In today’s op-ed piece, “Gilded Once More,” Paul Krugman picks a few factoids to show how our Gilded Age compares to the 19th century original. He finds that even though ours has a kinder face (due no doubt to the proliferation of TVs, fast food, and other creature comforts that make modern poverty look more […]
Read more...There is quiet distress within the Democratic Party that the need to rein in the burgeoning Bush deficits will severely limit their ability to tackle issues near and dear to their heart, such as health care. As Mark Thoma reports in “Democrats and Deficits,” citing Brad Plumer of the New Republic and Greg Anrig, Nobel […]
Read more...This article by Robert Franks, a Cornell economist, in today’s New York Times gives several simple but compelling examples of how conservative ideology is internally inconsistent. Conservatives like to claim that keeping government small is pro growth and makes us all better off, at least in a financial sense, by giving us a bigger economic […]
Read more...We’ve discussed before that, despite the popular coverage that it gets in the business press, carbon trading, or “cap and trade” is not as efficient or effective a way to reduce greenhouse gases as taxation. If you would like official confirmation, Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw (who is far from being liberal; he’s an advisor […]
Read more...For the benefit of non-US readers, AMT stands for alternative minimum tax. When individuals take itemized deductions, they must also run an AMT calculation to see if the taxes due under that framework are higher than they’d get using income – (deductions + exemptions). The idea behind AMT originally was that high income individuals who […]
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