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 […]
I’m preparing a few slides for a class discussion about the US federal budget. In so doing, I produced the following picture of federal revenues and spending, excluding the Social Security trust fund. Even I, someone extremely familiar with the details of the US’s budget problems, was slightly astonished by this picture. Note: The projection […]
Jonah Goldberg reads another story noting that Karl Rove may have been in more legal jeopady that Jonah has been assuming. Jonah protests that he now neither understands or cares much about this issue. But really – when has he ever grasped the issues or cared about the outing of a CIA agent? If he […]
President Bush says yes: Bush said November’s strong job growth was due to what he said was a policy of cutting taxes and restraining spending and pledged to continue with that strategy. Restraining spending? I thought the rightwing talking points were supposed to blame the deficit on an explosion in government spending as tax cuts […]