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 Foundationarticle 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.”
The Economist debates this issue and the answer is apparently “yes” by a margin of 51-49 – not all that different from the US presidential election outcome, with the MBA student losing out in both cases…
I am looking forward to listening to this EconTalk podcast on my daily walk today. Here are the program notes for this podcast:
“Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago and the author of The Redistribution Recession, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book. Mulligan argues that increases in the benefits available to unemployed workers explains the depth of the Great Recession that began in 2007 and the slowness of the recovery particularly in the labor market. Mulligan argues that other macroeconomic explanations ignore the microeconomic incentives facing workers and employers.”
It’s Paul Krugman vs. Paul Krugman. Paul Krugman v.2 says there’s nothing to worry about, whereas a previous incarnation of Paul Krugman (from a decade ago – let’s call him Paul Krugman v.1) says that there is plenty to worry about… Hat tip to my Baylor colleague economist Dave VanHoose for pointing this article out to me…
Quoting from this article, “The efficient markets hypothesis is surely false. What is striking is that it is very close to being true. For the Warren Buffetts of the world, “almost true” is not true at all. For the rest of us, beating the market remains an elusive dream.”
Quoting from this article, “ON THE face of it, economics has had a dreadful decade: it offered no prediction of the subprime or euro crises, and only bitter arguments over how to solve them. But alongside these failures, a small group of the world’s top microeconomists are quietly revolutionising the discipline. Working for big technology firms such as Google, Microsoft and eBay, they are changing the way business decisions are made and markets work.”
Economics: Micro stars, macro effects | The Economist.
Quoting from this article, “ON THE face of it, economics has had a dreadful decade: it offered no prediction of the subprime or euro crises, and only bitter arguments over how to solve them. But alongside these failures, a small group of the world’s top microeconomists are quietly revolutionising the discipline. Working for big technology firms such as Google, Microsoft and eBay, they are changing the way business decisions are made and markets work.”]]>