Outsourced to Bruce Bartlett, more proof that Republicans are ideological zombies:
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Posted in Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Bruce Bartlett, Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Council of Economic Advisers, George W Bush, ideology, income tax, Republicans, tax, United States, United States Secretary of the Treasury, Washington Post.
I’m a couple of months behind
Tyler Cowen, but I want to call attention to
Price V. Fishback’s “Social Expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries: 1900-2003.” Noting that official measurements of government expenditure as a percentage of GDP miss the subtlety of a country’s institutional and cultural fabric, Fishback tries to look at net social expenditure, a figure which incorporates forced private spending, charitable giving, &c. This insight, namely that
“government” spending is at a normal level for advanced democracies, is a point overlooked on all sides of the isle. The
subtlety of the point makes it unappetizing for cable television, but the truth is that our budget debates would serve more constructive ends
if they focus not on How much? but on To where?.
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Posted in Rhetoric and Ideology, Taxes in Other Places.
Tagged with distribution, Economic, economic distribution, Gross domestic product, Nordic Countries, revenue distribution, socialism, Sweden, tax, tax distribution, tax incidence, Tyler Cowen, United States, welfare.
The Laffer Curve depicts the relationship between tax rates and government revenue, with the idea being that lower tax rates can lead to increased government revenue. The bastardized version of this idea, to which all Republicans seem to agree, is that tax rates should always be lowered, and a government that collects no taxes will have much more revenue than a government that collects even 1% of GDP. I’ve argued this point before, and Dylan Matthews, writing on Ezra Klein’s blog, has decided to conduct a little more research. His findings, which support raising taxes, are below the fold.
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Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Dylan Matthews, Ezra Klein, government, Gross domestic product, Laffer Curve, Republican, tax, United States.
Alan Greenspan wants to raise your taxes. The man who gave Bush intellectual cover for cutting taxes in 2001 and 2003 also supports their full repeal, even for middle class families. I never thought I would say this, but that makes Alan Greenspan more liberal than than President Obama.
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Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
For rich people, according to a new Pew/National Journal survey conducted at the end of July. The poll asked, “Which comes closer to your view about the tax cuts passed when George W. Bush was president?“ Only 30% of respondents want to keep the tax cuts in place, whereas 27% want to repeal the cuts for the wealthy and 31% want to repeal them for everyone.
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Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Bush tax cuts, George W Bush, government, income tax, inequality, middle-class, Obama, President, staglfation, stagnation, tax, Tax cut, tax policy, taxes, United States, United States Congress, wage stagnation.
If you listen to American politicians taxes are intrinsically evil: they only slow down growth, lead to more unemployment, and lower revenue. If you study facts, however, you realize this is not true. And if you read
Gustavo A. Flores-Macias’ op-ed today in the New York Times, you realize that taxes were instrumental in defeating
FARC and the drug cartels in Colombia.
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Posted in Taxes in Other Places.
Tagged with Colombia, Drug cartel, drug wars, government, Mexico, military, New York Times, Plan Colombia, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, taxes, United States.
As readers of this blog will know, I highly respect
Bruce Bartlett because he is a Republican whose positions aren’t crazy since they derive from empiricism, not dogma. Moreover, his respect for reality means he understands the severity of our solvency crisis and the urgency of structural reform. On the occasions where his positions differ from mine, it is due to political disposition and not ideology. I was therefore ecstatic to see a prestigious right-of-center publication,
The Economist, conduct
an extensive interview with him about solutions to our fiscal situation. I’ve copied the interview below the jump, but the short summary is this: the short to medium-term inertia of our political system dooms us.
Continued…
Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with Bruce Bartlett, Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Federal Reserve System, Fiscal policy, George W Bush, increase our taxes, Monetary policy, Republican, The Economist, United States.
I don’t know if it’s a real heuristic, but I like to use what I call the opposite expectations assumption: if someone makes a case for a position opposite of what you would expect, then that position is probably quite strong. So when the
Wall Street Journal runs a
softly negative article about Democrats’ fall posturing as defenders of middle class tax cuts and that article contains a chart showing how little taxes the middle-class pays, the article illuminates the preposterousness of Republican claims that tax cuts help the little guy.
Continued…
Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with Bruce Bartlett, Congress, Democratic, Democrats, government, Income, increase our taxes, middle-class, Property tax, Republicans, Tax cut, taxes, United States, Wall Street Journal.
