Economist’s View – Paul Krugman: The Hijacked Commission
From the Economist’s View:
- Why We Should Beware Budget-Deficit Mania – Robert Reich
- The Deficit Reduction Plan Doesn’t Add Up – Stan Collender
- The return of “starve the beast” nonsense – Andrew Leonard
- Walras’ Law and Say’s Law – Brad DeLong
- Long-Term Unemployed Cut Job Hunt – Real Time Economics
- Obama’s tax cut surrender – Salon.com
- How’s That Audacity Thing Working Out for Ya? – EconoSpeak
- Moral heuristics, public policy, and self-defeating tribalism – interfluidity
- Even the Greenspan Fed Was No Politburo – Real Time Economics
- New Rules for Hot Money by Nouriel Roubini – Nouriel Roubini
- The Basel III Process Is A Disaster – The Baseline Scenario
Paul Krugman: The Hijacked Commission
Why does deficit reduction mean “tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class”?:
The Hijacked Commission, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. …
[…]
We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected. … The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.
So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?
Actually,… what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.
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