(That’s not my phrase, it’s Rep. Boehner’s). Or, tax cut extension for income less than $250,000 passes. From The Hill:
House passes middle-class tax bill with three Republicans supporting
By Vicki Needham – 12/02/10 04:00 PM ET
The House passed by a vote of 234-188 a measure that permanently extends expiring middle-class tax cuts and provides a patch for the alternative minimum tax.
Four Acronyms in a Very Depressing Play
Truly we are in a strange world where legislative extension of unemployment insurance payments, which is highly effective at maintaining aggregate demand, is stalled, while giving tax cuts to households with income in excess of $250K (a.k.a. the Todd Henderson households) moves forward despite having very little impact on employment and aggregate demand. In other words, on benefit-cost grounds we would want to do exactly the reverse. Given the sheer incoherence of some of the arguments being propounded, it might be useful to recap some findings.
The autumn of 2010 is in some ways a replay of what we saw last spring. Is what we saw then a guide to what’s going to happen next?
Here I pass along a few items on the early history of the oil industry that I found interesting.
At least, month-on-month. Three month annualized inflation — either PCE or CPI — both under 0.5%:
The start of the FOMC’s November meeting is described in the minutes released yesterday as follows:
The meeting opened with a short discussion regarding communicating with the public about monetary policy deliberations and decisions. Meeting participants supported a review of the Committee’s communication guidelines with the aim of ensuring that the public is well informed about monetary policy issues while preserving the necessary confidentiality of policy discussions until their scheduled release. Governor Yellen agreed to chair a subcommittee to conduct such a review.
Here I provide some suggestions for Governor Yellen’s subcommittee to consider.
And Barry Eichengreen anticipates with an answer
A cartoon has been making the rounds (e.g., Forbes, Zero Hedge, and Real Clear Politics) in which cartoon characters (bunnies maybe? or perhaps some other life form) ask questions about quantitative easing. I would have provided slightly different answers than did the didactic character in the cartoon, so I thought it might be fun to interject myself as a third character in the bunnies’ conversation.
With the EGTRRA/JGTRRA extensions and proposals for tax reform and debt reduction flying left and right, I think it behooves us to review what the theoretical (well, actually undergraduate textbook) literature and the empirical assessments suggest will be the impact of tax rate changes. I want to devote special attention to the hypothesis that there will be large dis-incentive effects on high income households should their tax rates go up, with correspondingly large negative ramifications for overall economic activity.