I write about issues I believe affect economic growth. For example, over the years, I have written a lot about taxes. And here’s a simple graph showing why: What we see is that tax rates at any given time seem to be related to the growth rate of real GDP per capita over the next […]

Videos below the fold. I caught Edward Kleinbard the other morning on Cspan.  He is a professor of law and business at USC and a fellow at the Century Foundation.  His book: We are better than this: How Government Should Spend our Money.  If you google his name, articles will come up from October 2014.   […]

  Update: *Additional numbers added Digby wrote a few days ago about the“grown-up” people coming to town to save America from the deficit. She listed a few of those people and their annual income.   Also, a few days ago the Senate had a vote on the tax cuts. Letting the Bush cuts go (I’m […]

A key but seriously underemphasized factor in the near-collapse of the financial system and economy in 2008 was the role that the two largest securities-ratings firms, Moody’s and Standard and Poors, played: The two agencies routinely and deliberately overrated the value of mortgage-backed securities.  So I was momentarily (and naively) stunned to read this morning […]

Guest post by Kenneth Thomas Top 1% Reduced Taxes in Last 3 Years but Probably Gained Income Share Citizens for Tax Justice came out with a nice report today showing that the overall U.S. tax system is just barely “progressive,” which is to say that as your income goes up, so does your tax rate. […]

by Mike Kimel Explaining Why Low Tax Rates are Correlated with Slower Economic Growth, Once Again One of the regular mysteries facing economists is why the US economy fails to display evidence of a relationship that everyone seems to accept implicitly, namely that lower taxes lead to (or even are correlated with) faster economic growth. […]

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 6: 1981 – 1993 This post is the sixth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from […]

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 5: 1968 – 1988This post is the fourth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 […]

by Mike Kimel This post is the third in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 to 1940. This one will look at the period from 1940 to 1950. Before […]

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 2: The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 – 1940 This post is the second in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. Last week I had a post […]