Category Archives: Economics
David Brooks is wrong about poverty and the safety net.
This passage from David Brooks’ Times column today got my attention: The United States spends far more on education than any other nation, with paltry results. It spends far more on health care, again, with paltry results. It spends so … Continue reading
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GRAPH: Social Security decreases inequality
Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income … Continue reading
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Counting war savings as deficit reduction is not entirely a gimmick, just mostly one.
Many months ago, well before the super committee deliberations began and even before the debt ceiling talks that begat the super committee in the first place, President Obama announced that he would begin drawing down the number of troops in … Continue reading
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This doesn’t sound like Ricardian Equivalence to me
From the New York Times: A mint-condition two-bedroom, described by the broker as having “a New York meets Los Angeles meets South Beach flavor,” it is also in a race against time. It has been on the market since March, … Continue reading
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CHARTS: Digging deeper into the US and UK GDP comparison
A variation of this graph has been making its way around the internet over the past two days (see here for instance). It compares the levels of real US and UK GDP since the beginning of 2006, and shows that … Continue reading
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Cautiously pessimistic on the sequester
Ryan Grimm has an article in the Huffington Post that is essentially a public version of the private memo Stan Collender of Qorvis Communications has been sending around DC: the Joint Committee is doomed to fail because of partisanship, and … Continue reading
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Tax expenditures are (mostly) not loopholes.
The great value of Lori Montgomery’s Post story on tax expenditures — other than the fact that she uses data from my Pew colleagues at Subsidyscope – is that she debunks the myth that the cost of these preferences is … Continue reading
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Obama’s “Buffett Rule” is a better AMT than the current AMT.
The New York Times is reporting that President Obama will propose a new minimum tax rate for millionaires later this week, designed to ensure that upper-income filers pay at least the same proportion of their income as “middle-income taxpayers”, though … Continue reading
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The Obama-Era Surge (then Fall) in Government Spending
Matt Yglesias posts the following graph to illustrate that “the Obama-era surge in government spending is largely a figment of the conservative imagination.” I sympathize with Matt’s argument, but charting only government spending on consumption and investment omits several other … Continue reading
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It won’t be impossible for the “super committee” to raise revenues. Not by a long shot.
In his slides selling the emerging debt ceiling deal to the GOP caucus, Speaker Boehner writes that the proposed “super committee” charged with coming up with an additional $1.5 trillion of deficit reduction over 10 years will be forced to … Continue reading
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