Scot Lehigh of the Globe details an apparent rift between the supply-side Club for Growth’s Stephen Moore and the White House:
Asked by Newsweek about those ads [attacking Olympia Snowe], Moore implied they were fine with the White House, noting that Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, hadn’t voiced any objection. ‘’When he’s upset about something, […]
Paul Krugman has posted another clarification on job creation and the business cycle on his website - a bit technical (i.e. involves graphs) but a good concise explanation of why the Club for Growth types are either confused or lying. As Krugman has pointed out in the past, anti-globalization lefties and their liberal sympathizers generally […]
Dan Kennedy’s post today brought to my attention a commentary piece in the Globe’s business section by Steve Bailey, calling for the end to the bottle deposit. The piece is spot on: the bottle deposit is, today at least, less about good environmental policy than surreptitious revenue for the state. This is clearer nowhere than […]
I hadn’t meant this page to turn into a Paul Krugman defense site, but after watching Treasury Secretary John Snow’s rebuttal of Krugman’s op-ed last night on the PBS Newshour, I feel I need to take issue with his support of Bush’s tax plan and the resulting budget deficits. For one thing, he argues that […]
David Warsh has a useful overview of the move to replace the income tax with a consumption tax. Tracing the current administration’s policy makers to the Ford years, he seizes on a Treasury Dept. treatise called Blueprints for Basic Tax Reform. According to its its author, David Bradford,
The great advantage of consumption taxation would be […]
I actually hadn’t noticed Paul Krugman’s latest entry on his website before I posted yesterday’s comment on the OMB’s website, but he makes the same point I did, further adding that 45 percent rise over five years is not 45 percent growth. (It’s more like 7.5%). It’s hard to imagine that any previous administration’s budget […]
I’ve never been of the mind that statistics can be made to say ANYTHING, but two misleading tricks are common. The first is to muddle the difference between average values and median values. Why for instance, does the White House insist on referring to AVERAGE family income when talking about tax cuts (from its website: […]
A good article in Sunday’s NY Times dispels the myth of the “marriage penalty” in our tax code. The author, Edmund Andrews, points out that married couples with only won income earner and more than one child fare the best, while single parents and two-income couples fare worse. And behind it - and behind Bush’s […]
Following up on yesterday’s post, I’ve been trying to understand - I really have - the economic arguments in favor of dividend tax cuts. For the neo-cons are sincere in their belief that this cut will help the economy. The explanations I’ve encountered have ranged from smart (as in the Economist) to dumb (as in […]
Today the dollar has risen in the currency markets. The ‘psychological boost” of Bush’s tax plan is given as the reason. Before the boosters say that a strong dollar is a vote of confidence in America’s economy, we should consider the more important and immediate message of the rise: that all other things being equal, […]
A number of commentators have jumped on the forthcoming Bush economic stimulus plan - the New Republic gets it right when it notes that the dividend tax cut, even if it were being done right (it isn’t) doesn’t address the problem about stimulus:
Fixing capital market imperfections isn’t a trivial objective, but it has nothing to […]