The Angry Bear

Dylan Matthews has a typically excellent explainer about taxing the rich. Just click the link. I have one thought. Matthews is soft on capital income. Matthews wrote Saez and Diamond also argued that capital income — income from things like capital gains, corporate profits, dividends, etc. — should be taxed, which broke with previous models of optimal tax theory. (Our current capital gains top rate is 23.8 percent.) Those models had suggested the...

A Small Anecdote about Alan Krueger It was back at the beginning of the 1990s, and I was putting together a panel on NAFTA for the ASSA meetings.  This would be URPE’s big plenary at the event, and, among others, I was able to enlist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a leader of uncommon integrity and seriousness of purpose whose victory in the 1988 Mexican presidential election was overturned through blatant fraud.  I wanted someone of stature to present the case...

The government shutdown may have caused a mini-recession Aside from being a monumentally poor policy outcome, and aside from the hardship it caused nearly a million workers, the government shutdown may also have caused a general contraction in production, sales, and income, and a slowdown in employment, that if it were longer would qualify as a recession. Because the affected three months straddle Q4 2018 and Q1 2019, both quarters will likely show...

As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) audacity and offered to pay full ride and make a sizeable donation to the school. Maybe I am wrong; but, I do not know of many...

Now that Andrew Yang has made it into the first debate by meeting the fundraising threshold, and being on Morning Joe this morning,  it is time to post this interview of him via Freakonomics. I was impressed by his thought approach.  He is the first person who is talking about the economy as a ecosystem of society.  That is, it’s not just about making money.  He does not come out and say it as I would but I think he is thinking about a question I have...

I just had an unusual experience. I was convinced by an op-ed. One third of the way through “Elizabeth Warren Actually Wants to Fix Capitalism” by David Leonhardt, I was planning to contest one of Leonhard’s assertions. Now I am convinced. The column praises Elisabeth Warren. Leonhardt (like his colleague Paul Krugman) is careful to refrain from declaring his intention to vote for her in the primary. I am planning to vote for her. I mostly agreed with...

Preventing Presidential autocracy: thoughts on reining in Executive power Matt Yglesias posted a jarring tweet this past week when he wrote: He elaborated by linking to a long-form article he wrote four years ago, explaining his position, where in relevant part, he wrote: America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day … there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100 Years Old On the forthcoming March 24. This last of the Beat Poets, who founded and still owns both the City Lights bookstore and the associated City Lights press, which legally overcame an effort in 1956 to prevent him from publishing Allen Ginsberg’s poem, _Howl_, he is not only alive and well by current reports, and looking forward to his centennial birthday party, but his bookstore on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco...

By Steve Roth (reposted from Evonomics) The Real Reason Stock Buybacks Are a Problem  Buybacks are a massive tax dodge for shareholders Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer’s New York Times op-ed, “Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks,” has thrown internet gasoline on the buyback debate. The left is waving the flag, and the right is trying to tear it down. The core Sanders/Schumer argument: buybacks extract money from firms, money that could be used to pay workers...