Pakistan has a lot of problems. We usually associate the country with violence, poverty, and instability, and to that list we can add one more:
tax evasion. I won’t pretend to rank these problems in any sort of way or pontificate on any sort of root causes, but it’s fair to say that it’s very difficult to maintain a functioning state when power and tax evasion are positively correlated.
Continued…
Posted in Taxes in Other Places.
Tagged with IMF, income inequality, income tax, New York Times, Pakistan, Quiet Coup, Simon Johnson, tax evasion, war on terror.
As frequent readers of this blog know, I hate income tax deductions and find
the mortgage interest deduction the most pernicious of all. To recap, it’s a transfer of wealth from poor and normal people to rich people, is an inefficient deployment of government revenue, and skews our economy too much towards housing. Worse, it epitomizes what happens when our ideological aversion to government spending clashes with our
evolutionary disposition to consumption.
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Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with Congress, debt, Felix Salmon, income tax, mortgage, mortgage interest tax, Reuters, tax, Tax deduction, United States, wealth.
First off, Lincoln Chafee has a great name and an even greater nickname. Second, he looks like Steve Doocey’s twin brother. Third, he’s running as an independent candidate for overnor of Rhode Island.
Only that last fact is of interest to this blog, and only because Chafee is undertaking a serious conversation about the difficult realities of our economic distress. In other words, he is letting voters know that he will raise taxes, albeit just slightly. From his campaign website:
To help close a budget deficit, Chafee suggests examining a one percent sales tax on items currently exempt from the existing seven percent sales tax. He believes that property taxes are the hardest tax to pay so he’s opposed to passing the state’s problems down to the municipalities. You pay income tax based on the rise and fall of your personal income. On the other hand, you have choices on what you buy and therefore how much you pay in sales tax. If you lose your job or experience other misfortunes, property taxes are still due and your home is put at risk. For businesses owners and renters, property tax affects your monthly payment as well. He would also consider repealing the flat tax, or at the very least, delaying the next scheduled rate reduction to help close the state’s relentless budget gap. When the economy improves, Chafee backs lowering taxes on personal income and corporate profits.
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Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with Democratic, Frank T. Caprio, GOP, income tax, Independents, Lincoln Chafee, New York Times, Republicans, Rhode Island, sales tax, United States.
Through high school, I was an avid fan of
Car and Driver, the best car magazine on the planet. For some reason, the magazine also had a very right-of-center editorial bias that I never quite got: their favorite cars were (are?) German, but the Christian Democrat Union’s platform is decidedly left of anything the magazine’s editors would support. So I was quite surprised to see a
C&D columnist pushing for a gas tax.
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Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with CAFE, Car and Driver, Congress, Corporate Average Fuel Economy, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, fuel tax, gas tax, John Kerry, Mankiw, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, regulation, Robinson, United States, United States Environmental Protection Agency.
You may have heard about
some oil spill from some British company in the Gulf of Mexico, and you may have heard that some
Republicans feel bad for said company. Did you also know that our government provides
Big Oil with billions of dollars of subsidies every year?
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Posted in Politics and Taxes, Rhetoric and Ideology.
Tagged with big oil, BP, Company, corporatism, Environment, Federal government of the United States, Gulf of Mexico, New York Times, Oil spill, Republicans, Supermajor, tax breaks, tax subsidies, tax subsidy.
And the rich have a
lot of income to tax. I’m outsourcing this post to
Matt Yglesias:
There’s no form of tax increase or spending reduction that has a really enormous amount of public support behind it, but as both public opinion polling and even Pete Peterson’s “America Speaks” event demonstrate, far and away the most popular method available for reducing the long-term fiscal deficit is higher taxes on rich people. I’m much friendlier to the idea of broader-based tax increases than is the average American, but it’s really striking the extent to which members of the political elite insist on ignoring the strong public consensus behind higher taxes on the rich in their discussion of politically feasible policy options.
Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with deficit, dividend tax, estate tax, Income, income tax, inheritance tax, Matt Yglesias, Politics, rich tax, tax, taxation, United States, wealth, wealth tax.
Hot on the heels of my
previous post, the
Wall Street Journal reports that the Senate will not include as part of an upcoming spending bill a measure to tax
carried interest as normal income. Democrat leaders could not round up 60 votes to pass such a version of the bill, so they decided to ignore majority rule and let Republicans continue to pillage our fiscal system. The spending bill is the same one that would have extended unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans. Ideology is again beating empiricism.
Posted in Politics and Taxes.
Tagged with Carried interest, Republican Party (United States), Senate, tax, taxation, United States, United States Senate, Wall Street Journal.
