Most Americans think that the estate tax (popularly known as the ‘death tax’) should be reduced or eliminated. Wealthy families started funding a campaign in the mid 1990s which successfully rebranded this tax on large estates into a tax on death. Google’s…
Blog Archives
Is The US Constitution The Oldest In The World?
Encyclopedia Britannica is among those who claim that the US has the oldest constitution in the world of any sovereign state. That is true if you define a constitution as a single document. There are much older constitutional documents like the 1215 Magna…
Posted in Public Finance
National Debt is NOT like Personal Debt
Note: There is a newer version of this post. Krugman explains that government debt can never be repaid when we owe it to ourselves. Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
Interest Burden Is More Important Than Total Debt
Who has a bigger debt? Total Debt Outstanding Interest Rate Monthly Payments Barry $100k 2% $370 Ronny $40k 11% $381 Both Barry and Ronny have the same incomes and both expect to pay off their debt in 30 years at…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
Progressive Taxes Could INCREASE Inequality
UPDATED 2015/01/28 Cathie Jo Martin and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez wrote an interesting article on Vox arguing that progressive taxation increases inequality. It is a counter-intuitive argument, but their graph gives evidence for it: Their theory is that progressive taxation leads to…
The US Has High Mean Wealth, But Low Median Wealth
Ray Person sent me an article from Money Magazine that compares mean wealth with median wealth which suggests that although the US is one of the wealthiest countries in the world on a per-capita (mean) basis, unfortunately the US is…
5 Times More Economists Support Raising the Minimum Wage Than Oppose It
Economics textbooks leave most students with the distinctive impression that raising the minimum wage creates a market failure and only creates unemployment because that is the simplest story you can tell using the most revered tool in economics: the supply…
Posted in Medianism, Public Finance
Medianism 