14/03. At the current rate […]
Thinking about the idea of a consumption tax, I can’t help tying this into the somewhat infamous “Lucky Duckies” editorial in the WSJ (“The Non-Taxpaying Class. Those lucky duckies!“). Who are lucky duckies? The working poor who do not have to pay income taxes (though they do of course pay payroll taxes). See also the […]
Static and Dynamic Analysis of Consumption Taxes This and one more post on Chapter 5 of the Economic Report of the president. The author(s) of this chapter clearly anticipated a “consumption taxes are regressive” line of attack and attempt to construct a defense, coming up short in my opinion. Here are two phrasings of their […]
The Economic Report of the President is authored by the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), currently chaired by noted economist Glenn Hubbard. Noam Scheiber gives essential background analysis of both the politicization of the CEA, and Hubbard drifting from analyst to advocate. See Bush’s war on honest economics. Scheiber may slightly overstate the historical lack […]
So this is a bit off topic, but last night I saw an infomercial on the benefits of “Coral Calcium”. While generally not much better or worse than the average infomercial, I feel compelled to share this phrase from the informecial: “DNA can’t work unless it’s smothered in calcium”. I’m now anxiously awaiting my shipment, […]
Corner Solutions and Backwards-Bending Labor Supply Curves If taxing an activity makes people do less of something, why might replacing the income tax with a consumption tax not lead to a large increase in industriousness? The first two factors, related to corner solutions, will mostly apply to wage workers. The third applies to upper income […]
Here’s a few links on the issue. Note that these are to show that this is an actual proposal, I do not endorse the views in these links. AB. Finding the Warts In Bush’s Tax Plan Consumption taxes and liberals Bush Wants Shift to Taxing Consumption, Not Income
Income and Consumption So here’s the exciting bit of information that lead me to finally decide to put my two cents on the web. Dave Neiwert reports that the 2003 Economic Report of the President contains language referring to plans to eliminate or reduce the income tax and replace it with a consumption (i.e., sales) […]
I’ve thought about it for a while and now I’ve decided that a few people, somewhere in the vast spaces of the internet, may care what I think. See the next post for the trigger issue. In the meantime, you might want to know whose views you are reading. For the time being, I’m staying […]