Taxing the wealthy will not kill jobs
I study the distribution of wealth and income here at the Levy Institute, so I read the first five hundred words of Robert Samuelson’s Washington Post column on inequality (“The backlash against the...
View ArticleA Public Option for Banking?
In the course of an interview by Alan Minsky from a couple of weeks ago, Michael Hudson discussed a proposal for setting up a public option for banking (following the “Chicago Plan” of the 1930s and,...
View ArticleState Taxes Are Wildly Regressive
Some indigestible food for thought: there is not a single state in the Union—not one—in which the top 1% of income earners pay a higher rate of state taxes than the bottom 20%. For the majority of...
View ArticleWray on the Burden of Social Security
Randall Wray has been engaged in a back-and-forth with John Carney of CNBC. Their latest exchange touched on the question of the “real” economic burdens of Social Security (distinct from issues of...
View ArticleDid Tax Reform Contribute to Soaring CEO Pay?
Mark Thoma has posted the English transcripts of a three–part interview of James Galbraith by the German website NachDenkSeiten. In the first interview there is a brief exchange with Roger Strassburg...
View ArticleBeyond “Fixing” the “Fiscal Cliff”
The cliff approaches, and politicians and pundits in Washington are pondering how to deal with it. For those who have forgotten, recent nontechnical summaries of the legislative issues and amounts of...
View ArticleUnemployment Figures and the Uncertain Future
We expect the unexpected at the Levy Institute. As followers of Keynes, most economists here, including this author, believe that one cannot assign exact probabilities to most important economic...
View ArticleWill Fiscal Austerity Work Now?
An update on some developments on the fiscal-trap front: After a Levy brief on fiscal traps was issued in November, events continue to bear out the fears expressed therein that budget cuts and tax...
View ArticleA Fiscal Fallacy?
We have been advocates of the theory that fiscal tightening is threatening economic recovery (last week, for example). John Taylor objects to the view that fiscal tightness has been the key to the...
View ArticleWhen Will They Ever Learn: Uncle Sam is not Robin Hood
Memo to Obama: Don’t tie progressive spending policy to progressive tax policy. Each can stand on its own. Reported today in the Washington Post: Obama proposes $600 billion in new spending to boost...
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