Tag Archives: tax cuts

Recap: What History Says about the New Tax Bill

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December 13, 2017 — Evidently House and Senate Republicans today agreed on a tax bill.  It is really awful.  If you want to understand why economists are confident that the tax cuts will not pay for themselves and why Republicans are disingenuous to claim otherwise, I recommend what Jason Furman and Larry Summers have been writing, e.g., in this column in the Washington Post.

The angle I have focused on over the last two weeks is the light shed on the tax plan by the historical precedents of several decades.  Here is a Table of Contents, with links for potential watching, listening or reading. read more

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Forecasting 2016 Economic Developments & Candidates’ Reactions

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(Jan. 4, 2016)   As the new year starts, Politico asks a set of economists for forecasts.

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Procyclicalists Across the Atlantic Too

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     My preceding post bemoaned the tendency for many US politicians to exhibit a procyclicalist pattern:    supporting tax cuts and spending increases when the economy is booming, which should be the time to save money for a rainy day, and then re-discovering the evils of budget deficits only in times of recession, thus supporting fiscal contraction at precisely the wrong time.  Procyclicalists exacerbate the magnitude of the swings in the business cycle.

        This is not just an American problem.  A similar unfortunate cycle — large fiscal deficits when the economy is already expanding anyway, followed by fiscal contraction in response to a recession — has also been visible in the United Kingdom and euroland in recent years.   Greece and Portugal are the two most infamous examples. But the larger European countries, as well, failed to take advantage of the expansionary period 2003-07 to strengthen their public finances, and instead ran budget deficits in excess of the limits (3% of GDP) that they were supposed to obey under the Stability and Growth Pact. Then, over the last few years, politicians in both the UK and the continent have made their recessions worse by imposing aggressive fiscal austerity at precisely the wrong time. read more

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