January 31, 2012
CBO's Budget and Economic Outlook: Tax Expenditures
The CBO has just released the Budget and Economic Outlook. The document is full of extremely useful information, and provides a useful anodyne for some of the reality-free analyses floating around (examples here). For now, I'll just highlight two interesting graphs regarding tax expenditures:
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:29 AM permalink | Comments (9)
June 30, 2011
Tax Changes, Revenue Impacts, Conditional Statements, and Other Things that Befuddle the Statistically Disinclined
Or, a weblog post for the benefit of those unable to read beyond a technical paper’s abstract, a clarification of what exactly Romer and Romer (2010) found regarding the impact of tax increases on tax revenues. This note is inspired by Econbrowser reader Ricardo (who also goes under the monikers of RicardoZ, Dick, and DickF) who inaccurately (but with inexplicable confidence) characterizes the Romer and Romer findings regarding tax changes in my last post’s comments:
Posted by Menzie Chinn at 12:10 PM permalink | Comments (101)
December 04, 2010
The Hill: "Senate rejects million-dollar tax-cut compromise in Saturday session"
Or more clearly, all Senate Republicans plus one four Democrats reject a tax cut for incomes below one million dollars. From The Hill:
Republicans had held firm in recent weeks that the tax cuts — designed to benefit the wealthiest Americans — should be permanently extended as a whole. Democrats had argued that only the cuts for the middle class should be extended, also blasting Republicans for failing to propose any spending cuts or revenue increases to pay for all of the cuts.
Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:29 AM permalink | Comments (57)
November 18, 2010
Assessing Fantasy Scenarios
With the EGTRRA/JGTRRA extensions and proposals for tax reform and debt reduction flying left and right, I think it behooves us to review what the theoretical (well, actually undergraduate textbook) literature and the empirical assessments suggest will be the impact of tax rate changes. I want to devote special attention to the hypothesis that there will be large dis-incentive effects on high income households should their tax rates go up, with correspondingly large negative ramifications for overall economic activity.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 06:20 AM permalink | Comments (32)
November 02, 2010
Detachment from Reality and Innumeracy as Impediments to Rational Discourse
Tax cut version
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 06:21 AM permalink | Comments (40)
August 02, 2010
Let Bush Be Bush...on Taxes
Recall the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were written to expire, for the most part, in FY2011. I wrote in February that one way to start fixing the Nation's finances is to let the EGTRRA and JGTRRA expire as they were originally designed to. Via EconomistMom comes Bill Gale's additional reasons why we should, despite the lackluster recovery [0] (more on that below).
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 11:30 AM permalink | Comments (20)
November 02, 2008
Fiscal Implications of the Candidates' Plans
I think now is the time to consider the fiscal implications of the candidates' budget -- and particularly tax -- plans, especially considering the revenue declines and outlays that will confront the next President. Indeed, I would say imminent revenue declines will place an even greater premium on sensible tax plans, and efficient use of Federal dollars. Figure 1 displays the budget surplus to GDP ratio, both actual and CBO baseline.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:44 PM permalink | Comments (39)
September 03, 2008
Corporate tax policy, budget deficits and the capital stock in a neoclassical model of investment
Or, What would be the net effect on investment of the McCain tax plan?
Posted by Menzie Chinn at 07:55 PM permalink | Comments (16)
June 02, 2008
Important Footnotes in Dynamic Scoring
The White House today cited the 2006 Treasury Report in its "Pro Growth Tax Policy" information sheet. From the website:
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:22 PM permalink | Comments (31)
February 13, 2008
International Aspects of Tax Policy in the 2008 Economic Report of the President
The tax policy chapter of the ERP is quite interesting, in part because I have a sense of deja vu [1], [2] when reading the cross-country/international sections.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:32 PM permalink | Comments (5)
January 21, 2008
Why One Percent of GDP? Opportunity Cost Illustrated (Part III)
As the decoupling thesis becomes more and more tenuous [1], and the rest of the world exhibits greater evidence of a slowdown [2], [3], [4], leading to predictions of a more persistent and deeper slump in the US than previously anticipated [5], I wonder -- where did that presciption of a one percentage point of GDP fiscal stimulus come from?
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:07 PM permalink | Comments (11)
January 18, 2008
More Thoughts on Fiscal Stimulus: Business Incentives
What does the literature say about the efficacy of incentives for investment?
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 11:20 AM permalink | Comments (23)
January 14, 2008
The Implications of a Textbook Analysis of Macro Stabilization via Discretionary Fiscal Policy
From Reuters:
If Bush and Congress are to act at all, they will have to move quickly to have any impact, says Alan Auerbach, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done research on the effects of fiscal stimulus.
"Timing is extremely important," he says. "Recessions typically last less than a year, so unless you can be pretty quick, it's not worth doing."
Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:35 PM permalink | Comments (7)
September 16, 2007
Is Bush an Economic Conservative? Does He Analyze?
Greenspan says no, on both counts.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 09:18 AM permalink | Comments (5)
April 13, 2007
The Last Throes of PoMo Macro?
That is to say, is Post-Modernist Macroeconomic Policy over?
From Postmodernism:
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 04:00 AM permalink | Comments (23)
January 22, 2007
Army Transformation sacrificed on the altar of ...(a) tax cuts, (b) Iraq, (c) other
Or, "opportunity cost illustrated" redux. From GovExec.com:
Posted by Menzie Chinn at 08:53 PM permalink | Comments (28)
October 10, 2006
Proposition 87 tax plan
Sixteen of the 191 pages that Californians are asked to read in order to vote intelligently in the upcoming election are devoted to discussion of Proposition 87, the Clean Alternative Energy Act. This calls for $4 billion or more in new taxes and spending. In this post, I discuss only the tax side of this proposal, and hopefully will have an opportunity to take up the spending details in a sequel.
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Posted by James Hamilton at 09:22 PM permalink | Comments (27)
July 25, 2006
A Dynamic Analysis of Permanent Extension of the President's Tax Relief
The press account surrounding the Mid Session Review (MSR) (page 3-4) noted the preferred estimate of GNP response to the President's tax proposals: real GNP might be 0.7 percent higher than steady state baseline. The Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis has just released the underlying analysis.
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Posted by Menzie Chinn at 10:48 PM permalink | Comments (2)