by Angry Bear Much Ado About Nothing? Post For many years, there was a third rail of politics: Social Security. Simply put, don’t f*** with the Grey Lobby. They vote and they have money (and they don’t like it when you try to take it away). The stock market boom of the late 90’s came […]
Calpundit has the heads up on this one, though he highlights a different quote. “The White House team is saying that the Fed chairman has lost sight of the broader thrust of the president’s tax proposals. They claim that Bush has started a major revamp of the tax system, from one that taxes investment and […]
Angry and Timely New in Slate.com: Meme Watch: Consumption Tax Gambit: Taxing the poor by stealth? By Timothy Noah Posted Monday, February 17, 2003, at 2:50 PM PT Coincidental email from Angry Bear to Timothy Noah (twelve hours before the Slate story was posted): Date:Mon, 17 Feb 2003 02:52:54 -0800 (PST) From: “Angry Bear” Subject: […]
How High Would a National Consumption Tax Need to Be? Dave Neiwert interveiws Robert S. McIntyre, an economist at Citizens for Tax Justice. Neiwert, quoting McIntyre: “It becomes pretty hard to run when you get up to a rate big enough to replace the income tax, because you’re going to have to have a 40 […]
This is worth skimming (I saw it on Atrios): Columbia Tape Shows Network Competition. Here’s the fun part NEW YORK – During coverage of the space shuttle Columbia’s disintegration, the folks in CNN’s control room thought the picture they saw on rival Fox News Channel looked familiar. So they tried a little experiment. The producers […]
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 […]