All Posts Tagged With: "tax cuts"

A Boost for the Managed Economy

Nowhere is it easier to miss the forest for the trees than in discussions of government policy. Late last year the media were saturated with debates over the compromise tax package agreed to by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans. The package that passed the House and Senate included a two-year extension of the Bush-era tax-rate [...]

24Feb2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism

“Can we do it again?” asks Amity Shlaes in her introduction to this book. She is asking about the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. In his final chapter George Melloan answers yes. But it won’t be easy because of the great expansion of government in 2008-09. He calls for a new vision of “Supply-Side Prosperity.” [...]

24Nov2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Paying for Tax Cuts?

Tax cuts don’t cost money; government programs do.

3Sep2010 | Sheldon Richman | 20 comments | Continued

The Failure of Keynesian Economics

That anyone can still believe Keynes’s General Theory holds any answers to the world’s economic problems is one of those sad facts that make one realize just how difficult it is to gain headway in the dismal science. An article on John Maynard Keynes in the Washington Post late last year, which argued that “Keynes’s [...]

25Jun2010 | Steven Kates | 19 comments | Continued

Why Cut Taxes?

Judging by the popping corks at the White House, taxes are cut to increase government revenues so the budget deficit can be shrunk without reducing government spending. Tax cuts are good, but this reason leaves me cold. President Bush announced recently that “This economy is growing, federal taxes are rising, and we’re cutting the federal [...]

1Oct2006 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The Irish Miracle

Karl Sigfrid is a graduate student in business administration and economics at Stockholm University in Sweden. European advocates of the freedom philosophy are rarely enthusiastic about their own continent—a world center for high taxes and overregulated markets. When asked to pick their favorite society, they will usually select Hong Kong or—less often—the United States. Too [...]

1Apr2004 | Karl Sigfrid | 0 comments | Continued

Tax Cuts Cause Trade Deficits and Currency Depreciation?

In a recent New York Times opinion piece Franco Modigliani and Robert M. Solow, Nobel Prize-winning economists, weighed in with yet another leftist objection to President Bush’s tax cut. The gist of their criticism is that such a “massive, permanent tax cut” will worsen the international economic position of the United States, leading to a [...]

1Aug2001 | Joseph T. Salerno | 1 comment | Continued

Honesty at Last

Budget surpluses and a possible tax cut make people say funny things. Folks who never cared a fig about the national debt suddenly are fiscal hawks, and the guardians of the pretense that Social Security is a pension program now are willing to talk about it in other terms. It is a peculiarity of tax [...]

1Jul2001 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Unworthy of the Name

When’s a tax cut not a tax cut? When it’s a targeted tax cut. That is the new euphemism for government’s manipulation of people’s behavior with the tax code. Government can get us to do things in several ways, including decree, subsidy, tax credit, and tax deduction. The last two are particular favorites of the [...]

1May2000 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Cut Taxes, Not the Debt

Last fall’s standoff over the budget between the Republican Congress and Democratic President generated a curious by-product: more money to reduce the national debt. Some analysts want to devote future surpluses to the same purpose, perhaps eventually paying off the entire $5.6 trillion national debt.

1Apr2000 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | Continued

Clinton versus Cleveland and Coolidge on Taxes

In a post-State of the Union speech in Buffalo, New York, on January 20, 1999, President William Jefferson Clinton was asked why Americans shouldn’t get a tax cut since the federal budget is in surplus and the share of personal income taken by the federal government is at a post-World War II high. Is this [...]

1Jul1999 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued

Cutting Marginal Tax Rates: Evidence from the 1920s

Dr. Smiley teaches at Marquette University. Recent political debates have raised the issue of adopting a flat marginal rate federal income tax. Though the marginal rate would be flat, the addition of a generous personal exemption would make the average personal income tax rate rise as it approached the fixed marginal rate of, say, 17 [...]

1Oct1996 | Gene Smiley | 1 comment | Continued

New Keynesians Finally Reject Keynes’s General Theory

“When people attempt to save more, the actual result may be only a lower level of output . . .” —Paul A. Samuelson[1] “Higher saving leads to faster growth . . .” —N. Gregory Mankiw[2] The two quotations above dramatically demonstrate the stark contrast between the “old” Keynesians and the “new.” Samuelson and the old-style [...]

1Sep1996 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | Continued

Why Wages Rise

“For low-paying jobs that already exist, public policy must aim at supplementing the income of the working poor. . . . One way would be to raise gradually the minimum wage.” —Wallace C. Peterson, Silent Depression[1] In the recent debate over the minimum wage and the working poor, I was reminded of a little book, [...]

1Aug1996 | Mark Skousen | 3 comments | Continued

Customer Service, Government-Style

Mr. Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology (Transaction). One of the defining characteristics of denizens of the nation’s capital is their belief that government “serves” the people. This attitude naturally leads to much concern, particularly among the “good government” crowd, for [...]

1Jan1996 | Doug Bandow | 1 comment | Continued

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