Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

I didn’t think they could shock me. Then I read that the Trump OMB made a $2,000,000,000,000 arithmetic mistake Jon Chait explains “One of the ways Donald Trump’s budget claims to balance the budget over a decade, without cutting defense or retirement spending, is to assume a $2 trillion increase in revenue through economic growth. This is the magic of the still-to-be-designed Trump tax cuts. But wait — if you recall, the magic of the Trump tax cuts is also...

Dan here…I noticed several articles in the NYT (here is one forcasting Trump/Mulvaneys’ Budget Proposal 2017, contrasting safety net program cuts with the Medicare/Social Security deficit busting programs. In an aside no less. Here we go again…as if deficit spending reduction was important to Republicans, and Social Security was one of the chief problems. I am reposting Bruce’s last piece on Budget and deficit from 2014. Also see this post Social Security:...

Following up on my post from two weeks ago, Immiseration Revisited, I built a spreadsheet replica of the marvelous Chapman diagram. In addition to lines on the page, the replica provides me with tables of numbers that I can add, subtract, multiply and divide in accordance with the conceptual logic of the diagram. The chart below shows the results of some of these calculations. The red curve graphs cumulative gross “output” and green curve subtracts the value...

by New Deal democrat A thought for Sunday: the Left is winning the battle of ideas. The right’s own man says so Prof. Arnold Kling, a conservative neoclassical economist who has taught at George Mason University and been affiliated with the Cato Institute, has a post up this morning in which he  reflects upon whether he has changed his mind about anything in view of developments over the last sum of years. His reply is a notable bellwether: I think that in...

Lifted from Alternet: Which ailments are on the list of preexisting conditions that can drive up prices for coverage? The Kaiser Family Foundation catalogs “so-called declinable medical conditions” before the ACA. AIDS/HIV Alcohol or drug abuse with recent treatment Alzheimer’s/dementia Anorexia Arthritis Bulimia Cancer Cerebral palsy Congestive heart failure Coronary artery/heart disease, bypass surgery Crohn’s disease Diabetes More listed below the fold....

Via the NYT comes this major dilemma as a next step in the “money is speech” campaign: The head of President Trump’s re-election campaign accused CNN of “censorship” on Tuesday afternoon after the broadcast network refused to run the group’s latest advertisement. CNN said it would run the 30-second television spot, a celebration of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, only if the campaign removed a section that featured the words “fake news” superimposed...

Lifted from comments by Dale Coberly… This year’s Social Security Trustees Report seems to be late as usual. But this is the LAST year that a gradual increase in the payroll tax can begin and still solve some of the less understood problems of the projected shortfall in SS funding: This is mostly that a gradual increase starting now preserves the Trust Fund at it’s current level… meaning the Congress doesn’t have to find the money to pay back it’s debt TO...

This isn’t actually news, but it’s news to me, and it’s something you need to know. Greg LeRoy sent me an article by James Meek in London Review of Books (20 April 2017) that he’d been sent by a friend, documenting more EU-permitted job piracy by Poland that preceded the case I discuss at length in my book, Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital. There, I criticized the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition for...

The US Federal Government isn’t shutting down. Also it seems that Republicans almost totally caved to Democrats in the deal Kelsey Snell at the Washington Post Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) boasted that they were able to force Republicans to withdraw more than 160 unrelated policy measures, known as riders, including those that would have cut environmental funding and scaled back financial regulations for Wall Street. Democrats...

Linda Greenhouse of the NYT comments: A Supreme Court quiz: Who offered this paean to judicial restraint: “If it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in my view it is necessary not to decide more to a case”? … That was nearly 11 years ago, only eight months into his tenure. It was before Citizens United erased limits on corporate spending in politics, before Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, before Chief Justice Roberts...