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I had been waiting for last month’s publication of the book “Confronting Inequality” before preparing my annual update on income inequality and redistribution in Canada. I am glad I did because the book presents new and exciting empirical findings that shed light on the age-old equity/growth debate (more on that below), but also introduced me to the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID). Data comparability and granularity has been a challenge for inequality researchers...

I had been waiting for last month’s publication of the book “Confronting Inequality” before preparing my annual update on income inequality and redistribution in Canada. I am glad I did because the book presents new and exciting empirical findings that shed light on the age-old equity/growth debate (more on that below), but also introduced me to the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID). Data comparability and granularity has been a challenge for inequality researchers...

 by New Deal democrat The 2017 GOP tax scam may hurt the economy this spring It turns out that part of the GOP tax scam of 2017 might hurt the economy this year. That’s because the total decline in the amount of tax refunds going to tax filers this looks like it is going to be enough to affect consumer spending significantly this spring. This post is up at Seeking Alpha. Special bonus: a few RW commenters there really don’t seem to like it!...

One of the tenets of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is that taxes are, ceteris paribus, deflationary. When prices of gasoline increase because of green taxes, people have less money left and know that their purchasing power declines. This is not consistent with neoclassical macro, at least not in its influential ‘Ricardian equivalence’ version, but that’s not interesting. The interesting thing is that MMT states that if inflation rises, taxes should increase to cool the economy. Which...

Source: International Labour Organization The most popular post on this blog is a summary of ‘The Great Transformation‘ by Polanyi. Which is remarkable as it is an old book about even older events: the transformation off traditional economies with a low rate of investment and little wage labor into modern economies with a high rate of investment and high levels of wage labor (Polanyi does not stress investments too much but see, in about the same period, Kuznets (1955) and Rostow...

Opportunity cost provides the best way to think about the recent decision to reject a new coal mine at Rocky Hill. That’s the central theme of my latest piece in Inside Story and also of my forthcoming book, Economics in Two Lessons. Given a tight budget of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we can afford to emit while stabilizing the global climate, every new source of emissions comes at the opportunity cost of an existing source. Since phasing out coal is among the...

I’ve spend the last few days at a workshop on the transition to a renewable energy supply for Australia, which focused primarily on electricity. The presentations should be available soon, and I’ll write a longer post if I get time, but here are a couple of quick points I took away. Adding storage to a system that is at or close to 100 per cent renewable will cost around $25/MWh, that is, about 2.5 cents/kWhThe big problem for Australia is transmission, to connect solar and wind...

from Peter Radford The following is part of a correspondence I had recently with a friend here in Vermont: The purpose of increasing taxes on the wealthy is twofold: one is to raise revenue; the other is to prevent growing concentration of wealth.  I think the second of the two is the more important.  The American system of opportunity and so on was founded on society being more equal than it is [not equal, but more equal].  As wealth gets entrenched further each decade inequality erodes...

I presume that Trumps Emergency is strictly political theater as it will be tied up in the courts for the next couple of years. Trump has no problem with this as he can tell his base that it is working and they will accept his story. Now I’lljust wait and see the response to this idea.