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11 Dec 09

Matthew Yglesias » Earl Blumenauer’s Carbon Audit

  • a provision into the TARP bill last fall calling for a comprehensive “carbon audit” of the U.S. tax code.
  • But what’s frustrating about the conversation is that when we talk about costs we oftentimes just assume that all we can do is take the baseline policy environment we have, and then plop emissions reductions on top of it. As if the pre-existing status quo already constituted optimal growth policy or something.
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04 Dec 09

Christianist Watch - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Jesus never advocated the government go steal
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03 Dec 09

Obama, Trimmer - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Conservatism, I
    would argue, is first and foremost about preserving or regaining a
    stable society.
  • Limiting government often
    leads to both these things, and thus it is a means to an end, not an
    end in and of itself. 
  • 4 more annotations...
01 Dec 09

Matthew Yglesias » The War

  • I don’t think the kind of effort that as best I understand it we’re undertaking in Afghanistan meets any kind of plausible cost benefit test. At the same time, unlike conservatives who only invoke this principle opportunistically I do think it makes sense to pay attention to what military professionals have to say about operational aspects of defense policy.
  • I think the reaction to David Obey’s “war tax” idea is telling—nobody seems to really think there are national interests at stake that are critical enough to be worth paying slightly higher taxes for.

PolitiFact | Krugman says Bush was first president to lead country into war and cut taxes

  • "This is a lot of money," liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Nov. 30, 2009. "And the point is, we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into a war and cut taxes."
  • Generally, we found, taxes and wars have followed a fairly predictable pattern: taxes rise during wartime and then come back down in the years afterward.
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Our Uni-Polar Moment - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Other countries, not merely in western europe, have relied upon US
    protection so heavily that they are now largely incapable of making
    large-scale interventions themselves. They need the Americans. One
    consequence of this is that when the Americans actually ask for help
    there is not much their allies can usefully offer. This strengthens the
    American view that the US is having to shoulder too much of the burden
    itself. There's something to this.
24 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Larson, Rangel, Murtha, Frank Join Obey’s War Tax Bloc

  • I wondered yesterday how serious David Obey was about the idea of paying for the Afghanistan war with higher taxes.
  • Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel and Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank joining Obey, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, and also picking up Conference Chair John Larson and Jack Murtha who chairs the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.
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19 Nov 09

C Street House No Longer Tax Exempt | TPMMuckraker

  • Residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house will no longer benefit from a loophole that had allowed the house's owners to avoid paying property taxes.
  • it was classified as a church
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05 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » The New American Economy

  • Here he is explaining why Europe isn’t a zero growth dystopia:


    In America, people tend to think of their federal taxes as money down a rat hole and react accordingly. But in Europe, the people are more apt to feel they are simply paying for services with their taxes that Americans have to pay out of pocket.


    This fact is best illustrated by health care. Most Americans get health insurance through their employers. The cost reduced their cash wages by 7.9 percent on average in 2008 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If we had national health insurance and insurers were entirely relieved of this expense, they could afford to pay their workers 7.9 percent more and be no worse off. If the payroll tax went up by 7.9 percent to pay for health insurance, it would all be a wash, but both taxes and government spending would be higher. [...] The second reason why taxes have less of an impact on incentives in Europe than one might expect is because European countries raise much more of their revenue from consumption taxes than the United States does.

03 Nov 09

PolitiFact | California Republican lumps Obama in with Hoover in his approach to fighting recession

  • False
  • "Three presidents within the last 100 years have responded to recessions by reducing taxes and regulations," McClintock said. "Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all produced rapid and dramatic economic recoveries. We’ve had two presidents in those 100 years who reacted to recessions by doing the opposite — Herbert Hoover in the early 1930s, who radically increased taxes and spending and who imposed unprecedented burdens on trade, and the other is Barack Obama."
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27 Oct 09

The Curious Case of Bruce Bartlett - The Atlantic Business Channel

  • Suppose you had a 10 percent VAT and we said we weren't going to
    collect it for the next 10 months. People would buy like crazy. They'd
    buy toilet paper, they'd buy anything they could get their hands on
    that they knew they'd need in the future. We're depriving ourselves of
    a great stimulant tool by ignoring this.
25 Oct 09

BBC NEWS | Europe | Rich Germans demand higher taxes

  • The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany's economic recovery.

  • The group say the financial crisis is leading to an increase in unemployment, poverty and social inequality.

    Simply donating money to deal with the problems is not enough, they want a change in the whole approach.

  • 2 more annotations...
21 Oct 09

Taiwan: Choosing Carbon Taxes Over Carbon Tariffs - Environmental Capital - WSJ

  • Taiwan could become the first country in Asia to pass a carbon tax, part of the country’s plan to steadily reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2025.
  • But so would carbon tariffs slapped on Taiwanese imports by the U.S. and some European countries, among them some of Taiwan’s biggest trading partners, retorts the government. The U.S. has already included carbon tariffs in the House energy and climate bill; the inclusion of carbon tariffs is gaining momentum in the Senate.
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19 Oct 09

The Wall Street Journal Publishes Erroneous and Dubious Anti-VAT Arguments | Capital Gains and Games

  • The other day the Wall Street Journal editorial page ran an article by Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins attacking the idea of a value-added tax for the United States. This is the second anti-VAT op-ed the Journal has run this year on top of two highly negative editorials. Only one piece has appeared favorable to the VAT and that was written by former Clinton administration Treasury official Roger Altman. Apparently, it's okay for Democrats to get space in the Journal to promote the VAT because it allows the editorial page to maintain the fiction that only liberals favor such a tax as part of their nefarious plan to eventually tax 100% of everything. When I've queried the Journal about an article on why conservatives ought to support a VAT I did not get a reply.
  • The reason it is extraordinary is because the universal view of economists has always been that 100% of a VAT is shifted onto consumers. That's what makes it a consumption tax and not a tax on capital, which is the main problem with income taxes.
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18 Oct 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • But as I try to explain in
    my book, my views haven't changed at all; it's circumstances that have
    changed. I believe that my friends are still stuck in the 1970s when
    tax rates were considerably higher and excessive demand (i.e.,
    inflation) was our biggest economic problem. Today, tax rates are much
    lower and a lack of demand (i.e., deflation) is the central problem.
  • I
    really don't understand why conservatives insist on a one-size-fits-all
    economic policy consisting of more and bigger tax cuts no matter what
    the economic circumstances are; it's simply become dogma totally
    disconnected from reality.
  • 1 more annotations...
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