I had hoped to write this post for Roger Altman and Gene Sperling as they advised President-elect John Kerry on how to reverse George W. Bush’s fiscal mess. Two recent discussions pose the problems facing President Bush in his second term. Daniel Gross of Slate writes: The fiscal record of the past four years has […]
Brad DeLong’s The Simple Arithmetic of Social Security Privatization suggests how Bush’s “reform” might work for someone nearing the age of 50. The word is that the Bush administration will shortly propose the diversion of 2% of the taxable Social Security payroll to private Social Security accounts… Since benefits for the next generation or so […]
I’ve read in a couple of places over the past week (sorry I can’t remember any specific instances offhand, but would welcome citations) that a good policy proposal for Democrats might be to advocate the abolition of sales taxes, replacing the lost revenue with income taxes. Since there’s no national sales tax this would have […]
Let me rephrase and shorten that long post about liberal morality that I wrote over the weekend. First read this essay by Robert Reich. Then let me condense my own post down a bit, to: “Yeah, what Robert Reich said.” Kash
In the previous post I pointed out that, “California, the world’s fifth largest economy, … gets only $.78 back on every $1.00 it pays to the Treasury.” Just how much money is California donating to the poorer states? The State’s Gross State Product is about $1.4 Trillion, and in 2003 California residents and corporations paid […]
There’s a new website devoted to tracking inter-state transfers, which primarily run from the Blue States to the Red. For example, this map shows the ten biggest net recipients of the federal dole. DC makes this list, but that’s a special case; HI is also on the list because of the large military presence there. […]
As the days have gone by since the election, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that a major handicap for the Democratic party in the past few elections has been that Republicans are seen to be “standing for something,” while Democrats are seen to either just be non-Republicans or to simply have a laundry list […]
I used to think CNN’s Lou Dobbs – the Bill O’Reilly of Mercantilism – was as awful as it gets as far as business or economics commentary. His tirades against free trade have gotten so bad that I can no longer watch his show. But I do wake up Saturday mornings to CNN’s On The […]
Tim Russert invites Karl Rove on Meet The Press and asks him about the uniter not a divider issue and Rove replies: I remember well after 9/11 sitting with the president and a leader of the Democratic Party talking about the economic stimulus package. The president said, “Look, our economy’s been hit hard on 9/11. […]
John Taylor, the Treasury Undersecretary of Treasury for International Affairs, delivered an address on Policy Challenges of Global Payment Imbalances at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. I learned about this address from Atrios and his post called “We’re All Keynesians Now”. Atrios points to this Washington Post Story , which included the following: The large […]