Doing the Minimum | No Mercy / No Malice
Taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income already pay for more than 43 percent of the U.S. government, and taxpayers in the top 1 percent pay for more than 27 percent; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns. Many of the Obama reforms, including much of the stimulus bill, and the health care bill, redistribut
... See moreTyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton
But replacing a job shouldn’t be the goal for unconditional cash benefits. Instead, the purpose of unconditional cash is to grease the wheels of capitalist life — to give people that extra boost they need to pay their parking tickets, or deal with a health emergency, or buy a little more nutritious food for their kids, or just make it to the end of... See more
Noah Smith • Andrew Yang's ideas are better than you think
This fact is even more striking when we consider that the cost of eradicating poverty in any developed country is around 1 percent of GDP. An individual unemployment benefit set at the poverty line (around $1,200 a month) and granted to all jobless individuals regardless of their place in the family structure would not only pull everyone out of pov... See more
Daniel Zamora • The Case Against a Basic Income
If you’re wondering, this observation about median income is not a secret, but we haven’t yet given it the correct interpretation. The American left has pointed out and indeed stressed measures of stagnant median income, but it usually blames politics, insufficient redistribution, or poor educational opportunities rather than considering the idea o
... See moreTyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton
If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and, as we will see in chapter five, the
... See moreTyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton
Krugman is pushing policies that require high real income growth, precisely when real income growth is relatively low. He is putting the cart before the horse and asking for some burdensome policies precisely when they would be toughest to bear.
Tyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton
real income growth, widely distributed, of about 2 to 3 percent a year. Maybe that sounds good to you, but if you’ve read this far, you know I think it is currently impossible. We don’t have the low-hanging fruit to make such a scenario real.