Generational myth-busting, 101
This is why we all need to read Dean Baker’s Beat the Press column. This alarm bell–“the old are ripping off the young!”–goes off all too frequently. The answer is not, as such histrionics imply, to do...
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Headline writers: enough already with the disembodied trillions!
President Obama’s 2017 budget is out today, and here’s why I think it’s worth a look. Yes, he’s approaching lame duck status and Congressional conservatives wouldn’t even use the thing for door stop....
View ArticleIt’s nerdy, but we’ve got to consider forecast errors in budget policy.
Over at WaPo. I wish every such budget forecast contained error bands like this. We can’t be reminded enough about the uncertainty inherent in such predictions. All of this also reminded me of the...
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Is there a deficit of deficit hysteria?
I hope so, and it’s what I wrote about yesterday in the WaPo. Let me entertain OTEers with a few more thoughts on the topic, including feedback I got yesterday. One response was: “You’re endorsing...
View ArticleHold up, New Jersey! It’s time to take a stand against our terrible tax debate.
This has been a terrible few weeks for tax policy. Donald Trump declares himself “smart” for tax avoidance; leaked returns show him to have claimed almost a billion in losses, much of which stems from...
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Paul Krugman goes all “crowd out” on us. Is he right?
Progressives’ Keynesian economist in chief, Paul Krugman, has been second to none in calling out policymakers’ focus on reducing budget deficits when economies were still weak (also known as...
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Debt/GDP and growth
I was just on a tax panel this AM with my pal Maya MacGuineas. Maya suggested that high debt levels lead to lower economic growth. Using Richard Kogan’s data on debt as a share of GDP and real...
View ArticleReflections on Trump et al’s weirder than weird economics interview
Yes, there was probably a bit more than the usual dose of cray-cray in President Trump’s interview with The Economist yesterday. But I just can’t muster the energy to crack wise about all that, other...
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The deficits generated by Trump’s budget are much bigger than CBO’s estimates
The figure below, from Senate Budget Committee staffer Bobby Kogan, shows four different estimates of projected budget deficits as shares of GDP: –The lowest line is the administration’s own estimate,...
View ArticleHarvey, Irma and the TBTF implicit subsidy problem
On my way in this AM, I heard an interesting interview by the great Bloomberg Surveillance team of Tom Keene and David Gura (and I’m not just saying that because they occasionally invite me on; those...
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