A Jobless Dilemma: What’s Wrong With Fort Wayne?

A Jobless Dilemma: What’s Wrong With Fort Wayne?

This article provides an interesting case study of some of the important problems which have been plaguing the labor market ever since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007.  It also corroborates some of the recently published findings in Casey Mulligan’s book entitled The Redistribution Recession; specifically, Professor Mulligan’s finding that increases in the benefits available to unemployed workers help to explain the depth of the Great Recession which began in 2007 and the slowness of the recovery (particularly in the labor market) since then.

The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate

Peter Schiff: The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate – WSJ.com.

Peter Schiff parses the historical facts on the incidence of the US income tax; by incidence, I mean the actual taxes that one pays as a function of his or her actual income.  By doing so, he corroborates an important fact, which is that the US already has in place one of the more progressive personal income tax systems in the world (for further evidence to this effect, see Table 4.5 of the Tax Foundation article entitled “No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as U.S.”).  Furthermore, Schiff notes that “A liberal article of faith that confiscatory taxes fed the postwar boom turns out to be an Edsel of an economic idea.”