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Category Archive for 'Taxation'

Can you hold the idea of “equal pay for equal work” and still be a strong advocate of progressive taxation? Ignore the moral arguments against progressive taxation – which include the political view of the founders warning against the tyranny of the majority … focus on the logical consistency for the moment. The idea of […]

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As you ponder the inane debates about tax “reform” (i.e. deck chairs and symbolism), suppose you take the work of Martin Feldstein seriously. He has previously estimated that the dead weight loss in an economy due to taxation would be up to 30% of the size of the tax take. Now, I suspect the direct […]

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US Autarky?

Are Tyler and his comment threads suggesting that once a dollar leaves the US, it never makes its way back? Please explain how, absent a corporate income tax, the US is going to effectively tax foreign investors, if they invest via a US or foreign corporation. This is a major practical problem of eliminating the corporate […]

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Were I to run for a serious elected office, among my policy positions would include: (1) Eliminate all favorable employer tax treatments for health insurance. In other words, raise the taxes employees and employers pay on the income they pay their workers. The obvious reason to do this, and even the hated GWB proposed it […]

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Via Coyote without comment.  

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As you probably all know, social security is a transfer program, not a retirement program. Aside from eliminating the program entirely, which advocating for would have you removed from polite company, here are some things to consider about it. The system is in far better shape than Medicare. Medicare is the big elephant in the […]

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So, New York State (who is that, exactly?) passes an historic increase in the minimum wage. It argues, implicitly, that raising costs to $15 per hour will benefit workers and not have the adverse consequences economists warn about. Of course, there are myriad adverse consequences, not just unemployment, so keep your eye on the ball. […]

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A tax on university endowments and a tax on college tuition would seem to me to be pretty efficient and equitable taxes. On the equity side, the wealthiest people in America work for, have graduated from, attend and will attend universities – so it targets the 1% pretty well and almost all people in the […]

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I’d  like my readers and students to briefly examine the economic literature to determine what the “consensus” is on these two questions. What is the economic incidence of the payroll tax and other “benefits” that are mandated to be paid by employers to employees? For example, the total payroll tax amount imposed by the government is 15.3%, […]

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This result was surprising, sure to get lots of news coverage: It shows that despite a rise in measured capital-labor ratios, labor-augmenting technical change in the US has been sufficiently rapid that effective capital-labor ratios have actually fallen in the sectors and industries that account for the largest portion of the declining labor share in income since 1980 Paper […]

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