Tax Lawyer's Blog

I often disagree with Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, but when he writes in 66% of Americans Want Higher Taxes on Rich, But there’s a Catch about the dangers of relying on public opinion polls he is right on target:

Two-thirds of Americans support keeping the Bush tax cuts only for families earning less than $250,000 per [...]

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Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute favors Reaganomics over Obamanomics and has been catching hell for it. He responds in his post When Keynesians Attack, Part II:
In my original post (the one he was attacking), I commented on the “burden of government” rather than the “burden of government spending.” I’m a fiscal policy economist, so I’m [...]

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Chris Good of The Atlantic has written an interesting column titled The Laffer Curve: The Most Powerful and Ambiguous Idea in Tax Politics:
A couple years ago I was interviewing Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, about economic policies and the 2008 election, and, as he told me repeatedly that lower taxes would yield higher [...]

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Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic gives us 6 Reasons to Temporarily Extend the Bush Tax Cuts to the Rich:

Raising the Deficit a Little Won’t Scare the Market
The Rich Are the Only Ones Spending
Credit and Investment Will Benefit
Last Chance for Stimulus
No Better Alternative for the $70 Billion
Not Worth the Risk of Double Dip

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Rich folk sure do suck.
MSNBC.com reports that a group of billionaires led by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates is donating half of their wealth to charity:
A little over a year after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett began hatching a plan over dinner to persuade America’s wealthiest people to give most of their fortunes to charity, more [...]

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Paul Caron alerts us to some statistics from economist Arthur Laffer that I suspect will never be acknowledged by the always “honest” and “purely motivated” tax-the-rich crowd (emphasis is mine):
Wall Street Journal op-ed, The Soak-the-Rich Catch-22, by Arthur B. Laffer:
Sadly, in the debate over whether to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and if so whether the cuts should be extended to those people [...]

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Nancy Folbre, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the latest in a long line of tax-the-rich intellectuals to assume that anyone who thinks that tax increases are bad for the economy is up to no good.
Here’s what she says in her New York Times’ column The Art of Tax War (emphasis is mine):
The highly charged partisan debate [...]

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Kay Bell of Don’t Mess With Taxes talks about the Bush tax cuts in a post titled Debunking 5 Bush Tax Cut Myths:
William G. Gale, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center…. debunks five myths about the Bush tax cuts in an article for the Washington Post.
I’ll let [...]

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About two minutes ago on Meet the Press David Gregory asked former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan the following question:
Do tax cuts pay for themselves?

Greenspan’s answer:
They do not.

Supply-side conservatives have argued for years that when you keep taxes low you increase the money supply the supply of capital and thereby stimulate the economy. This is not the same as [...]

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A fellow named Bruce Webb posting at Angry Bear suggested that allowing the tax cuts to expire on the top 2% of Americans might not hurt the economy since these folks aren’t lending and spending money as it is:
The argument against allowing tax cuts to expire on the top 2% is that it would be [...]

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