John Cochrane plays around with some of the CBO projections and comes up with this graph which represents the long-term outlook based on their numbers. Sort of OK for the next say seven or eight years and then things get really ugly. Cochrane properly asks, “So what can adjust?”, as the scenario represented by the […]
Posts Tagged ‘taxes’
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Republicans Need A Modified Tax Message
Posted by Tom Lindmark on April 22nd, 2011
This perhaps demonstrates just how big a mountain the Republicans have to climb with their deficit reduction budget: While I give Ryan and his compatriots high marks for sparking the current debate, I felt from the beginning that they missed the boat on a couple of things. One is an unrealistic assumption about the eventual […]
Ignoring The Elephant In The Room
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 25th, 2011
Since Rep. Paul Ryan is going to deliver the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, Derek Thompson put up a nice post contrasting the differences between the visions of the two men. It’s a nice balanced analysis which is worth your time. The last paragraph, however, is a poignant example of […]
Small Business On The Ropes
Posted by Tom Lindmark on September 4th, 2010
Here’s a little blurb from the NFIB that puts some perspective on the most recent employment report from the BLS: “Although the economy officially peaked in December 2007, small business owners were already shedding workers, reducing employment by an average of negative 0.04 employees per firm in 2007. In 2008, this rose to an average […]
Who Agreed To This?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on August 21st, 2010
Greg Mankiw posted the latest CBO projections for federal outlays and revenues. Here it is. Now here is a chart from Keith Hennessey that gives a good picture of historical spending and taxes: Notice that the CBO report projects an increase in revenues well above historical norms. Do the increases come from tax increases or […]
The Tax Con
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 25th, 2010
Tim Geithner seemed to make it pretty clear today that the administration plans to let the Bush tax cuts for individuals making more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 expire. Here is the rationale for increasing taxes: “We think that’s the responsible thing to do because we need to make sure we can […]
The Tax Trial Balloon Floats Again
Posted by Tom Lindmark on August 2nd, 2009
Here are a couple of items that are at first glance only semi-related yet when you think about them in a little more detail, they’re critically intertwined. First, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on ABC today was once again floating the new taxes trial balloon. Via Politico.com: “We’re going to have to look at – we’re […]
