Hey, What’d I Miss? OTE Summary, 9/24 – 9/30
Oct 01, 2012 at 9:28 pm
- Pointing to two Center on Budget blog posts worth checking out: learn who the 46% of households that don’t pay federal income tax are (hint: low-wage workers!), and why the House-passed Buffett Rule Act doesn’t merit the name.
- Breaking down a critical argument on temporary spending increases: I’m not claiming that stimulus is a free lunch, but I’m very much claiming it’s not what’s driving the budget deficit going forward.
- Highlighting a head-scratcher: it doesn’t matter if banks deceive customers? Really!?
- Considering two economic reports from this past week: the preliminary benchmark revision to the payroll jobs survey and revision of real GDP growth for the second quarter.
- Taking on electoral calculus: aside from their entanglement with the current horse race, what can economic indicators tell us about elections in general?
- Recapping my debate on poverty policy opposite eminent social policy scholar and critic Charles Murray out at the University of Michigan.
- Mulling over the question as to whether economic growth is hurt by rising inequality: it’s a challenging relationship to prove, though it suggests a number of simplifying, and hopefully elucidating, models.
2 Responses to “Hey, What’d I Miss? OTE Summary, 9/24 – 9/30”
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About
Jared Bernstein’s areas of expertise include federal and state economic and fiscal policies, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, international comparisons, and the analysis of financial and housing markets.
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One that’s been bugging me for a long time (either YAIA or some other treatment):
What would the consequences be of shifting from an income-based tax to a wealth-based tax, in whole or in part? A wealth tax would be intrinsically progressive, of course, and from the rough numbers a rate of about 2% would replace the revenues from the income tax. That’s nice.
But, as always, taxes alter behavior. So what should we expect from the (hypothetical) change?
Economic growth is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. The end is broad-based economic freedom. Economic growth that does not provide broad-based economic freedom is valueless.