How the Tax Reform Entrenches the Welfare State
The GOP plan pursues tax revenue on par with growth. The crafters of the reform have even put tax revenue above growth when the two goals conflict.
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Taxes Make Netflix, Spotify Victims of Their Own Success
These taxes appear to be imposed on purely digital providers, whether they have any nexus or receive any public services in the state or not, simply to replace the tax revenue lost from traditional, brick-and-mortar storefronts.
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Paul Ryan’s Trojan Horse for the Welfare State
The bill creates a new federal statistical agency: the National Secure Data Service (NSDS). Why? The answer is simple: not-yet-created entitlement programs for which we qualify based on our incomes.
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The Answer to Holiday-Parking Hassles: Let Prices Rise
Scarce parking is a sign that prices need to rise or more parking needs to be created, since the laws of supply and demand apply to parking too.
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Lack of Ideology the GOP Achilles Heel
Perhaps the ideological conversation needs to take a new route, one that cuts between the equally unrepentant libertarian and egalitarian camps, and maybe this third route can share the same goal as the libertarian camp.
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Taylor Swift Knows Scarcity Drives the Price
There’s an economic lesson we can learn from how pop superstar Taylor Swift sells her music: she hypes it up, then makes it scarce.
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GOP Opens Door to Single-Payer Medical
The American welfare state is three reforms away from becoming a Scandinavian welfare state: universal child care, paid family leave, and single-payer medical care.
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Solving the Transit Financing Puzzle
Aligning the goals of transit users and transit funders requires costly political changes that come with their own problems, but agencies must address their funding deficiencies if they hope for a future beyond rusty rails, crumbling concrete, and broken-down buses.
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Reckless States Are Coming for Your Online Purchases
The underlying problems that are overlooked in this discussion are the burdensome tax policies and profligate spending programs already present in many states.
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Conservatives and the Laffer Curve: An Ugly Love Affair
When Arthur Laffer drew this famous picture on a napkin to Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney during a lunch in 1974, the reaction was ecstatic: that’s exactly what they needed, some justification for doing what politicians are best at doing anyway: giving away the goodies that don’t cost anything. The best of both worlds!
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Zoning: The Nemesis of Housing Affordability
Housing supply has simply not been able to keep up with the unprecedented demand for housing in large urban centers. Sadly, most policymakers and pundits overlook this elephant in the room.
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GOP Chooses Progressive Taxation over Sustainable Growth
A hidden, extra 45.6 percent tax bracket, is tucked away inside the GOP plan. They are more concerned with recovering “lost” revenue than with stimulating economic growth. The great Art Laffer’s influence over Republican tax policy has definitively come to an end.
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