Hey, What’d I Miss? OTE Summary, 9/24 – 9/30
October 1st, 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.
Share the post "Hey, What’d I Miss? OTE Summary, 9/24 – 9/30"
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.